Rimworld Dev Tracker

Someone please try this! I suspect it's better than the in-game version.

@tanyaxshort @robinhanson Of course it's fine to seek validation; it's a basic human need. I only think it's a problem if the influence of this need isn't consciously acknowledged.

Acting in service of hidden urges while inventing rationalizations - this is not a recipe for optimal decision-making.

@tanyaxshort @robinhanson e.g. Spending weeks and thousands of dollars to personally exhibit to 200 people at a con is an absurd waste given you can easily reach 20,000 with a cheap Youtube vid.

Yet people keep doing it because they crave the personal validation.

@tanyaxshort @robinhanson Just watching a sales number go up (if it even does that) doesn't satisfy the monkey brain. The monkey brain wants to have 20 people you recognize acknowledge your work.

It explains a lot of the nonsensical decisions devs make about how to allocate their scarce time and energy.

This isn't related to RimWorld in any way (RW uses XML, which works but isn't optimal since it's not specifically designed for this kind of data.)

The TyD language is basically what I wish I had when making RimWorld.

I made a simple data language which makes it easy to write and edit things like creature/weapon/terrain types. It's now open-sourced under MIT license:

A C# implementation:

Hope someone can get some use out of it!

This is basically the foundation of my game design method:

Collective a massive number of ideas over months and years. Then bubble-sort them by doing repeated side-by-side comparisons. The best ideas float to the top over time.

@dukope Also fun to imagine creating such a game without a computer at all.

Imagine a book of letters, photos, diaries, and other documents, together with a list of fill-in questions to answer, requiring close observation, deduction, and combination of knowledge to complete.

Played Obra Dinn from @dukope. First time I've seen a narrative deduction game that actually worked.

It's a Dune 2 moment. There's clearly a whole genre of games hidden here, waiting to be created.

@Rhopunzel You need to see this!

I cannot describe this.

Fun for the whole family?

Or, how to prep a generation of hardened survivors for the new world order?

I just noticed that this prototype was also made after my failed magic school simulator prototype.

You can see I kept using the graphics for the students' desks in the room near the bottom.

Screenshots from my mercenary management sim, December 17 2012.

The code behind this was later re-used for Starship Architect prototypes, which evolved into Eclipse Colony and then RimWorld.

It's charming to note that some of this code is still running in RimWorld today.

Reading Dan Simmons' "Carrion Comfort". The book's main part is set in "the present" of 1980, with historical sections set in 1942.

I just realized that 1942 is actually closer to 1980 than we are now. And yet it doesn't feel that way. Time runs.