Research Journal of a Veil Mage | Slimedev Log | ๔гєค๓รςคקє

Tinkers' Construct came about from a fundamental problem with Minecraft back in its beta days. Everything was taking so long to do anything… I desperately wanted to dig out a trench and build a castle by hand in an hour, not a month. I liked the game, that part of it was bad, therefore I had to fix it. How exactly do you fix it? Answer this question: "What kind of mod would I make if I owned Minecraft and was making an expansion?"

Tiny Tinkers is an answer to a similar question: "What if Tinkers' Construct was a game?"

One game mockup, coming right up!

Such an idea ballooned out of control and gained a life in ways that I couldn’t possibly imagine. What genre would you put on a game where there are 50 “life sized” toys running around, gathering materials, building houses, creating a society, warring with factions, and you can personally control all of them?

What sort of game exists where you can go to the Tinker Toy Store with a bunch of coins, walk out with a box of rocks or obstacles or a nice platforming dungeon, and add on to the world itself? How can you play the game while being a level designer?

I have yet to find one. There are some games that have pieces of what’s in store, but nothing complete like this. The experience we should have is one where you can play as the side character in a world that obviously has a thriving story just as easily as you can be the main character or none at all.

The core idea is that these characters are the same size on your screen as they would be in real life. Think of it like a window into a place where you have tiny people running around doing their own things. They might be robots, automatons, or some kind of creature that has its own wants and needs, or they might just be a thumb-sized princess living with a field mouse. And a demon. And a slime.

…and a whole lot of edible plants and objects specifically made by the Tiny Tinker Toy Company so you’ll buy more bricks and swords to fight the giant monsters known as “beetles” and “squirrels”.

One of my hobbies involves dissecting games and trying to fit them into other games. Somewhere along the way, that morphed into a fully fledged, modular system for making characters out of bits and pieces of everything I could get my hands on. Throwing a vest over a shirt is easy when everything is a pile of data. Just give the system some rules for how items are supposed to stack on top of each other, then make sure they can be animated in a way that doesn’t lead to combinatorial explosion, and let everything sort itself out.

As much depth as Dwarf Fortress has, seeing anything happen is not something you do. What you get is stories, spit out as text, and constructed as grand narratives as symbols and icons of characters perform great feats such as a dwarf draining a river into an underground lava lake. Also known as: L → R.

That’s… not what should happen. There are too many things to watch and too many mismatched game assets sitting on my hard drive for that to happen. How about we shove all of that in a box, call the things that don’t quite match “Competitor’s Products”, and make a spectacle out of it?

This is how the game currently looks. Most of the systems are in place and ready for testing. Integration of all the systems was a special kind of pain, but progression is happening at least. The underlying code has a lot of layers to it that are hard to show off, but everything is in place now to build content.

More or less. You know how these things go.