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Alright! You might not know, I forget if I mentioned it, but I've slightly pivoted for a few weeks. I was using the RP Hypertrophy app and my subscription ran out. To my great surprise I tried to get in to see what my prior workouts had been and I was completely locked out. I was pretty livid and naturally this spurned me on to create my own fitness app. The purposes of this first post, before I create a section for this is to discuss where we sit so far. Base Data laid down for 277 exercises. Exercises are broken up into their primary and secondary muscle groups. You can quickly filter and find the ones you want to do. The IO structure, I believe, is completed. Now I need to build the UI to actually interact with it. With this I'll have a VERY rudimentary workout system where I can track workouts. What I haven't created are the workout plans. Think of it this way. A Workout is composed of Exercises, Exercises are composed of sets, and sets are composed of reps/weight or time/weight. All of this is contained within a workout plan. So I'll need to work on that next after this. Once this is working for me I'll see if I can get a WebGL build of it running on the website. Then you can try it out for free and see what I'm missing! Eventually it'll be an apk and...whatever the hell iOS uses on their app store. I've got a few class names that I regret at this point but I'll see about fixing those in a refactor once the whole thing is working. Basically there is a subtle distinction between an immutable ExerciseSheet, and a modifiable Exercise. Unfortunately I had already called the former "Exercise" so I called the latter "Exercise Stats". Not a huge fan, but it works for now.

I've been thinking a lot recently about how I want to handle the concept of Shopkeepers within this game. It is likely that every game you've played where you acquire goods or services from an NPC has involved this fairly standard concept. That game could be a science fiction adventure that takes place a thousand years in the future, or a fantasy game that takes place in another world entirely. No matter where you go the idea of coin carries on. It might have a fancy name but really it is always there. You could argue that what I'm about to describe is just currency with extra steps but a part of me finds that a bit reductive. It is a bit like the joke in Magic that everything is kicker. You can make the argument but I think it really misses a lot of nuance. With that weirdly preemptive defense out of the way let us get into it. Living NPCs I've built a somewhat robust state machine system for the game already. This will allow me to give each NPC a series of states, shocking I know, that they can switch between based on needs and desires. I'm not going to make any bold claims about them being truly sentient or any of this modern AI nonsense. However they will have schedules of one kind or another by the end of development. This means that they will have time to help you with things and they'll have time that they need to spend relaxing, eating, or who knows what else. This means that each NPC's time will be a finite resource for you. We don't need to balance things with a currency to keep people from getting out of control. If building up resources for an NPC takes time, and that NPC has finite time, then we can balance around that. So can I just take everything? Conceivably, and I'm sure people will figure out how to game the system. But the actual raw materials will likely be provided by you or other NPCs that are gathered on the island itself. NPCs will be providing you with refined materials based off the materials you provide them. Raw wood could be given to a woodworker to provide lumber or other goods. All they would ask in return is the time to finish the request and that you supply them with enough materials to help other people in town. The more you do this the more you'll build up a report with them and become friends. How do you gate what I can get? Simply enough, the more someone likes you the more they are willing to do for you. More complicated requests become available as you provide them with more resources and they get more excited to help you. Happy people tend to really put their full effort behind relationships and that'll be a big part of this experience. So is the currency in this regard the materials or friendship? I do think you could make this reductive argument but it is clearly a different relationship. People are doing what they are doing in the game because they love doing it. They *need* materials in order to do those things. You can't work wood that doesn't exist. And I would hope that most people don't feel that their relationships with other people are purely transactional. That buildup of trust and love is a beautiful thing. All sorts of animals do it and don't give one another a single cent. So that's that, my plans for getting things like build materials, fancier food, toys, possibly even help around the manor grounds. People and Moosecats gathering to share their passions with one another and create something better than what any individual can muster.

When you need to design a character for a story there is a simple pair of questions that'll help you out. The first questions is what does this character want? The second question is how far would they go to achieve that goal? I think you can take that same sort of logic and use it to layout design plans for a game as well. With that in mind lets talk about my plans for Moosecats in three phases. The short term, the mid term, and the long term. Some of these things should be accomplished within the next six months, some things within years, and others may never happen. The Goal I would like to create a game that marries a few concepts. The first is a sense of irreverence. Tell a story that has twists and turns but ultimately doesn't involve a lot of extremely dark narrative. Life is complicated, and sometimes life is deeply sad, I think it is nice to occasionally have outs from that. The next concept is of the importance of fitness and being active. So I would like to have some sort of integration that allows people to advance their gameplay by being physically active. This will obviously be limited by the APIs I have access too and my own capacity to learn. The final concept is of community interaction. I want to have close connections with the players of the game. Part of that will be through the Chatty Moosecatty (Twitch Cats) program. Which will be another vector for advancing the state of your cats and also add to your collection. These are the three prongs of my plans. So now we know what we want. But how do we achieve this goal? Short Term These are all of the things that I'd like to complete for each project within the next year or so. I'm going to try and list everything out so that we can strike through things as they are completed. Chatty Moosecatty - Twitch Game Viewers are gifted a randomized Moosecat. The cats will say what the viewer is saying. This includes emoting whatever the player emotes. Cats will respond to a series of commands. These commands can be located with the !help command. Should add things like dance, sleep etc. Players can swap between their cats, or activate a new cat while others are on adventures. Cats appear and disappear depending on viewer activity. If someone stops talking for long enough their kitty goes to sleep and poofs. Obviously is fine, will return when they chat again. Fitty Moosekitty - Fitness Game The goal of this project is to enhance both mental and physical fitness. Players will get a Moosecat upon loading the game. They can also utilize the cats they've collected from Chatty Moosecatty. Walking will earn your cat experience. Occasionally your cat will find treasure while out on the walk. You can send your cats on quests. They will finish them faster if you are walking. Be able to track your weight, body measurements, water intake, etc. None of this will be sent back to me. Everyone will be free to check their network traffic to confirm. Ya boy don't care about your measurements. Just happy you are getting healthy. Timer/Stopwatch functionality. Auto-Rest functionality when doing workouts. Wii Fit distance/height tracking. Find out when you've climbed higher than Mt. Everest or walked longer than the Great Wall. Moosecat Manor - Roleplaying Game You've received a letter from your grandfather mentioning that he's having a bit of trouble and would love it if you could come around to his Manor and help him sort it out. Users will explore 12 different islands, and their Grandfather's manor to try and uncover the mystery of...just where did his manor go? This adventure will require the help of magical creatures known as Moosecats to uncover the secrets of the missing Manor and the world in general. You will rebuild the manor through magical seeds that grow to become the rooms that had once stood there. Rooms will vary wildly, from volcanic rooms, to rainforest rooms, to a simple run of the mill kitchen! Or so it seems. You will collect pages from your Grandfathers adventure journal that tell of new places to visit and have a chance to experience the adventures you never even knew happened. Individual rooms will unlock new cat habitats. They will also unlock new game features Mid Term At this point all of my projects are at least "started" and in a state where we can move onto enhancements. Some of them might be completed in this phase or before this phase. Chatty Moosecatty - Twitch Game Bot accepts whispers to allow people to check stats without spamming chat. Players can send their cats out on adventures to bring back loot. This loot can later be used in Moosecat Manor. This loot may also be new eggs to add to their roster. Cats interact with one another while I'm streaming. A GUI stream screen that I can swap to to show player progress in adventures. This would also show recent achievements, stats, and other fun stuff. An "AFK" stream play area, so when I'm away people can still enjoy their cats together. Fitty Moosekitty - Fitness Game Weight/Plate calculator. Exercise suggestions. Yoga, Walking plans, weight training. Circuits, programs, that sorta stuff. Workout sharing. Show your friends what you did. Inspire them to get at it too. Walking also earns you points towards any active quests for your Chatty Moosecatty team. Moosecat Manor - Roleplaying Game Minigames Certain rooms will unlock fun minigames. A means to earn more rewards, finish adventures faster, and frankly give me a chance to experiment with miniature game ideas without abandoning this one! Adventure system. Send Moosecats (and yourself) out on adventures to uncover treasure, new areas to explore, and hints towards the mystery of the missing manor. Trust system. Moosecat horns are actually always invisible to people they don't trust. As your moosecats come to trust you more and more you'll see them. Some never seem to show...do they just wot have them? Long Term We've now hit the point where all three projects are either finished or released as early access titles. From here on out we are looking for ways to expand on the games and to provide people with an experience that evolves. At this point is probably where I'd like to look into ways to create artist collaborations and to help small time creators. Chatty Moosecatty - Twitch Game Bot sees conversations across all services, not simply twitch. Giveaways of some kind based on whatever metrics. Like randomly picking subscribers, or picking a random person with a certain amount of activity. Fun community stuff. Fitty Moosekitty - Fitness Game *Whales* The idea here is one I used before. As you lift we will tell you when you've lifted as much cumulatively as a kind of whale. Then once you reach the biggest whale we'll either move onto combining them or other even bigger things for fun. Achievements from this will show up as items in Moosecat Manor. PB tracking, potentially with an OPT IN leaderboard. Would likely need to have it linked to YT videos (unlisted is fine) or something to keep things nice and fair. Or just have people make friends groups and not worry about it. Moosecat Manor - Roleplaying Game Artist DLC packs. We'll pay artists to make collections of new pets and they'll get the lion's share of the revenue from the collection. Either for at least a year or forever. All depends on if I'm making enough to keep the lights on. It'll always err on the side of them getting more than me in the revenue share though. In Conclusion This will be a living document that will over time branch out into tracking posts and other content. The basic idea was to give myself some inspirational bullet points to move forward with. Suggestions are also welcome.