something neat with Nested is that due to the recursive nature of the game, you can get anywhere from roughly anywhere else
for instance while coding cells i was spawning a bunch of bacteria for testing purposes, and felt too lazy to change that when i wanted to see if plant cells worked too
so what i did is i just kept going deeper into one bacteria’s cell membrane’s atoms until it spawned a new sub-universe where i found an inhabited planet where i found an industrialized country where i found a house where i found a kitchen where i found a jar of cherry jam in one of the cabinets
Nested is always really interesting to work on because it involves a buttload of research, from finding out what pearls are made of (it’s aragonite, a carbon-calcium-oxygen compound) to writing an instant meal generator (outputs range from “Starvin’ Dude - duck with beans“ to “Ogre King - pork and sprinkles“)
Nested 2 uses a special syntax for animals, which allows me to push the detail down to species-specific extra body parts in a way that i don’t need to declare a separate prototype for each of the (currently 467) animals in the game
for instance each hagfish spawns with a slime coating, no fins, and eyespots instead of eyes; in my code, this is done with “hagfish|body:slime|body:-simple eye|body:eyespot,2|body:-fin“
(there’s a limit to how specific my research gets tho, so while each fish should be correctly categorized as fresh- or saltwater, the internal organs of each bird mention a crop even when the specific species shouldn’t have one)
i understand all this stuff is more nerdy than fun so i’ll just finish by adding that the game will feature achievements awarded for finding rare and obscure stuff around the universe. thank you
my procrastination is so advanced the only times it allows me to get work done is to make a game that wastes other people’s time. my procrastination has reproductive instincts
oh i just cannot believe today is february 14, the 96th anniversary of when the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company changed its name to International Business Machines Corporation (IBM)