Interesting. Does this provide any game balance whatsoever?
I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to design magic systems when I was a teenager, but they always ended up being either way too powerful or not “rich” enough to be interesting. It’s just really hard to design a simple mechanical system that stays within arbitrary human boundaries.
Hmm, I feel myself getting drawn back in. That’s almost like a zero-knowledge proof, and there’s lots of weird ways to implement cryptographic primitives.
i guess you could say the learning curve is a balance feature. it’s an entire functional programming language in a pretty unergonomic form factor, so actually building spells that do anything impressive takes a lot of time.
Only until you’ve figured it out, at which point you’re god. You could make it non-repeatable somehow to avoid that, but magic is depicted as being mainly old, repeated spells most of the time, like in the comic. You could also move to something like Brainfuck or even Malbolge where coding a single new program is hard. As I learned the hard way, though, you’re still going to have no control over what ends up being easy and what’s not.
Actually, it’s more like homeomorphic encryption since you have a system of some bounded complexity instead of a single fixed piece of information. That’s usually harder, but then again you actually want the scheme to be “insecure” in this case.
i think that’s just a fundamental problem with designing magic systems though. if you design it logically, it doesn’t feel like magic. if you design it by feel, it doesn’t make sense. if you want it to feel magic but still be tricky to learn, it becomes a mess.
in the context of minecraft mods there’s also not much you can do.
Well, ir’s obviously not balanced for vanilla. But I had talked to the quite a while ago now. And they did try to walk a fine balance of being useful and fun, but not too over the top. They apply limitations where it makes sense for them.
Especially since there is PvP.
If you liked Hex Casting, or even Psi. This should be right up your alley. It’s also less tedious than either of them I would say.
Interesting. Does this provide any game balance whatsoever?
I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to design magic systems when I was a teenager, but they always ended up being either way too powerful or not “rich” enough to be interesting. It’s just really hard to design a simple mechanical system that stays within arbitrary human boundaries.
Hmm, I feel myself getting drawn back in. That’s almost like a zero-knowledge proof, and there’s lots of weird ways to implement cryptographic primitives.
no, it does not. there is a rune that consumes amethyst but it’s just for flavour, so you can give your spell a cost if you want.
i guess you could say the learning curve is a balance feature. it’s an entire functional programming language in a pretty unergonomic form factor, so actually building spells that do anything impressive takes a lot of time.
Only until you’ve figured it out, at which point you’re god. You could make it non-repeatable somehow to avoid that, but magic is depicted as being mainly old, repeated spells most of the time, like in the comic. You could also move to something like Brainfuck or even Malbolge where coding a single new program is hard. As I learned the hard way, though, you’re still going to have no control over what ends up being easy and what’s not.
Actually, it’s more like homeomorphic encryption since you have a system of some bounded complexity instead of a single fixed piece of information. That’s usually harder, but then again you actually want the scheme to be “insecure” in this case.
i think that’s just a fundamental problem with designing magic systems though. if you design it logically, it doesn’t feel like magic. if you design it by feel, it doesn’t make sense. if you want it to feel magic but still be tricky to learn, it becomes a mess.
in the context of minecraft mods there’s also not much you can do.
Well, ir’s obviously not balanced for vanilla. But I had talked to the quite a while ago now. And they did try to walk a fine balance of being useful and fun, but not too over the top. They apply limitations where it makes sense for them.
Especially since there is PvP.
If you liked Hex Casting, or even Psi. This should be right up your alley. It’s also less tedious than either of them I would say.