Quiet Week, Expensive Plans

Studio Update: Quiet Week, Expensive Plans

It's actually been a pretty quiet few days around here.

Not a lot of development.

Not a lot of major changes.

Mostly planning.

And waiting.

Specifically, waiting for a check to clear so I can start spending money.

Responsible business ownership at its finest.

The Office Upgrade Is About to Begin

I've been planning the office redo for a while now, and finances should finally allow me to start ordering some of the remaining pieces next week.

Then some better financial news came along...

Which naturally means I'm looking at the original plan and thinking:

Well... maybe I could upgrade a few things.

This is how budgets die.

The office furniture itself is still the priority. There are several pieces left to order, assemble and get into place, and that's probably going to make the next couple of weeks fairly busy.

It'll also finally give the spiders their proper places instead of having terrariums scattered around wherever I could temporarily fit them during the office changes.

A few of them need to be relocated into larger homes as well.

So apparently I'm renovating both my office and theirs.

My Monitor Is Old

Then there's my monitor.

I've been using the same 34-inch curved Viotek ultrawide for a very long time.

And I really can't complain about it.

It still works great.

There's nothing actually wrong with it.

Which makes replacing it considerably harder to justify.

But it's old.

It's tired.

And compared with newer displays — particularly OLEDs — it simply doesn't have the brightness, contrast and overall image quality that modern monitors can deliver.

And I want one.

Sometimes that's the entire technical justification.

39 Inches? 45 Inches?

I still haven't completely decided what replaces it.

I've been bouncing between a 39-inch and a 45-inch ultrawide.

One thing I'm becoming fairly convinced about is the curve.

I think I want 800R.

My current display has a much gentler curve, and once the screen starts getting this wide, I like the idea of the sides wrapping toward me instead of requiring more side-to-side head movement.

I'm also leaning pretty heavily toward 5K2K resolution.

Despite all the game development I do, I actually don't spend that much time playing games.

I'll occasionally fire up Diablo IV, Baldur's Gate 3, Elder Scrolls Online or World of Warcraft, but gaming isn't really the primary job of this monitor.

Development is.

Unity.

Visual Studio.

Browsers.

Database tools.

Graphics applications.

Approximately fourteen windows that I swear I still need open.

That's where the extra resolution starts sounding really appealing.

5K for Work, Less for Play

One of the LG displays I'm looking at makes that compromise particularly interesting.

For development, I can have the big 5K2K workspace I actually want.

Then when I decide it's time to stop pretending I'm productive and launch a game, its dual-mode option can drop down to 2560×1080.

That should make it considerably easier to crank the graphics settings up without asking the laptop to push a ridiculous number of pixels.

High or Ultra settings.

Pretty OLED picture.

Everybody wins.

Except my bank account.

Threefold Is Still Moving

There hasn't been a huge amount of work on Threefold: The Last Stand over the last few days, but it hasn't been completely ignored.

We've added some new spell animations, giving the Priest's abilities more of the visual impact I've been wanting.

There are also new floating piece icons to improve the information being communicated on the battlefield.

Mostly polish.

Nothing revolutionary.

But Threefold is at a point where those little touches are important. The underlying game works, so more of my attention can shift toward making everything easier to understand and nicer to look at.

Threefold's Rules May Be Changing Too

There is one bigger Threefold question I've been thinking about while playtesting.

At its core, Threefold mostly follows the traditional Rock-Paper-Scissors relationship, with the Priest added as the fourth, special piece.

Combine that capture cycle with each piece having restrictions on how far and in which directions it can move, though, and I'm finding that some battles can start to drag.

They're not necessarily boring.

They're strategic.

Sometimes a little too strategic.

Both sides can end up maneuvering around each other, trying to get the correct piece into position against the one type it's allowed to capture.

That works.

I'm just not convinced it's the game I actually want Threefold to be.

I've always envisioned this as a relatively fast-paced strategy game. I want positioning and planning to matter, but I don't necessarily want every match turning into a lengthy chess game where everyone is afraid to move.

So I'm considering a fairly significant change to the capture rules.

What if every combat class could capture either of the other two classes, but could never capture its own?

A Paladin could capture a Rogue or Ranger, for example, but couldn't capture another Paladin.

A Rogue could capture a Paladin or Ranger, but not another Rogue.

And a Ranger could capture a Paladin or Rogue, but not another Ranger.

That obviously moves away from traditional Rock-Paper-Scissors combat, but I don't think it necessarily moves away from Threefold.

You still have three distinct combat classes.

Matching classes still block each other.

Movement differences still make positioning important.

The Priest still adds another strategic layer.

And the goal is still to break the opponent's chain and force them toward their Last Stand.

What it would dramatically change is the number of opportunities to attack.

Instead of constantly trying to maneuver the one correct counter into position, most encounters would immediately create a potential capture for one side or the other.

That should mean faster battles, more captures, more pressure, and fewer turns spent shuffling pieces around waiting for something to happen.

At least in theory.

There's also a good chance it completely breaks something I haven't thought about yet.

That's what playtesting is for.

So I'm not calling this a rule change yet.

For now, it's food for thought... and a whole bunch of AI-vs-AI testing.

Mostly Waiting

And that's about it.

It's been an unusually quiet few days.

Threefold got a little prettier.

The office plans got a little more ambitious.

The spiders are getting new homes.

And my perfectly functional monitor is sitting on my desk blissfully unaware that I'm shopping for its replacement.

Now I'm mostly waiting for the money to clear so I can start ordering everything.

Which gives me just enough time to make the plans more expensive.

Probably best if that check clears soon.