The Mathematics of Monad

 Hello. C J here. Allow me to present to you a question. We’re talking about my video game Monad by the way. It’s in development. It will be made out of pixels. Anyway, the question is as follows. How do you notate a concept in numbers? This question has come up in my work a lot. Games notate real life phenomena or phenomena from stories in numbers that both a human and a computer can use. That is their job.

This is why I use games to present knowledge and also real Earth magic practice. If I know I need to present an action in a game then I read up on it and find a way of presenting the numbers it relies on in game form. Everything in life can be reduced down to numbers like time in seconds, lifting strength in kilograms or speed in metres per second. Everything except for a concept. They don’t last seconds and they can’t be lifted.

Monad, my retro style top down pixel video game, is my attempt at doing this. The game takes everything I can’t fit into my open world third person roleplaying game Dragon Engine and groups it together into a single game. One of these is how to describe a concept in game numbers. This one is still a question without an answer. Some examples would be rainfall, topsoil and industry. They probably are best put into a story so my next attempt will be to put them into quests.

Here’s some things I do know. The player will have an actual inventory in a grid menu they can open and close. There will also be a journal that records your progress in narrative form. I’m hand drawing inside GDevelop all of the pixel art. I’ll probably do this on my Android with a stylus. The crafting system will not be the one in Dragon Engine. It will be simplified and will not involve gem colours. Crafting, along with health and other numbers, are run off five bars. They each do a different job and can be refilled with food.

Heat
This acts as the character’s health and it goes back up over time but very slowly. Social interactions and combat generate heat and the character can’t fight when it’s full. It’s reset by meat and can be healed using cold food.

Move
This is the character’s stamina for special combat moves and high movement actions. It’s refilled by sugar and other sweet foods like fruit.

Story
This bar is the character’s ability to use language and is used for learning and special social moves. It’s filled back up by high fat foods like peanut butter.

Craft
This bar is used to craft other items and limits how much crafting can be done in one go. It’s refilled by carbohydrates like bread and cookies.

Rest
This bar slowly diminishes when awake. It is refilled by sleeping and some spells and other activities use up a bit of another bar to refill it. It is also refilled by tea and coffee.

I think this should be a good system for tracking a realistic day including food. This list is entirely based on my own life. I very carefully read ingredient labels on products and I’ve spent years tracking down what food is good for what job. This is the complete list I’ve developed. I was looking for how to recover from painting fantasy miniatures and according to the list that would be cookies and not the coffee I was relying on.

Wow. That got useful.

C J Mcpherson