A lot has happened with the development of Genome since its first (unpublished) devlog was written. I (Abby Yaffe) was in and out of the hospital for the better part of the summer. In my own best interest, I took a break from development to work on getting better.

While I was recovering, I had time to do a lot of mental iteration involving how to progress with Genome’s evolving form. A lot of stuff has been cut, and while that may seem sad, from a design perspective it’s not necessarily bad and may even be good.

In the technical first devlog, which will now be known as the elusive devlog 0, we described how we went maximalist with design, trying to see how far we could go with the concept of inserting toxic substances into the human body to change its physicality. This resulted in a system that sort of flew over our heads, much less would fly over players heads: the bit system. 

The bit system was how resources moved through the theoretical body of the player ship. Resources were inserted into the body at different system entry points, were broken down into bits, and then spread throughout the rest of the body. When at their final stopping point, the bits were then supposed to “break down” as they sat in different points of the body. 

Even trying to describe the bit system is difficult. Since kicking production back into gear, my time working with Jordan and Gurn Group has been dedicated to changing the bit system into something more comprehensible to developer and player. Through iteration, we’ve now found it could be made simpler by having resources just “go into the body” of the ship once they enter their associated input body system, and then just tell the player that they went through the body instead of actually simulating it. 

To minimize the amount of body systems in the game, the endocrine has been removed from the production pipeline and nervous systems have been turned into mainly a motif.

The nervous system is now just a brain hovering over information display screens, to emphasize the brain as the “control center.” The mood is there, and the complexity has decreased nicely, but I have some personal qualms about the removal of the nervous system as a space of input. This is because in Genome, I really wanted to emphasize the effect of things like sound or stress adding physical experience of the human body, and that epigenetic change can come from all sorts of stressors, not necessarily “pollutants.” I thought it would challenge how we view the ways our bodies are impacted by surrounding reality. 

The new “nervous system,”as shown below, is just the model of the brain with 3 screens under it telling the player what’s going on in the game. The player can interact by viewing, but otherwise cannot interact with the nervous system.

The circulatory system is now in charge of “deteriorating resources”. To have resources leave the body, and to decrease instability in the associated district’s stats, resources that have been put into the body systems are shown when the player hovers over the crank on the heart. By cranking enough, the player can remove the resources shown from the district’s body. This is meant to evoke the feeling of “pumping blood” throughout the body. Before we were thinking this would be associated with blood pressure of some form, but now it’s just meant to be associated with flushing the resources out of the body. When a resource is pumped out, it goes to the excretory system, which is not yet implemented.

In addition to the functionality of the bit system changing, another design decision has come into play: associating Yarnl with yellow and the digestive system, Arglax with pink and the respiratory system, and Zeebus with blue and the exocrine(skin) system. We aren’t sure on the exact implementation of this yet, but we have a few ideas. Maybe having it so the associated good bodily change either doesn’t or only happens in its associated district. Maybe the player has to have at least six citizens with the associated body change in each district. This association may not work out due to adding another confusing layer of complexity, but we do know that we want to have the colors signify where the player is currently. 

My only fear for the colors on the trim is that the colors mentioned above to be associated are already so prominent in Genome as UI accents that players will associate them with things that don’t correlate to the district. A simple solution could be finding other colors for the districts, the complex part of that is keeping the mood of the game up, if neon green or neon purple or neon red don’t cut it in on the vibes side/look ugly with the colors going on in the player’s ship.

On a separate note:

At this point, I would approach the development style of a bigger game in a completely different way. I would stick to paper prototypes first, just to be safe on the core mechanic being fun. Genome never had an initial “core mechanic,” other than the player changing the bodies of a population to survive an apocalypse. This is maybe a core “throughline” or “mood” but, at least in my brain, it is not designed out in a playable way. The question arises, what is the player actually “doing,” in a parseable, sensical way? Genome has so many things going on at once, mainly because to me the core was a feeling. And that feeling may be achieved but the functionality of everything is so broken on a ludic level. But that might be okay, Genome might not be about the core mechanic of itself, but about the mood of itself.

Anyway, thank you for reading! It was probably weird having no context from the elusive devlog 0, but here we are.