Kraa! Kraa!

The Rodin scene is almost done. I had to work on the weekend. Not sure it actually made things worse, but I sure do feel more tired.

The Hux-cam sequence is over. I didn't do this one in period voice; instead it is just Penny describing it, including a few quotes from memory. So it is left to just having to describe Rodin's art. Through the voice of a North Carolina-born comic book fan on vacation in Paris. In the cheap mezzanine "cafe" of the Pompidou center, overlooking the Herge exhibit.

In the context of a clue that may or may not be about The Gates of Hell. Or something about flowers, which is a clear quote from the "Birds of the Air" from the Sermon on the Mount -- KJV translation -- and for a moment they think it might be about Van Gogh, but Penny eventually realizes it is actually Degas. Via the grawlixes of Captain Haddock...

I don't know when I'm finally going to get the Pompidou sequence finished. There's an argument with Amelia, and then there's some parkour addicts outside. But one tiny advantage to working like this is I've already thought ahead to ways to make that scene richer. I'm going for a Mutt-and-Jeff. There's this particular depiction where one person is giving the running translation for the other person who is doing all the talking. The "He says... he says..." format.

I am going to broach some of the weirdness of parkour philosophy here. But actually Jeff is having her on. He doesn't care much for the dedicated ascetic school himself. He just likes to do the thing.

And, as usual, Penny escapes the instant expert, just add montage. She picks up just a little, but she fails more than she succeeds because, seriously, things like this take time to learn (in the Japan book, she did actually end up studying martial arts. Kind of. And she used it in the climax...she'd learned how to fall properly.)

Bodies in Motion

Writing the Rodin scene now. I decided not to go for a direct except from Jonathan Huxley's memoirs for this one, and instead have Penny try to make a synopsis (and choice quotes) from memory. Which is also her demonstrating some of the methods of doing history, which is one of the underlying themes of this book.

Each book sort of explores some aspect of archaeology. In the London book, it was CRM; rescue archaeology done as part of commercial construction projects. In this one, it is history; how to read and interpret texts.

But there are of course other things going on in this scene. I'm still struggling to find the character of Amelia, my art fanatic and STEAM student from North Carolina. My latest take is that she is enthralled by what she calls the Creatives -- and doesn't consider herself one.

So I'm right now at the point in the scene where she is talking about the tragic romance of Rodin and Camille Claudel. And she is going into the ways they diverged as artists. And this is where I realize it needs to move beyond the dry facts of history, or the dry matter of technique.

There is a lot of conversation about both. If for no other reason, it is sort of expected by the reader that if I'm going to name-drop Rodin or Picasso, there's going to be a quick sketch of their career somewhere. Whether it is a road map for those readers without the inclination to open a search engine in the middle of the book, or just reminders for those who are already familiar with the artists in question, it is part of the game.

And the next level is getting that sense of behind the scenes. Of things you might not have learned somewhere else (or had forgotten). Satie playing piano in a bar, say. In an environment surrounded by arts and with working artists ("The Bohemians") as part of my cast, there's an expectation also of something about how it works. Paint coming in tubes, clay drying out, why Herge chose ligne claire, that sort of thing (combination of move to color, and paper shortages, but it also worked well for what he was trying to say.)

But there's yet another level beyond that. And that's the human meaning, the philosophy. Why did Rodin admire Michelangelo, what were Herge's politics. It is the balancing of these three elements that is part of the fun in writing these scenes.

Well, that and the similar balancing act of naming and describing; trying not to make it just a cloud of names of artwork (and artists), but also not letting the narrative drag too long -- especially to be avoided are descriptions of art that try to paint the entire picture. It is the two poles of the mood and theme, and the techniques and the telling details, that should get the detail.

And then there's a parkour chase.

The conclusion of the Pompidou Centre scene is Penny seeing some parkour people stunting outside the building, and learning from them about a meet at La Defense (which won't be happening for her until Part III.)

***

Outside in the rest of the world, work is still busy crazy, I did a long walk through the botanical gardens Saturday...and I've started added hypertube boosters to my hypertube station network to help me get around the map better in Satisfactory. Update 8, the migration to Unreal 5, and the new Lumen lighting model are in and look spectacular, but the interiors of some of my factories are really, really dark now...

I think I'm blown out on creative work for the day after a long morning working on Rodin. So back to game land. I've a new sulfuric acid plant to build -- because sulfur is another of those annoying resources that is never near where you want to actually use it -- and then I can work on a new battery plant and my first uranium processing facility.

I'm getting, slowly, more experimental with my building designs. Hopefully I won't end up spending a whole play session just trying out some new architectural fancy for one of those new facilities. I have to save some design brain...Tuesday I'm back to creating stuff for work in Fusion 360.

Spiders spiders SPIDERS!

 Satisfactory is an addictive game. Probably because it is so completely open-ended. Like Minecraft, there is no clear end game, no victory condition. The original gameplay loop sort of fades into the background as you spend more and more time building for the sake of building.

I mentioned how Subnautica had an almost perfect gameplay loop. To solve the mystery and escape from the planet, you had to dive deeper and deeper. To dive deeper you needed better gear. At each stage, you are building better equipment and diving deeper to retrieve the materials and information you need to build the next round of even better submersibles.

The base building sort of hung off it like the proverbial cart, though. Not as bad as Fallout 4, where the base building is effectively pointless. Unless you take it as a longer, more open-ended campaign; to "retake the Commonwealth." Except as much as it gets across the emotional beats of living the life, starting farms and fighting off Raiders, you actually don't change the game world at all.

Subnautica has a similar issue. There isn't much point in building more than a primitive habitat. Sure, there are some deep dives where it helps to stick a shelter down there, and -- like Skyrim, like so many other games -- you eventually need a place to stash all your stuff. But there really is no point in making elaborate undersea habitats.

Except for the fun factor. And that brings us back to Satisfactory. It has the factory game game play loop; build things that allows you to build better things. In this case, the main mechanism is you have to turn in so-and-so-many of whatever thing is currently wanted to your off-planet superiors, who then download blueprints for more complicated and exciting things.

Some of this is quality of life, like Subnautica. Having even a rudimentary habitat really saves on swimming back to the surface to get air. In Satisfactory, the most fungible resource is player time. You don't want to spend time hammering when you could automate it (and go on to do something else) and more than anything else, travel time is a huge challenge.

Well, here's the first thing that Satisfactory does:

First, it isn't a top-down.

Satisfactory does that part right; you are planning layouts and doing math, you are in the loop of researching better technologies, or building the parts you need to build a new machine that will build even better parts. But you aren't up here.

The game not only puts you on the ground, the design of interaction; the animation, sound design, and of course all that Unreal Engine splendor, make the experience of these machines and the building process itself visceral. You aren't plopping another refinery on the grid. You are climbing this hulking, belching monster as it makes sub-base rumbles at you. The game makes you feel like you have sore muscles and grease on your cheek and you earned every bit of what you built.

And there's a human instinct. To arrange, to neaten. Every player (well, almost every player!) goes out of their way to find out how to make conveyor belts make clean turns. There is a certain summer Shakespeare, working on the car in the yard splendor about machines littering a grassy field, but pretty soon you put them up on foundations and start trying to optimize.

Optimized factories run better, get you to the next goal fast, and are easier to fix when something was hooked up wrong.

But that still doesn't explain why people go sideways. At some point, it stops being about making the goals, and starts being about trying to achieve aesthetics. A machine for living in; structural elegance not just for what it achieves in game play terms, but for its own sake.

Because honestly, all the function is achieved if you never add walls. You can lay stuff out on platforms on the ground and it works just fine. Walls are...an excess. The only thing they do is make you happier.

Well, I did find a new reason. Spiders! This isn't a base defense game but there are some annoying creatures. The spiders...those things are the most horrifying thing I've ever met in a video game, and I've played Alien Isolation and Dead Space.

And they are around some of the advanced resources. So I started building hermetic; throwing up walls, putting in doors and even airlock-style anterooms, running long enclosed corridors instead of just a catwalk.

There's a whole play style of building platforms high in the air, and going down just low enough to drop a mining rig, at which point you bring the goodies back up into the safe, safe sky. Like everything in this game, the environment is very present. Even when things aren't trying to kill you, it can be wet and miserable and the dripping jungle (depending on which biome you are in!) is filled with strange and disturbing sounds.

Having a roof over your head is satisfying on a deep visceral level. Having a nice habitat with doors and lights and viewing all that through the safety of a window is wonderful. So base building, too, becomes enjoyable.

And also. It is a game that is always changing the paradigm. Not just adding new challenges. At various points in the game the entire feel of the loop shifts. In early game it is all about finding resources. But then power becomes a problem, and more and more the machines are easy, but getting power for them isn't. In the later parts of the game the resources are spread further and further across the map, meaning you have to invest in transportation infrastructure; both to move the resources, but also to move you.

Every solution has by design things that keep it from being fully optimal. Trucks run out of gas. Trains get their AI locked up over complicated crossings. Conveyor belts are relatively slow. And the human transport is also full of compromise.

At the moment, I've been staying away from trains and using roads. Downside is building roads is much harder and slower than building rail lines. (Although a nice looking rail line is at least the same effort). Hypertubes are slightly slower than driving but have the advantage of being the only real "public transit" option where you don't have to keep going back to where you parked.

And in the very small scale, I've started putting moving walkways in some of my buildings. Those are a hack of the conveyor belts and only speed up the process of getting across a factory floor by a little.

A last thing. I've tried a couple times to make a clean start of things. I hate that I have abandoned factories littering the landscape, cobbled-up solutions standing in for a dedicated factory, and so on. But the progressive unlocking of builds makes this necessary. You do have to strew equipment across the grass in early game, because as much as you might know you want to arrange them neatly on a grid, you have to do a bunch of building before you get that grid.

Continuity

Writing a new chapter, finally. I've been adding more pages from Jonathan Huxley as part of the whole rewrite and re-work. What a pity I've been studying Picasso, because the next one is the one at Rodin's studio.

So in the revised chapters, Penny meets some bouquinistes, loses a parkour chase after a book thief, goes to the steampunk cabaret which she has to sit out after her injury during the chase, Huxley talks about the Bateau-Lavoir. A talk about comic books, Nathan drops by to taunt her about the stolen book, they go to the Beaubourg and get talking about Rodin, Penny opens the book again to...

Yeah. The book that got stolen out of her hands three chapters ago. Whoops!

I'm juggling so many threads in this book, and I'm not really sure where the beats are going to fall. I might or might not have a whole scene in one of the pedestrian passages/shopping arcades that is also a rematch with the parkour book thief -- so even the chapter scheme for Part II is a bit up for grabs. 

I'm also hating just how many scenes are nothing but people sitting around in cafes discussing art. So much, it is hard to remember that this was my entire scheme for this book; that there wasn't going to be the heavy action of the first, or the lavish descriptions of the third, but...people sitting around in cafes talking about art.