Latest progress accreted over a few days:
- Further work hashing out the math behind the mechanics of the tactical end; the intent is a hybrid VN that includes a turn-based tactics game component. Is anyone going to want this? Who knows. I do. 🙂 I might as well at least paper prototype it and see what happens. In the meantime, I may have nefarious plans for the Euler totient function
. 🙂
- I got Naninovel Scene Assistant running, which will help with the (admittedly minimal) graphics handling. The instructions are pretty clear!…but not when you’re recovering from medical diagnostic stuff, lolsob.
- ToonSquid test animation progress. I futzed for a while customizing a brush and am pretty happy with “vector but with inked lines vibes” it has going on. 🙂
- I got audio working in Naninovel proper; its audio handling uses Unity’s built-in audio engine. (Pro tip: make sure Unity audio is enabled in the configuration!) There are already basic dynamic game audio tasks I want to achieve for which WWISE (or Fmod) will likely work better, so my next step is looking into coding custom commands in C# for use in Naninovel scripts in conjunction with WWISE. The current mp3 is a placeholder I had lying around of Some Other Orchestral WIP in Sibelius NotePerformer output. 🙂
- I did a piano sketch of the VN’s prologue music eventually for looping. I’d considered taking it into my DAW tonight (Cubase Pro 14) but my daughter had a project video call so I decided not to be that much of a noise-making nuisance. :3
- Semi-relatedly, I looked longingly at chromatic harmonicas that are out of my budget right now, having made the mistake of listening to a glorious video play demo for the Seydel Symphony Grand. I fell in love with the timbre and the apparent responsiveness, even allowing for a professional player vs. me! I used to own a cranky Hohner 16-hole chromatic from the 1990s; flood casualty. That said, a Bushman Game Changer is (much) more achievable; I’m especially intrigued by “Paddy” pop tuning or possibly “bebop” C6; my diatonic harps have all been in Richter (“blues”) tuning, and my late lamented Hohner chromatic was in solo tuning. Someday!
This VN isn’t using the mechanics from my design of Ninefox Gambit RPG, but one thing I did want in that game as well as this VN was some sense of individual numbers as consequential. Of numbers with personality or emotional valence—you might laugh, but “critical failure” (e.g. 1 on a d20) and “critical success” (e.g. 20 on a d20) is something we already have in (USAn) gamer culture! Thirteen (13) is “unlucky” in the US; the parts of my childhood in S Korea involved elevators having a floor F instead of 4 because 4 = “death.” That idea of emotional valence is something I want to make use of, even if it doesn’t take the same mechanical form, because that entanglement between number and culture/history is core to the themes of Ninefox Gambit.
Meanwhile:
I’ve seen the advice to mine everything and anything in your life for game design material, which is congenial because that’s how I approach writing short stories and novels. Ninefox Gambit‘s influences included the late Marcia Ascher’s pioneering work on ethnomathematics, Planescape: Torment, Mage: The Ascension, Legend of the Five Rings lore (Alderac Entertainment Group) and the Rokugan 2000 fanfiction by Rich Wulf, the apocryphal story of Winston Churchill’s “decision” to sacrifice Coventry in WWII, Harlan Ellison’s “The Paladin of the Lost Hour,” and the late Ross Anderon’s magisterial Security Engineering; for Phoenix Extravagant, the curious history of the watercolor pigment PO49, known as quinacridone gold (one account and another), the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910-1945), and the history of my grandparents, one of whom was a collaborator who attended university in Tokyo; for the short story “Warhosts,” a BattleTech and/or Mechwarrior: Living Legends habit (I played as Maratai!), a lifetime of being tormented by skeeters in Houston and Seoul, and childhood reading about malaria and infectious disease (my father used to be a surgeon, medical researcher, professor of medicine).
Naturally, for Ninefox Gambit, I wanted to mine math.
My ongoing joke (…true) has been that Ninefox Gambit got bounced by the major publishers of sf/f because, among other reasons, people panicked when they spotted a vestigial use of the word “diagonalization.” But for a VN, why not lean in? Especially if I can figure out an interface to help people visualize/conceptualize the underlying (simplified) math?
In particular, I admire the pilot of the TV show Numb3rs for how elegantly it handled this. Let’s face it: the US audience is not notable for a high proportion of people who adore and understand high-level math. (I’ll spare you my rant on ways math pedagogy in the USA is frequently dysfunctional despite the best efforts of some teachers/schools.) The math professor character is supposed to be a math genius, I imagine at Fields Medal or equivalent level. (Fun fact: there is no Nobel Prize in math; the highest honor is generally regarded to be the Fields Medal, which no one outside of math has ever heard of. I’m not even a mathematician and I’m salty about this!) In real life, I’m pretty sure a lot of working mathematicians in other math subfields fields would find a Fields Medalist’s work to be tough going, let alone whatever you can stuff into a TV episode? I’ve never attempted even a layperson summary of Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem [Wikipedia], which has a reputation of being notoriously “deep” and difficult for actualfax mathematicians. If you’re going to represent “brilliant at math” on TV, you’re stuck finding a way to do so in a way that’s accessible to your viewership of, presumably, more than the population of math profs and grad students.
That pilot, instead, shows people falling to a common fallacy about the behavior of “randomness” and the mathematician believably pointing it out in a way that’s easily visualized for the screen. I guess this is a spoiler, but the math component hinges on the “random” attacks being evenly distributed rather than randomly distributed. The mathematician illustrates this by having people “place yourselves randomly in this room,” but humans being human, they space themselves evenly, which is not what you would expect in a random distribution! (Or: it’s possible but low odds. I’m having thoughts about PoincarĂ©’s recurrence theorem, which I used in a short story once.)
I’d spent a while searching for a way to angle the “core mechanic” on the VN’s calendar side. This consisted of noodling on JSTOR after papers on abstract algebra and number theory and Nim; revisiting some beloved abstract algebra textbooks; Knospe’s A Course in Cryptography; thinking about modern public-key encryption (RSA!); playing the board game Turing Machine, which is a delightful glorified logic puzzle engine with an incredibly beautiful and elegant physical design; poking around pedagogy books on using games and game design to teach math.
I realized on Monday (Feb 10, 2025) that I’d been looking too hard and overcomplicating the problem!
Instead, I remembered when I was a student teacher (I got my M.A. in secondary math education from Stanford) and one of the lessons I taught under supervision was about prime factorization and the Sieve of Eratosthenes [Wikipedia].
One thing I remember vividly is asking everyone in the class, for demonstration purposes, to write down on some piece of paper the counting numbers from 1 to 100. One girl, L, argued with me that this would take too long to do and it was unreasonable for me to ask the class to do this. (Everyone else did it!) As she spoke, I stood there scribbling in my notebook. When she had completed her argument, I showed her the notebook: in the time it had taken for her to say her piece, I’d written…the counting numbers from 1 to 100. She got the point. :p (L was a terrific student, by the way. I’m not in a position to complain about occasional argumentativeness…)
I’ve said in the past that I’d pulled out my abstract algebra and number theory textbooks in the hopes of creating, for lack of a better term, an abstract algebra combat engine for Ninefox Gambit when I started writing in 2012. My husband talked me out of it because he felt it would limit the book’s marketability, and he was correct. (My husband is a Caltech staff scientist working at LIGO; he has a PhD in astrophysics from MIT and a B.A. in physics from Cornell. So he’s not motivated by fear of math!)
You might ask, beyond matters of handwavium military science fantasy/space opera game engine reasons, why anyone would care about abstract algebra or number theory or modulo arithmetic (“clock arithmetic”). You’re in luck! Did I mention my M.A. is in secondary math education? A side-effect is that it exacerbated my preexisting tendency to collect Interesting Weird Math Applications (dating back to middle school) because no one is more skeptical of “Is this useful to us?” than a high schooler in a math classroom. :p To say nothing of the mock interview in which the interviewer, in real life a principal, with an air of “gotcha!”, asked me what use logarithms were in real life. (All the people I know in audio/music are sobbing now.) I should add that this was via Stanford’s School of Education, so I looked him in the eye and said, “We’re in California. I hear the Richter scale gets referenced a lot in these parts.”
As it turns out, modern asymmetric encryption hinges on this area of number theory! Do you have a bank account? A credit or debit card? Are you using a computer and/or the internet to read this? Congratulations: all of these interact at some point with number theory and various kinds of encryption. The handwave summary is that many such encryption methods rely on the asymmetry between it being computationally “easy” to multiply real Lorge Integers but typically “hard” to factor Lorge Integers back to the constitutent primes. (For example, see the RSA paper, “A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems.”)
(Yes, post-quantum cryptography, elliptic curves, etc. are active areas of research, is my understanding as a non-mathematician with only a B.A. in math; but until someone coughs up hard evidence that a number larger than 21 has been factored purely by Shor’s algorithm or quantum computing equivalent, i.e. without classical pre-processing, I’m not losing any sleep.)
Remind me sometime, also, to discuss the surprisingly vexed question of “What is a mathematical proof?” and “When do we know something is mathematically true vs. false?” (What can I say: I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid at an impressionable age, along with Theoni Pappas, Martin Gardner, and Raymond Smullyan, among others.)
I also wanted to gesture at numerology and a secular yet quasi-religious foundation for Hexarchate sociocultural interactions around and conceptions of math, which looks, perhaps, like an eccentric choice; except the history of math and science and technology (or “natural philosophy” if you’re referring to a certain time and place) hinges on mysticism and religion. Astronomy has historical foundations in astrology; number theory has historical foundations in numerology; modern Western medicine has foundations in Galen and humors and miasma. (Listen, if you don’t have microscopes yet, how would you come up with a coherent germ theory of disease?) Have you ever looked at Japanese temple geometry? (Hat-tip to author and former anthropologist/folklorist Marie Brennan, who has a Patreon on worldbuilding.)
I’m reminded of Robert Jordan’s assertion that there’s very little “organized religion” in his Wheel of Time novels (despite the cultural and religious syncreticism that is fundamental to the premise!) because if magic is “real,” there’s no “need” for an explicit religion. I always think of the amount of arguably superstition-adjacent cussing I see around A/V equipment and computers, and I say this as someone who names and talks to my devices and musical instruments. 🙂
In any case, to return to the Numb3rs pilot, one thing I’m reminding myself of is that a game that produces literal groundbreaking number theory (or requires it to play) is wildly unlikely to be playable. What I want is enough of the flavor—the “vibes,” if you will—to communicate that feeling to the player. Trying to do this for both a hypothetical audience of mathy people and non-mathy people is hard mode, but this is a personal project; I can take my time and figure out what is, in fact, achievable here, or if I need to reduce the scope.
There’s an accessibility angle I’m thinking about as well: in the book, General Shuos Jedao has dyscalculia, which was based on an account I’d read of a geometer with dyscalculia. (I’m pretty sure someone in point-set topology wouldn’t be slowed down much, if at all, by dyscalculia.) Dyscalculia and its multiple presentations are not entirely well understood even today, according to neurobiologists I talked to, let alone when I was researching in 2012; I have at least one friend now who has almost exactly Jedao’s form of dyscalculia (and other friends with vastly divergent forms of it), but it does look like there are multiple presentations that go under that term today.
One of my goals is to gesture toward math-based “warfare” per the book while keeping the game theoretically playable by players who are math-shy for any reason. (This can include Joe and me, by the way. Between us we have four STEM/adjacent degrees, and we nope out of “too much math, too much like work, not fun anymore” games by mutual agreement.) I think, with the computer/game engine handling some of the annoying computations and a suitably designed visual/audio interface, this is achievable although (probably) tricky as a design problem. Certainly this is an area where all my goals might not be realistic with the toolset I have, so a reduction in scope is likely, and where I’d want to do user testing down the line to see if the results cohere.
In the meantime, I’m chipping away at the smaller proof-of-concept goal of prologue + first gameplay tutorial, step by step, so that I have a microcosm of the development pipeline for the larger project and just how much I want to plan for in what’s functionally an extensible design. If I have learned one thing from calculus (Latin: “small pebble”), it’s that even infinitesimals may sum up to something significant.
Next time, I might talk about the value of literal paper prototyping even for a hybrid VN where, in principle, prototyping could happen in a tool like Inkle Studios’ Ink, Twine, or Inform 7.
Yours in calendrical heresy,
YHL