MFB · From the build
Devlog
Development notes, screenshots, and milestones — numbered MFB-001 onward, in the spirit of Factorio's Friday Facts. New posts when there is something worth your time, not on a schedule.
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MFB-014 · Fourteen weeks by the numbers
Hello, the smallest number in this post is one. One developer, fourteen weeks of devlogs, and a question I had been avoiding: what did all of that actually add up to? So this week I counted…
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MFB-013 · The 226 ms click
Hello, this week I finally paid the bill from devlog #1. Back then I bet the game on single-threaded JavaScript and wrote "this will hurt later" like a man signing a loan. Later arrived. To find…
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MFB-012 · The World Plays Itself
Hello, this week I loaded a save from three patches ago and the clan war came up correct, which sounds like nothing until you know there is no clan strength stored anywhere in that file. In #3 I…
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MFB-011 · Every Face Is a Seed
Hello, Mutarch currently has 45 species in the unit catalog, a hatchery that will produce an unbounded stream of individuals over a long run, and exactly one person on the art team, who cannot…
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MFB-010 · Teaching monsters to walk
Hello, this week's post exists because of one unit in one swarm fight. It had been handed an engagement spot on the far side of its target, the spot was unreachable behind two teammates and the…
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MFB-009 · Budgeting enemies like a pit boss
Hello, a few weeks ago a test clan walked into a tier 1 elite node that the offer card rated an even fight, and got erased to the last larva. The card was not lying about the budget. The director…
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MFB-008 · I put a slot machine in my game on purpose
Hello, hatching a unit in Mutarch is a slot machine pull. Not "is a bit like", not "has elements of". Last week in #7 I showed you the splice math: a penetration roll per socket, then a grade roll…
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MFB-007 · 40 percent of your first gene
Hello, this is the post I promised last week: the actual math of the splice bench. The design question fits in one sentence: how do you make pouring 50 copies of the same gene feel different from…
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MFB-006 · Cowardice is a tunable
Hello, this week is about the evening I watched one of my own healers stroll into the enemy front line and get deleted in about 4 seconds. It was not a bug in the usual sense. The unit did exactly…
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MFB-005 · Pixel art in a text editor
Hello, this week is about the part of this project I am least qualified for: drawing. Mutarch is a pixel-art game, I am the only person on it, and I cannot draw. Not "being modest" cannot draw. My…
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MFB-004 · The Fight Already Happened
Hello, this week I am going to tell you about the most load-bearing trick in Mutarch: by the time you see the first sword swing, the fight is over. When you click Engage, the engine runs the…
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MFB-003 · Your save file is mostly a number
Hello, last weekend I got a bug report that consisted of a string, a number, and one sentence: "the spore guy hits his own side on tick 140-something." I pasted the string and the number into a…
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MFB-002 · 129,024 cells and one ImageData
Hello, the overworld of Mutarch weighs zero bytes on disk. The save stores a seed string, and the whole region map, every coastline, river, kingdom, and road, is regenerated from that string on…
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MFB-001 · Why I bet my game on a browser engine
Hello, time for a confession: I am building a single-player strategy game in TypeScript, running in a browser engine, and every gamedev forum I have ever read says this is wrong. The standard…