Making a game can be difficult, systemic games especially. Everything leaning on everything else. It's a hell of a puzzle. I liked the frankly relaxing nature of making a new game every day: throwing away the stress of "today's work must build upon yesterday's work" in favour of a structure enabling maximum freedom -- to empower myself to do "whatever I feel like" today.

I didn't stick completely to familiar genres, but I stuck to a few things that would help me stay on track and some of those things did involve sticking to some familiar spaces.
1, Every game is built in a single Godot project with all assets in its own folder (with exceptions: 12, 28, and 29 comprise the cassette player "meta" game, so they share assets). Using one engine and a clean format from the start made it possible to bundle the games together. I had folders named "1thru10," "11thru20," and "21thru30" from day one.

2, Every game is 310x130 resolution, and uses 10x10 tiles. The 'weird' resolution and tile size kept me on my toes, not relying too much on old patterns, was powerful/flexible enough to never get in my way, and finally was fixed so I never had to waste time thinking about what the right parameters were for a given game, they were already set.

3, Every game uses 4 directions and 1 button. The escape key takes you back to the menu. Same benefits as above, but also easy for the player to learn.

4, Every game has a win condition.

5. In every game you have an avatar that you directly control using the given inputs. There is a 'puzzle', as you move from game to game, of understanding the controls. Having this fixed across all games meant that it would never be much of a problem. also I just like this type of game! It lends itself to platformers often, but not always.

[X] Also check if 29 allows you to exit off the top due to album scroll logic

It does not

Bug/crash report
[X] Mino- crash during batteries
[X] Jseakle- crash while licked by a ghost

One person is more beautiful than all of games.

But we design games to be accessible: one person is beautiful blossoming into the future; there is a Quantum theory that I hate that posits: from every moment, every possible universe unfolds at once, they all 'exist', and Quantum dynamics are just the consequence of our selves going down one path of infinite.

I hate it, but this all started when thinking about the enormity of death after watching Army of the Dead and pondering the anguish apparent in the actor's reaction. What about death is so powerful? A game is a straight line. A person blossoms. The death of a person is an enormous destruction of possibility.

Maybe it's biology that demands I think this way. But maybe it's just the way things are.

I like signs of human activity.

In Haven & Hearth I loved just walking around the land & seeing the farmsteads that people had built. I could not interact with them because doing so was a crime and I had not spent my learning points on the ability to commit crimes, but it was not about interaction anyway--it was about seeing the consequences of interaction, the footprints of play. I knew the world was lived in.

Although it once irritated me, now I love walking around cities & seeing the things that I do not, and may perhaps never, have cause to interact with. Maybe it's age and experience, maybe it's just a new perspective; regardless it's enough for me, to imagine with confidence that there is a fascinating way in which these things are used by real people. With experience seeing the guts of how urban spaces function comes the ability to imagine how urban spaces function comes the ability to trust that urban spaces function and are not just constructed absurdities.

.

"Who's your favourite games writer?" I asked on Twitter. Here is a list of the responses, simplified for my browsing pleasure.

• Raph Koster (@raphkoster), "especially the social aspects of trust and ownership that lots of people talking about online worlds don't address" -- @Tegiminis
• Holly Green (@winnersusedrugs), "being a game journalist (or, in a broader view, developer/player) struggling to deal with the contradictions of a toxic industry" -- @Tegiminis
• Jimmy Maher https://filfre.net -- @jseakle
• Sin Vega (@withoutaplain)'s review of Eliza -- @internisus
• David Wolinsky (Don't Die - An interview series about [humans in games]) -- @Beetlenaut
• Rob (Punching Robots) -- @FarbsMcFarbs
• myfriendpokey (https://myfriendpokey.tumblr.com/) -- @AndJamCol

ALSO possible: It's because I put the link in a separate place from the trailer, like in a second tweet rather than the same one? I really don't know!

Also possible: these are normal numbers and CW was extra weird because of the Timing Constraint. Buy and play it now, or miss out forever?

Tweeting postmortem. NUMBERS.

It's very very interesting that 31 unmarked games got so many more retweets than sales! The announcement tweet got 119 RTs, and the game got 51 purchases, at the time of writing this blog post.

My theory is that the story of its creation is more compelling than that of buying and playing it -- as interesting as it is to ME to design and play a game like this, something that asks me to make decisions about what to play and what to trash, it's not this hugely immediately compelling "I HAVE TO PLAY THIS" feeling like Cruel World was.

But, the tale of a droqen who worked hard for 31 days, doing the impossible, and coming out on the other side with a finished game, that's hugely immediately compelling! Maybe I should have stuck with that angle for the itch page? I dunno, fuck the numbers! I'm happy with it

I made a trailer today and tweeted about the game. I'm very happy.

Earlier this month I was at Randy Orenstein's house for a game of Vampire; he played the game & encouraged me to playtest the game a bit! Today I playtested the game with Camila Kukulski and David de la Peña Frigolet, and it was great!!!

Some to-dos before the big day:

[28] - Encourage (or force?) case editing/customization

[29] - Indicate that items can be put down on the desktop
[29] - Larger offscreen album
[29] - Labelled regions on the desktop maybe?

[30] - Make the 3-wide hole a floor (it's too mean right now lol). The stairs need to be doable.

[***] - Indicate The Game Autosaves. That's important: You don't have to complete it in a single session. (Also, you don't have to beat every game.)

[19] - Is the hay necessary?
Should you win if you leave?

[04] - STARTED YOU IN WRONG SPOT

[18] - Art: are the walls too similar to the background?
[18] - Modulo warping could be more useful. Right now it feels pretty bad.

[09] - Redo spell icons. Star = Double Checkmark instead, and then have a normal exit
[09] - "G" = 2 or 3 arrows, like a recycling icon?

[21] - Make the opposing fencer not 'activate' until you're halfway across the field

[14] - Last level too hard?

[17] - Bottom path

[07] - Don't reset previous rooms? Hmm... I'm not sure...

my notes from early october 30, really just leading up to starting the snake prototype.

30. ABSTRACT ART
started 9:37AM
stopped
read poetry
started 11:22 AM — late
Inktober's official 30. SLITHER
slither. i could make a game of snake
that doesn't look it.
you slither through grass.

30. ABSTRACT ART

A postmortem.

I've been making daily games for #droqtober for the entire month and sometimes I still have problems making something I like. Today it was an hour and a half spent on this snake thing. I even watched a very nice video about how snakes move. I enjoyed it, but it didn't make me feel like implementing any of it. I had this platformer, and then you had this sort of 'spinning in the air' animation when you jumped, and I thought, hey, that looks like a buffering/loading ring! Maybe I'll do something with that - a visual trick that makes your snake-in-the-air unexpectedly transform into a buffering circle, loading something. I implemented something and it gave me a headache, switching the levels while you turned into a buffering circle. I had done enough quick visual movement for #27.



We went for a walk.

On that walk, nothing game-related happened, but when I returned, I threw the snake platformer away and scribbled some careless thing, in red pixels:



I looked at it and thought: I like this. But what is it?
I tried making it something's head. Something's body.
Then I realized if I flipped it, it was a high heel shoe.
I put a leg in it, but the leg was too big. I wouldn't be able to fit a body.
I put a head on the leg instead.



And so, "You got the high jump shoe" was born.

P.S. shoutout to Control the Body which I played last night and was probably an inspirational factor, and also is good

Quote from: Jason Grinblatan mmo whose servers are only accessible when it's raining in your area

link

Hit three keys on your numpad (1-9), then hit three new keys, then hit the last three keys you didn't hit the first two times.
This is a pretty satisfying-but-awkward little loop!

The rest of the essay on the excitement of this kind of play is harder for me to wrap my brain around but it feels important. Like, the answer to resolving crunch lies along the same path.

Designing games has given rise, as we have seen, to degenerate strategies. Crunch. Creative tasks suffer from wide-open possibility spaces.

Being punished for doing too well -- for running into a well of creativity too rich not to crunch on -- is a material property of our bodies, of the world around us.