I'll also mention Dungeon Meshi, which has a similar feeling... a little tight-knit crew of characters who stick together and go on a quest. This is a strong emotional core that I can't get away from! Check out my (process) Emergent Characters pattern, and my favourite example games from that thread:

- Tamagotchi, Long Live The Queen (Princess makers)
- Shadow of Mordor, Tic-Tac-Crow (Nemesis System)
- Pokemon, Etrian Odyssey, Disgaea, X-COM (Customizable combat party)
- Dwarf Fortress (???)

Black Company - Likewise a long story about a mostly small number of characters, though there are a great number of other things going on I feel like it's all about this steady cast.

Cast of characters. A legacy board game like Oath has a 'steady cast of characters': the players themselves ourselves.

Girls' Last Tour - Lonely but not lonely. Lonely together? The two characters have a nice bit of banter between them... Do I want to write this banter, or merely suggest it, or inspire it in a player / in players? These are such different ways to explore a relationship. I don't think I like writing in games: see Writing inspired by the feeling of RPG book tables and Rules Express Lore. Hmmm. I don't want to write or read about a long-term relationship. So that leaves suggesting its existence and/or causing players to act it out themselves.

Shimeji Simulation (by the same author) - more surreal. there are other characters, but the vibe is kinda similar? they're not surrounded by characters all the time and most of the plots are about their relationship

Calvin & Hobbes

Hi, droqen here!
Today we're going to be designing a videogame pitch to a videogame company!
But first, don't forget to like and subscribe! And hit that notification bell!

Actually first, what's important is for me to figure out some big thematic inspirations- like, am I interested in a game set in space, on Earth, or in your mind? I should probably figure out some motifs that I find myself returning to again and again...

If I'm going to promise to make something, I had really better be sure I can uphold my end of the bargain.

At the bottom end of working for myself, every action became laced with a fear that it's not enough. While I think this was driven by not having enough money, it was very much a mindset thing. If you're rolling dice are you excited about the high end, worried about the low end, or just expecting the average? The mindset I want to get back into is to think about money in this middle space, where I have moderate expectations that I fully expect to meet.

I've experienced this high end -- Starseed Pilgrim -- and now I've experienced the low end. Failing and losing a bunch of money sucks. It happened over the course of a literal decade, though, and I didn't really even notice it happening.

Maybe I should have listened to my mom and gone to business school.

Maybe not, though ;) I'll just work with or for someone else who knows how to deal with this stuff. Save myself for game design.

At the heart of all this: worrying about money is poison. The flipside is that I've finally come to value financial stability over spiky "wow what if this blows up" gambling-on-experimental-game-design dreams. Now that I value it, I just have to learn how to find it :')

schadenfreude

dark souls

not exploitative (indifferent to harm, intentionally beneficial to oneself),
but malicious (intentionally harmful, indifferent to self-benefit).

Good Game Design

In all spaces where the orchestra does not care, I may still fill in the gaps with 'good game design'. This is good, because concrete art is easier to appreciate. But what is to be done when the two ideals are in conflict? And, some spaces still remain undefined - what's to be done? Leave those spaces empty?

I want games with impossibly beautiful form and content:

Game design finely crafted, comfortable, elegant.

Don't tell me one concrete thing; fill my head up with a whole formless orchestra of the whole idea you want to convey.

The Chorus of Imagination, A Pattern

The pattern captures all solutions to a problem; I want art that evokes the space of all relevant ideas to what is being expressed.

The best example that I can come up with right now is that if I am writing a story about love, to specify the hair colour of one of the lovers detracts from the choral fullness... it is a fundamentally unnecessary detail that makes the work more concrete, but less whole.

I don't like the questions that Disco Elysium lets me ask, or the disappointing answers I often get. So many choices result in "nothing happens" or "I don't know, obviously" or "that was the wrong choice."

Games can have systems that withhold content. What are the benefits of this? At first glance it seems purely negative to me. Why prevent an appreciator from being capable of fully understanding the work?

There are certain benefits but even upon deeper inspection they all seem hostile or condescending to me.

1. To create a variety of player experiences by force

We can already read books, watch movies, and come up with different interpretations, have different internal experiences. I don't know how valuable this is, really. But it's more inexpensive.

2. To reward dedicated effort to explore and understand

Again, we already have this; a work can have secret hidden meanings, games just do it without subtlety. It's not a hidden meaning for you to tease out with your mind, it's a hidden fact for you to tease out with gameplay.

Hmm.

I have some kind of beef with linear content in games, but that's not quite right either. What is it? I don't like deep art in games, because I prefer to admire deep games?

Well, I can't say that good writing doesn't belong in videogames, but I can absolutely say I always find it uncomfortable, personally, trying to enjoy a good piece of writing nestled among game systems. Switching modes is too hard. Ugh, I can't explain it, and maybe that's fine. It may just become a Droqen tenet.

I have been playing Disco Elysium some more.

I like its characters, its mystery is interesting, and the world is dense and inventive and weird, and it has such a commitment to bringing up politics around every corner, from every perspective. I like the writing style.

I think it controls well, I adore the metaphor of the thought cabinet, and my god the whole simulation is lush and chaotic and just plain cool. I like the way the voices in your head are driven by your systems and your stats.

But as I play, the inescapable conclusion I have been coming to is that I still don't like it, and I think there is a tension, to use an architectural Alexanderian term, between good prose and good systems. The relationship will never satisfy me.

My proposed corollary: videogame writing is bad because good writing in videogames doesn't work. I wouldn't watch a film that has the same type of writing I'd read in a novel. (I mean I might, but I wouldn't expect it to work.)

I don't like "good writing" in games.

I'll try to come up with an answer to "why" - the tension is between wanting to be in control of my reading experience, but not wanting to be entirely in control of the systems.

Back to that Jan 3 game. That, our first game, might have been a 5-hour game of Oath. That's nuts.

D got a strong start, so I took out his advisors: two nomads abandoned him and joined my ranks instead! I never even ended up using them, but it put him on the back foot for the rest of the game. RIP.

M bewitched D and joined thecommonwealth became a citizen, and quickly slurped up power.

R flipped grabbed the People's Favour and flipped the appropriate vision with seven favour -- it seemed like nobody had the resources to get it from him, but I helped D unseat him via the Tribunal. He just barely got it back from R.

J had been building up a ridiculous combo and suddenly claimed oathkeeper, and then became the usurper, and for a time it looked like she might be able to hold it and win...

I dug up M's discarded bewitch, became a citizen myself, and gathered enough relics that it looked like I had a shot at winning, if M unseated J...

M did unseat J, but also successfully stole the Darkest Secret from me and won, becoming next game's Chancellor.

Now part of the Cradle is last game's Tribunal and the Shrouded Wood with an Ancient Forge; the next game's oath is holding the most relics and banners, and the Ancient Forge allows you to draw relics straight from the relic deck; and in the Provinces, last game's Narrow Pass will keep people from exploring easily. Game 2 is going to be a good one.