I am making games that will work equally well on mobile as on desktop; touch and mouse controls, though I might include keyboard shortcuts on desktop. This feels right: a timeless control scheme.

I'll publish games on the web. Self-hosted, not on itch.io -- I want direct control over the presentation environment, as well as the possibility of passing data between one game and another, or with an individual's persistent data. An 'account.'

I don't like touch or mouse controlled platformers. The platformer is... gone? Wild. Hmm. I won't go into too much more detail here, since it's ongoing and this new forum (Things That Have Happened) is meant to be reflective, not prescriptive or predictive.

Please see my current active project:

So where am I now? There are a lot of things that have basically been settled in my mind, which is a good place to be. I like it here.

To wrap things up. Where am I now?

I've become more fascinated in underlying systems and novel ways of interacting with them... Databases have been fascinating me lately, as have strange APIs, as well as the ability of a thing like ChatGPT to process a lot of messy data and present it in a human-readable way.

There is a lot of data in the world.

In terms of input scheme, I have begun to think of the platformer character controller in Starseed Pilgrim as deeply incidental, not core at all, just the control scheme that I happened to be familiar with. I am not against platformers but SSP was not a deeply interesting platformer, was not a project deeply interested in platformerness. It was a simple control scheme that suited my platform  (no pun) in order to enable interaction with the 'real' system...

And lately, indeed for many years, I have not really been in love with playing platformers. On the keyboard, on a controller. I just haven't. I loved Cave Story and La-Mulana and even FJORDS but these are ancient games. Old news.

So it's not in my comfort zone. So what? I want to make a game I can play on my phone. I want a game where I can point and click on systems. (I also enjoy typing a whole lot, but I think it's a better bet to focus on developing point-and-touch design patterns; typing is nicer on a keyboard than on the phone and it's something I can already enjoy without a game to make it enjoyable.)

This is going to be rough. Seriously. But, it makes sense.

I also realized... I love doing things myself. I want a level of control over my platform, over my data, and I know how to separate concerns but not in a platformer — the indie platformer seems a particularly awful genre for collaboration. It is perfect for a solo dev.

Oh yes, and in the meantime, in parallel, some Paradiseans back in March noted that the droqever games were not playable on mobile. And, like, yeah! They're not! So at the beginning of April I implemented mobile controls using the js-Godot bridge, and struggled for a month or more with my dissatisfaction with that control scheme.

At the time I thought of my dissatisfaction as being solvable by creating "a better d-pad," but now that I'm free of the platformer assumption it seems obvious that there is a core conflict. I don't like mobile controlled platformers, and it's honestly been a while since I've enjoyed any platformers.

So the goal changed: What obstacles present themselves to a droqever for mobile?

Then some thoughts culminated in still life games, haiku games, a stronger focus on the underlying system and its nature, rather than the surface-level control scheme. I might say, less about the designed experience, and more about that which is experienced...

I considered replacing Godot for reasons that may or may not be well-captured in my forum posts. They say hindsight is 20:20. I wanted, I thought, and said, to be able to structure my data myself, in a more authored form.

 I had been spending a lot of time in MySQL, and enjoying databases, you know? Tables and queries. Data types. At the time I thought the problem was Godot; I blamed the engine.

I now suppose the problem was focusing too heavily on one type of game, on The Platformer. On more broadly the experience of having a little avatar.

In retrospect it is fascinating to look back and see how these dissatisfactions have been clearly resolved by droqever... I'm obviously not in the habit of compromising. Here I have found a solution which tracks multiple projects, something highly customizable (as I am building it myself nearly from scratch), and which avoids (as much as possible) my problem of large downloads. However. I wasn't done yet. I continued to work through little snags...

Then on Valentine's Day, "i feel that asking people to download plugins became passé like a decade ago, but whenever i export a godot project for web i don't like that i'm uploading the exact same 48MB along with my 100-200KB of videogame. is there a better way?"

March - I created droqever.com and shared some of the initial games with paradise.

but it's interesting to note my thought process evolving steadily through the few tweets I make...

November 25 last year, in response to which Brin suggested Kinopio, I twote: " I'm trying to find... a software or service to keep track of multiple projects in a way that's publicly followable and user-friendly. Not sure I can fully explain myself, but is there anything like this? Like . . . GitHub but for more types of projects than just code stuff? // And *ideally* something I can self-host or customize to my liking to a significant degree?"

see also Slow-Paced Combat And Depth

control schemes: clicking on things, moving a cursor around to select things (i.e. clicking but in a console/handheld context), moving around a little platformer character

actually there are a surprising number of click/touch control scheme games. out of 16 games, how well is each control scheme represented?

platformers or top down controlled characters - 7 games
selecting options from menus or using an on screen cursor to poke the world - 7 games

so they're about equally represented here, and yet in my own game dev practice platformers and top down controlled characters are much more well represented.

i am keeping an eye on these things but features that stand out, which i've rejected now and then, for one reason or another.

art style / screen composition: a lot of 2d games. fair number of games with text, but never a full screen of text. maps are common. there is a sub-theme of games with black or white abstract backgrounds; in my opinion these are the less attractive games although i have selected multiple. i have a preference for the games with strong theme or sense of place, and which feel 'alive', full of grass and plants and living people and things. calm, bright colours are nice. (fire emblem, etrian odyssey, starseed pilgrim.) my penchant for 'ugly' colours is not really very nice or appealing to me at all from this perspective. (databug, uurnog.)

rote tasks: drawing a map, exploring, number go up (well of souls, crossing flowers)

interesting decisions: choosing when to break out of a loop and move forward (disgaea, secrets of asherah, etrian odyssey), thinking about where a secret might be hidden (etrian odyssey, la-mulana), selecting a route or path (roadwarden, slay the princess, kingdom of loathing, etrian odyssey - i am noticing many of these route/path selections take the form of interacting with characters, possibly my own character development but USUALLY interacting with NPCs)

roadwarden's still life scenes, next to text
la-mulana's still life rooms
slay the princess' rooms, scenes, tableaux
uurnog uurnlimited's save room...
starseed pilgrim's stillness when in the air. the blocks that grow, the time you spend just standing there, waiting. minimal action. strategy?
databug has no timer, no time pressure... it waits for you to act and then proceeds
geomoth. i'm not sure. something about the way the scene is set and made of blocks. something.
crossing flowers. the world goes on without you but in a non-destructive way. there is waiting, there is no waiting for the perfect timing.
tabletop roleplaying games are an enigma to me. you create a character. you wait between sessions... you see what unfolds... anticipation. storytelling. improvisation.
the quiet sleep has discrete rules, like starseed pilgrim, but with hidden implications. there is text. hmm. it tells a story... you interact with its parts.
kingdom of loathing... you have a limited number of actions, you take them, you take efficient actions (or try). limited resources with a cost.
in etrian odyssey you draw a map, you move turn by turn, measuring your steps. the combat is turn-based as well. there is a map that scrolls, but you control it, if you like. the scrolling is not smooth but tile-by-tile.
fire emblem and disgaea are both tactics-battle games. they are not like Into The Breach, where every turn is wildly different. the enemies move and do their thing. you know where they might end up -- and better yet it's usually pretty obvious where they will end up. there is chaos, but the chaos is tempered by almost boring spatial certainty.
secrets of asherah. an mmorpg, but divided into discrete scenes. i've always held a soft spot for it.
well of souls. well of souls, what a weird game. same as prev.