Line = Subway Line



WIP. I almost called it done at this point but I realized I could take another hour to polish it up and juice it and oil it etc. The game right now is way too fast to feel good (it's slippery and horrible; getting a bike feels like a punishment) and it doesn't have any kind of coherent aesthetic. It took me about 3-4 hours to get it to this point.

Tomorrow's theme is "Line".

Gametober Day 1: Allergy Souls
https://twitter.com/droqen/status/1444077328875802629

post-mortem
The design went through a lot of changes from what I was initially imagining, lol. I wanted a bit more of a 'metagame', a loop, where you go back to 'town' and like, improve your stats. I was busy with other stuff all day and I didn't want to be working on Sneeze Souls into the night, lol, so I stripped the game of many of its moving parts.

Originally there was going to be a destructible plants and re-growing plants; I even have much of the spritework done for the 'growing' animation. (I say "much of the spritework" but it's literally just two extra frames of greenery, hahaha.) Instead, I employed a very simple static tile solution with some bars and stuff. I'm happy with it.

wip. the basic idea is: push your luck, get deep into the woods without running out of stamina. cut through plants. but: plants are growing behind you!

Figure/ground images

*edit in a figure/ground image or two: vases/faces, young/old *

p74

QuoteTo understand a medium like electric light or television or the Internet, it's necessary not only to understand that medium's properties (the figure) but also the contexts in which those properties become prominent (the ground)

Quotethe goal of a successful medium is not to remain figure [..] figure is a curiosity, while ground is the mainstream. A mature, powerful medium shifts from novel, new-fangled figure into unseen, contextualizing ground.

Ian's earlier statement about love and fun rubbed me the wrong way because it presumed a ground with which i did not agree. but the nature of statements is to be grounded; i cannot make a habit of rejecting the ground in favour of only figures.

speaking to and knowing a particular audience (market-ing) is a matter of common ground. with my friends, i know where we stand, and we can thereby move straight into the figure. with strangers, the ground must be discussed or presumed or laid out. mass media is general (speaks from a ground that almost everyone accepts) or coercive (makes a strong grounding statement that almost everyone accepts) or most often both.

Quote from: p.71After ten hours on the transpacific flight [..] the realization sets in: another four hours left in this aluminum prison. Here, where tolerance gives way to panic, the real work of confronting boredom sets in.

This from the chapter, Fun isn't pleasure, it's novelty. I like this moment. I love it. But it takes acceptance to see the beauty in this moment and in true "worldful, not mindful" fashion, Bogost does not even visit the idea of these 10 hours as wasted. They are the cause. They are the world acting upon our mind that creates the beautiful mental state.

QuoteOnce the familiarity of something ordinary is finally, totally, utterly spent, then the novelty of facing it anew can finally start.

I could make it a collection (Droqtober!) and allow you to 'buy' games (just pick a fixed number to unlock), and lock future games behind beating ones you already have -- or waiting a fixed amount of time. Could be a fun bit of metagame friction.

(I'm already doing them in one Godot project so that I don't need a launcher.)

I relate strongly to the above and am waiting, now, for the book to resolve the problem. What's the solution? What's the right way to think of fun? At this point in the book, I'm in the thought-position of fully recognizing the problem -- The word fun is vaguely defined, and as a result one person can take two mutually exclusive positions on it: Fun is bad, and Fun is good. -- and yet the book continues to go on and on about the problem. I already get it, just give me the good stuff, Ian!

As it goes on, it loses me:

Quote from: p.62-63Over time, "I love you" only means anything when it's withheld[..]

"Did you have fun?" is mostly a courtesy. "Yeah, we had a good time."[..]

"This is a fun game" is akin to saying, "That was a good book." It's a generic, empty signifier[..]

Genuinely: fuck that! Maybe I'm not old enough but I'm almost 30 and I hate these kinds of conversations. When words lose meaning, why say them? I can tell the difference in myself when I'm saying something just to say it, vs. when I'm saying something to communicate something. I'm not about to confuse the two, and I'm not going to try and define fun or love in the context of using them perfunctorily.

Quote from: p.61-62Given a choice between "having fun" and doing just about anything else, the responsible actor would choose the anything else. On the other hand, we are obsessed with imbuing [the anything else] with fun.[..]

We want it both ways: to reject fun as distraction, as vice, as sloth, as insignificace, and yet also to embrace fun as a universal motivator to action.[..]

We think games are powerful because they deliver fun, and we think we want fun in everything [..] Except, we're also terrified of games, which we see as compulsive and prurient wastes of time.

Nope, keep it simple. Grinding.

A scenario that you can hold fully in your head very easily, and run over and over mentally in order to arrive at the solution.

Idle Failure game. You set something in motion and then step away from the game. Go do something else for a while.
Oh, I guess you can watch, but it won't do anything... maybe you can gather information about why things are failing. That's about it. But you'll be able to see it all at the end anyway.

My partner is getting into digital art (finally! lol) and she's doing Inktober this month. I thought I'd join her, since I'm feeling a bit lost and would love nothing more than an excuse to not finish 31 'proper' games.

Day 1. Something you Love/Hate

This immediately made me think of the pleasure of grinding to unlock things, and this reddit post I saved a long time ago called "Looking For Game With Slow-Paced Combat And Depth". That'll be how I interpret today's theme.

QuoteRecently I've been looking through a number of games I never tried and I remembered like a decade ago I played some Asian MMO where it literally took 1-5 minutes of pretty idle combat to kill one normal mob, you lost exp on death and just a single level of like 150 levels could easily take a full day. I loved that.

Pretty sure that particular game is dead by now, but it would be nice if I could find some new game that meets some of the following points:

Combat

• you don't need to pay a lot of attention, the less inputs per minute the better (full auto-combat or no combat at all is fine too, if there's more depth to the game in other parts)
• preferably no keyboard input needed during normal grinds
• it can be more demanding during special boss or pvp fights, just not the majority of time

General Gameplay

• grind-heavy
• either a very, very long way to max level (at the very least like 300+ hrs) or some good endgame content with a lot of character progression
• depth to the game (I like to theory craft strategies while playing, always thinking what the most optimal next steps are, looking through menus and stats, looking at a wiki - I don't want to feel rushed or like I am not playing efficient while doing so)
• rare loot even from non-raid like content
• rare items and collectibles
• no real money only advantages or at least purchasable with in-game currency as well
• don't care too much about dungeon / raid content right now, but I wouldn't mind of course
• no resource management system / base upgrade as the main focus

Story, Setting and Other Things

• story not important to me (skippable cut scenes and quest texts are nice)
• any graphics are fine, it could be 3d with newest graphics, 2d or fully text-based
• it's available for PC (and not just some bad mobile port)
• free demo up to a certain level or f2p
• if you know a fitting single player RPG or Adventure that takes more than a week to complete I might be interested too (obviously doesn't need to be f2p)

Some games that I recently played are WoW, OSRS and a number of rather short incremental games. While OSRS is quite close to something I would like to play right now, it just requires too many clicks when you're trying to be efficient.

The last few days I did enjoy playing Megami Quest 2 a lot, but at some point there's just very little content left after you started to fully min-max it. I also tried some idle games, but all of them are missing a lot of depth to them.

I'm looking forward to any suggestions, keep in mind not all of those points need to be met as long as the game offers a lot of content and depth (grinding for weeks as content is fine for me, if it's rewarding) and has a rather passive combat system.

edit: Thanks for all the suggestions so far, I am currently looking into classic FFXI a bit more. My biggest complaint from my first impression are the weird console-style menus, but it gives me a lot of nostalgia. Trying my Xbox1 controller instead of mouse/keyboard next, first minutes felt a lot better already. Not sure yet if I'll stick to it FFXI though. Still open to more recommendations.

Quick summary of suggested games in no particular order:

OSRS
Dofus
Wakfu
Ragnarok Online
FFXI
FFXIV
Tibia
Pantheon
Kenshi
Eve
GW1
Maplestoy
TwelveSky 2
WoW Classic

Who does an army listen to? I'm reading Shadow Games (the 4th book in the Black Company series) and there's a situation where a General might be in a position to draft folk for an army, but there's a local religion to whose Priests these folk are loyal.

I'm think about forum mafia, and how things can swing depending on who's mafia and who's not. What about depending on who really has the hearts of the people? It's something you might not know until it's tested, and the test might cost you dearly. (I.e. the General says "to battle!" And the Priest says "mutiny!")

Mafia writ large. An army a thousand strong, each conscript playing a game of localized mafia.