Notes on pan choice:

Use the bigger rectangular pan for MORE SQUARES.

Use the smaller rectangle pan for better feel.

(Use the square for even deeper squares.)

Do not seek to make interactive that which is not interactive. ah, ah ah.

"Not all things are shining, but all the shining things are." (paraphrased a bit incorrectly, apparently.)

[AB] I need to get a handle on this...

I spent some time today wrangling, struggling, with
making music. Making visual memories. Constructing
loose textual narratives. There's a problem, which is
that games are a form. Some emotions will be less
accessible.

Set a riddle at the heart of each zone. A riddle. You should want to move, move through the space. But the riddles keep you where you are.

[AB]

My most important job is to understand what keeps it all together... my commitment is that I will draw my vibe from personal experience. I think the best thing I can draw from right now is that strange feeling of meticulous searching... actually, it's a surprisingly metroidvania-friendly activity.

i realized the other day that part of what i like about the timer is that it gives me some ability to directly perceive, and to some degree control, the way that time turns all things to dust. i have had the dubious pleasure, the honour perhaps, of seeing some of my games — especially one in particular — rise to greater heights of Timeless Visibility, and by contrast others fading away... my response to such awareness has not been entirely positive, and it's made it difficult to do things the way i now recognize they ought to be done (freely sharing sketches, getting feedback not knowing if they will ever be more than that)

JULY 7 TODO: dumb for me not to have realized this consciously sooner, but SOMETIMES GAME DESIGN TECHNIQUES ARE NOT THE LOAD BEARING ONES. e.g. if I want a place to feel like a subway tunnel, perhaps it cannot be achieved as well making gameplay elements as it can with sound or visual or something else. Doing the gameplay first is possible, of course, but it might be very difficult without anything to hold on to or build on top of. And it might be the wrong order in which to do things,

Note to my level designing ass: It's ok to make unreachable parts of the level. It's ok to use unreachable parts of the level to express or convey something. It's ok.

BOTTLES WITHIN BOTTLES. down then up again...

a top level menu with a very simple (re)quest... you satisfy a simple request by going into the bottle and coming out again. no sweat. but then what? find the bottle within the bottle... an oubliette that goes ever deeper. a place from which there is no escape.

score:1

what if there is more to score than '1'

return the player to the main menu. not "new game" (?) but some other terminology of entrance.

eventually, eventually, you will understand the scope of everything. eventually i will too.

a really wonderful epilogue to a wonderful book. lately i have been thinking about returning to try getting again through Deleuze's Difference & Repetition; there is a connection there, but maybe the wrong one... ahgh, do I need to Kinopio this thought?

Let's [AB] it at some point.

Quote from: p244. . . Said the second to the first, radiant with happiness,
"All things are not shining, but all the shining things are."

Quote from: p220A new kind of courage . . . In place of the Kantian courage to resist the madness of crowds, we need the courage to leap in and experience it. . . . Only by having been taken over by the fanatical leader's totalizing rhetoric, and experienced the dangerous and devastating consequences it has, does one learn to discriminate between leaders worth following and those upon whom one must turn one's back.

Quote from: p221Ours is not a moralistic claim, but a claim about what the gods are calling us to do. It is a natural temptation to ask why one should hear the call, or why one should heed it if it makes itself heard. But these moralizing temptations must be avoided. There is no reason why one ought to hear or respond to the call of the gods: callings just demand to be heard an obeyed. . . . our focus on ourselves as isolated, autonomous agents has had the effect of banishing the gods--that is to say, covering up or blocking our sensitivity to what is sacred in the world. The gods are calling us but we have ceased to listen. . . . like Dante's sinners, we have closed ourselves off by telling ourselves that we ought to be self-sufficient.

Quote from: p222Ask not why the gods have abandoned you, but why you have abandoned the gods.

I shall take this quote out of context:

Quote from: p215. . . landmarks, street signs, wind direction, the height of the sun, the stars—all . . . meaningful . . .

I love this small list of things that 'the noble art of navigation' may have given birth to reverence of in the past, that the GPS bulldozes.

Quote from: p213[Unskilled automatic work may produce worse results.] Even worse than losing quality, however, is losing the skill for telling the difference. As we lose our knowledge of craft, the world looks increasingly devoid of distinctions of worth.

Quote from: p213To the extent that technology strips away the need for skill, it strips away the possibility of meaning as well. To have a skill is to know what counts or is worthwhile in a certain domain. Skills reveal meaningful differences to us and cultivate in us a sense of responsibility to bring these out at their best. To the extent that it takes away the need for skill, technology flattens out human life.