Deadlines. External pressure. Sometimes these things can feel draconic. (There's a right word I'm looking for and that's not it.)

Doing something every day has been very satisfying. There's a website, "750 Words," which is a writing tool to help you build and maintain the habit of writing 750 words every day. It's nice. I don't keep my streaks long there.

I of course also made 31 unmarked games, and more recently droqever, both 'game-a-day' pursuits. Sometimes I would be proud of a game I made in a day, but I think their primary function was to shake me loose, to act as sketch, to get me doing instead of doubting.

And yet, it's the thinking and reflecting that produces an intentional work, something with real shape, something with a goal, a function. Making it a daily habit removes the questioning and becomes too unconscious.

-

There is a missing step which is gathering, living, asking "Why?" and stumbling upon a sharp answer. Sometimes the answers don't come, they aren't there, and while it's possible and useful to create something regardless (make a doodle, a sketch, operate on automatic), it can undermine the habit of searching for answers to questions, it can undermine the habit of conveying something meaningful.

Quote from: The Silver Spike, p 111/365"We thought you were dead with the rest of them, Timmy. Forty thousand people they killed that night. . . ."
"I was out of the city, Mrs. Cisco. I just got back."
"You haven't been home yet?"
[..]
"I said I just got in."
Smeds saw he did not like the woman much.
She went all sad and consoling. Even Smeds, who did not consider himself perceptive, saw she was just busting because she was going to get to be the first to pass along some bad news.
"Your dad and both your brothers . . . I'm sorry. They were trying to help fight the fires. Your mother and sister . . . Well, they were conquerors. They did what conquerors always do. Your sister, they mutilated her so bad she ended up killing herself a couple weeks ago."
Timmy shook like he was about to go into convulsions.
"That's enough, madam," Fish said. "You've buried your blade to the heart."
She sputtered, "Why the nerve . . . "
Tully said, "Piss off, bitch. Before I kick your ass up around your ears."

I remembered reading this the first time. It was striking and memorable then, too. Something that I like about reading books. It illuminates little corners of humanity. The ways that people act and the ways that people are. Yesterday (or I guess this morning) before I wrote playing the rain woggle I wanted to touch on this weird topic... I feel like being an author means thinking about these things in a way that being a single-player videogame designer doesn't. But maybe it is, considering that we have all these ideas about what it is that players, that people, want.

It's very different though. I don't want to cater to all these types of people, and not only people who are playing the games, but I want to spend time reflecting on and noticing things about other people, people far beyond the walls of the cyborg.

The wonder of plant life cycles... the strange feeling of watching things spread across the earth

Why do trees flower, and why do flowers turn into leaves?

It's important, learning these things. The very structure of droqever has two problems, then.

1 - Because of the way they are presented, every one must explain itself as if from scratch. This is sort of exhausting. I need a way to write a 'second page' to the 'first page' that is each game, that is not hamstrung by the link-any-game structure, as much as I wanted it for 31 unmarked games.

2 - There are some motifs that keep coming out. I really like when the player's mode is switched -- when a button performs contextually different actions. Picking up a block, then dropping it . . . depending on the dropped block, that contextual button does something very different. (See Starseed Pilgrim.)

Nope :) That's it. They can go to bed now. I find the mobile control scheme which I have imposed upon myself is too limiting: one stick (four directions) and one button is too restrictive a control scheme. Can I put this into a pattern? There are ways to combine inputs, but I feel a distinct need for two types of action: ONE TO SELECT, ONE TO ENACT. This isn't entirely true, because I make a lot, a lot, of platformers . . . a jump button is not exactly a "select" button . . . and yet it also is.

Anyway, I found myself itching to make games where you "pick up" and then either "use" and/or "drop" items. See and and perhaps others. YRKKEY'S PARADISE also has a pick up and drop control scheme -- actually, it does it with only one button as well...

but in a mobile context, I suppose that the jump button does not come across as well as on a keyboard. On a stick, "up to jump" brings a lot of distaste to my mouth.

...

What does it mean? I think I want to make a longer game where I can teach you the basic controls and build on top of that understanding. Every droqever game has to allow you to drop in on it anytime. What would it mean to make a droqever that requires previous knowledge? Maybe I can set up relationships? I'm not sure. Not sure.

April 15
The droqevers... maybe I've been thinking about them wrong.
The thought occurred to me to make "Museum I" today, an expression of a more general pattern of creating projects designed to be built upon—but still, ones with some self-sufficiency.

They should inspire, as much as they functionally enable

April 14
Wrote a short story (sort of) abt a character's death.
I've been thinking about the end of droqever for a little while.
The practical benefit of d.e. has been me getting in touch with the feeling of doing the work and finishing something each day.

droqever.com proper is not the perfect bound over that entire problem space; what I mean is that there are other things that do not abide by the rules of droqever which a daily creative process must enable, for me.

I came into it with the assumption that I wanted to make a game every day, but that's not true. Godot, I should note, is not a blocker, as much as the necessity of making something public facing ("releasing" a game every day, rather than creating something worth building on top of), and the constraint of it being game-shaped (rather than e.g. an entire story).

However. Both those incorrect constrains contain rough details of correctness.

There was and is something critical about producing something "finished" which I can capture by releasing a game that is hard to capture in other ways.

I must learn these other ways.

At the VALU VILLAGE, looking at books. These are written for somebody, for a function, but not for me, not at me.

I like the feeling of engaging with a thing that has a function.