droqen's forum-shaped notebook

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" (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=60.0). That'll be how I interpret today's theme.

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.

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.

Nope, keep it simple. Grinding.

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.)

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!

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.

Tomorrow's theme is "Line".

Line = Subway Line

(https://i.ibb.co/TLnRMmb/1002-subway.gif)

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.

Okay, a very casual, distracted 3-4 hours.

Unfinished tileset. Took another 2 (very casual, distracted) hours to get here.

(https://i.ibb.co/GdphSX6/image.png)

"Haunted Hedge Maze Maker" or just something really on the nose like PAC-HEDGE-TRIMMER or something??? Jeez. Who knows.

It's been nice making little arcadey games. I've really loved making each and every one of them! Also: playing them!

They also all have interesting room to make level design... maybe a new game+ mode where every game gets a new level???

Day 4. Rock Blaster! Happy with how I imagine this game can be approached by a beginner without feel-bads. I regret the death hole though.

Tweet (https://twitter.com/droqen/status/1445128002757660700)

for posterity, the note on my computer:

form
sculpture?
stone
rock formation.
army formation.
pushing units into formations?

and tho i had the idea of being a 'sculpture-carving wizard' my first idea that i really made any sprites for and gave serious thought to was 'a game where you push an army into shape to see it fight against another army'. but i realized that was more of a system to design and wasn't sure iw as up for the task.

Day 5: COLOUR

I want to do some kind of interesting UNSEEN system that you have to learn, since I shied away from that yesterday...
Maybe potions/ingredients?
I don't want to make something that relies heavily on telling colours apart.

fucking love Webster's 1913. https://www.websters1913.com/words/Color

Notes (mostly unused):

"COLOUR."
unseen systems
the joy of finger painting
colour is seen; what does it mean for the systems to be unseen?
a system seen through a colour tint
(i.e. mostly you cannot see it)
but still: what is the system?
systems are better when seen. they need SKIN.

good health and spirits; ruddy complexion.

that which covers or hides the real character of anything; semblance; excuse; disguise; appearance.

to show your true colours.

applying paint to objects in the world; enemies attack things based on colour; including each other; including you (maybe you're always the bad colour)
HMM get away, get away from enemies
but how does hiding the real character of anything benefit you if you're not hiding it *from* something or someone...?

a colour: a reason: an influence, a flavour
a skin-centric system cannot be unseen. interesting. maybe it's not seen at first, but revealed later?

Quote from: ash kgod damn!!!!!
how do you manage to make high quality stuff so fast and so consistently?

[..] I gave a long-ish answer, which ash (correctly) paraphrased as:
so i guess the short answer is YEARS of practice?

I'm not really happy with this exchange because it seems like a very imprecise answer, and more importantly, not useful. Sure, years of practice, but everyone knows experience/practice makes you better. Surely that can be broken down further. Is there an answer I could give to how do you make stuff so fast and consistently that would help someone get on the right path of building up the experience to get there?

Breaking down the process of making this inky droqtober game (day 5!) (https://twitter.com/droqen/status/1445419176689029125)...

1. Brainstorming ideas, eventually arriving at this idea: Bucket that you use to splash ink on the environment. Includes: TILE MODIFICATION ON HIT, and BUCKET IS AN AWKWARD PHYSICS OBJECT, and a little ONE-STICK SHOOTER. Also Splatoon inspo.

Past experience: I know how these subsystems work, how they feel, how to implement them.

- Modifying tiles in a tilemap is something I've done before.
- Awkward physics-ish objects, Rigid Bodies that like to stick to you but which you can push around and whose position you care about, has an interesting and particular feel.
- HMDL issue 0 was the end result of, like, months of experimenting with one-stick shooter controls, so that's also something I have familiarity with.

2. Implementation.

Past experience:

- Particles: The 'ink' particles use a lot of 'object particle' experience that I have. I was relying on this ahead of time; that is, I knew I could make ink particles that I would enjoy.
- Drawing tiles that I like (there are 5 unique ground tiles at various levels of inkage between 'fully clean' and 'fully black')
- In general, feeling comfortable with designing this kind of control scheme. Reading player inputs, animating things, etc.

Implementation had new things too! None of this is to say I didn't do anything new, but I wanted to sort of point out a bunch of specific things that I have experience with. New stuff:

- I didn't know exactly how I was going to do the inky droplets, and I'd never done anything like the 'squash' that happens at the end of their animation.
- I used a Path2D and PathFollow2D node pair to help me spawn the enemies around the edge. (I've sort of done something like this before in its separate components: I've done enemy spawning and I've played with Path2D/PathFollow2D nodes, but this was my first time connecting the two in a time-saving way. Very happy with how enemies spawn.)
- I have done sticky ground before, as well as 'entities that leave path behind them', but I came up with a novel solution for how to make the landscape change in a meaningful way. Your attacks ink the ground, and walking on ink makes you slow. Enemies also ink the ground as they move around. It is a bunch of familiar pieces (e.g. "TILEMAP MODIFICATION", as well as "READING NONCOLLIDING TILES AT THE PLAYER'S LOCATION") put together to create a particular dynamic that I'd never created in whole before.

^ That's all the VERY LONG ANSWER.

The very short answer that isn't "years of practice":

I'm familiar with a lot of mechanical implementations that dovetail well together, and/or that i am good at making work together. In general I feel like there are no absolutes and prefer a subjective perspective, but I think these are basically the same idea. Get familiar with building mechanics that you can re-use in novel contexts, and with mechanics that can work with each other.

As a counter-example, learning how to build a First-Person Character Controller and also how to build a 2D Platformer Controller do not really fit together in the same scene. You can build a game in which you do both of these things, but I don't really see them as mechanics that can 'combine' to create a larger mechanical thing.

Then, of course, to make games quickly/consistently, you need to actually put this 'mechanical library' into action. It's important to become familiar with a mechanical domain that you're actually interested in working with, and this is where learning how to build a First-Person Character Controller and also a 2D Platformer Controller comes in handy: if you don't know exactly what you want to do, this type of breadth will help you explore until you figure it out.

A little more detail about the particular familiarities I have. These might be useful tips, but the actual familiarity is composed of a hundred tiny little neuron-data-points, so even if these sound useful, reading them is not the same as getting experience just building stuff out of them. Work with your material. These I give not as quick shortcuts to expertise, but to give an idea of the type of thing which accumulates to become mastery.

edit: note: These are also just things that work for me. It's not just mastery as in 'good game design,' but mastery as in 'you already made all the taste decisions ahead of time.' What works for me isn't necessarily what will work for you, or your work!

- For low-stakes effects such as minor slowdown effects, it's almost always good enough (and even has some interesting softness) to grab whatever tile is under the player's center point imprecisely, rather than worrying about detailed collision.

- Building a world out of non-colliding tiles and then changing those tiles to ones that have different effects feels very good. Destroying colliding tiles also feels great. Adding colliding tiles usually feels a bit weird, and has tech issues (you can get stuck inside them) that are solvable, but take more effort and time. So, I try to avoid that.

- Changing tiles looks jarring unless you have some kind of effect happening overhead. It does not have to be a really great effect, but something needs to be happening other than a tile snapping from one tile to another. Examples:
-- Player walking over a tile changes it. Just having the player sprite partially obscuring the tile can work if the change is subtle, like crushing grass. The note above, "grab whatever tile is under the player's center point," totally applies here.
-- Particle effect (explosion, splash, dust cloud) obscures the change. It does not have to completely obscure the change, don't sweat it.

- I could go on and on about physics. One example type of movement physics that I use often goes something like this:
velocity = velocity * 0.95
velocity += dpad.normalized() * some_acceleration_value

- edit: Actually there is a better version I much prefer, since it gives me precise control over the resulting final velocity
velocity = velocity * 0.95
velocity += (desired_velocity - velocity).clamped(acceleration_value)'clamped' is a Godot function that takes a Vector2 and just clamps it if it's too high. Very useful.

-------

OK! Examples over. Hold onto these types of things. Re-use them when possible, and as you get more and more comfortable with these little repeatable patterns and how they fit together, work to define your output in a way that lets you re-use these patterns as much as possible, while still producing work that is variable in the ways that matter to you.

DAY 6: SPACE

Wrote these notes when thinking about what to do. Didn't really come to any great conclusions!

"SPACE." and mayybe "spirit"
"To arrange or adjust the spaces in or between"
Space, as one of the classic seven elements of art, refers to the distances or areas around, between, and within components of a piece.
positive/negative. open/closed. a very abstract concept!
A small, insignificant player-character watches the night sky. I want you to be grounded as an individual! but... giving that sense of SPACE...

how do you win?
look at space. dead in space. space space space... lost in space...... cloud exile


-Thought about making a walking-sim scene with a big SPACE background but realized there was not much system/skin there, just presentation, so I knew I'd get stuck if I did.
-Played around with long jump lengths and acceleration. Got a neat bike platformer game out of it.

GAME 6. (https://twitter.com/droqen/status/1445802260169117697)

Day 7. Texture

As always, I kick it off with Webster's 1913 (https://www.websters1913.com/words/Texture) and a quick internet search for 'art element texture'. Also this one is gonna have to be fast.

realizing my take will have to be on thecatamites' text as texture (http://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=12.0), of course. wish me luck :x

Day 8. Value

Today I'm thinking about subjective value structures - what if you're playing an arcade game with multiple scoring systems, connected to individual characters with their own 'Value Systems'?
I have two related problems: 1. Conveyance, and 2. Content.

Problem 1. Conveyance

How do I make it clear why a certain character is giving you points while another is taking them away? The world needs choices subtle enough to make this kind of thing interesting, but... the individuals and elements that make up the world need to be a little trope-y in order for them to be readable at all.

Problem 2. Content

This is a highly abstract idea in my head; it's exploring the high-level concept of "value structures" without actually approaching what those value structures are. This is an idea lacking in content. I'm theoretically fine with creating abstract value structures which do not map to real-world value structures but...

a) It's harder, and

b) it may be less meaningful than referring to such existing structures? This is about having value structures, not what the values are themselves; can non-specificity really be that useful? Thinking about Anna Anthropy's criticism of Gris (https://twitter.com/adult_witch/status/1074077168844595203?lang=en):

Quotegames whose narratives are metaphors often feel trite and insubstantial [..] using the limited and awkward vocabulary of (especially digital) games to tell a story about Depression or Grief or Mourning, it could feel safer and more appealing to abstract that story. but i think abstraction weakens these themes. [..] Grief is such a Specific experience, and there are so many different kinds. when you abstract (Grief as a whole, not This Specific Grief) you are universalizing the experience, and arriving at something that feels vague and intangible. i want to see Specificity in our stories.

Expressing values through 'systems' --- and NOT about the choices the player makes within the system, but just... presenting a system which draws attention to the concepts relevant to the values. Not prescriptive. Leave room.

I spent the last few sessions timing myself! I'm going to go back to my day 1-3 casualness and not record so much.

I'm playing with tiles (the idea of 'underwater magic', as a result of a yet earlier train of thought not worth recording) and placed these purple ones down and just looked at it for a moment and thought, "hey, maybe moving through a diagonal passageway with a sharp turn like that (indicated by the black arrow) could be fun."

Playing around with making games is absolutely full of moments like this, and documenting every one of them makes the process significantly less free. It's why I can't really stream game development, and why sometimes timers are harmful - it feels like there's a weird sort of pressure to 'only have good ideas' that I don't feel in other contexts.

This is by no means a good idea, but there is a chance that this idea, or one like it, will lead me to a good place. Who knows?

* And, having these ideas and chasing them down is some of the most pleasurable and productive and satisfying stuff there is. I say "there is a chance that this idea, or one like it", but what I mean is that any individual such idea has a chance. In aggregate, it is almost guaranteed that when I do get to a good place, the road was paved entirely with chance successes.

Money and magic:

I often want to play with strange resources, and money is one that comes up quite often. But, I realized just now why I don't like the way money feels. It's social.

Many other resources have the flavour of being a 'force of nature', but buying something from a person at a shop is more like a conversation, and I need to remember to treat it that way.

A transaction between people isn't magic or science: it's social.

Frick, this stealth game is so fun. Droqtober Game 8 tweet (video) (https://twitter.com/droqen/status/1446682600936988674)

I basically saw shelliest's day 8 inktober submission (https://twitter.com/shelliest_tweet/status/1446671943827079169) (before it was tweeted - I did NOT make Game 8 in one hour lol; it was more like 3-4 hrs) and the whole idea flowed from there.

USING PAST KNOWLEDGE:
- Familiarity with Entities Pathfinding on a grid (I have a little wrapper for it but mostly directly using Godot's AStar2D).
- I've implemented a VERY similar platformering/climbing control scheme a few times in the past, but never made anything out of them. (fun fact: the first time was for a game that i was trying to make for SHARECART1000 (https://sharecart1000.com/)! (fun fact: i have never successfully made a sharecart game))

DAY 9. PERSPECTIVE ( & PRESSURE )

Okay, I made a game in the genre I will call "very arcane ruleset games." It's weird, making games like this, because the joy comes from studying something that makes no sense. I think the best ones of these come together to create a sort of whole where once you've finished comprehending the ruleset you go somewhere higher-up with it. But... these types of games are for a very niche audience.

Ninth Alchemist (tweet) (https://twitter.com/droqen/status/1446927543567802371)

Also, wow, I'm TIRED. Making a game every day is no small task. I wonder when the skies will clear and I'll see the light on the other side!

I'm not tired of making games- that part is still quite great. I am, however, tired of tweeting.

Maybe tired of documenting in this de log too :) need to go back and reread to see if any of this is useful!

Ninth Alchemist (game#9) postmortem

There was a moment near the end where I felt a bit defeated. I thought to myself, this level is a complex little knot. It's awful, and not good. I need to design a new level with simpler mechanics.

But... I tried, and took an hour or so trying to design a "good" level, and it ended up feeling like a... a very very linear puzzle. I was extremely not into it. In retrospect I had erroneously ascribed my bad feelings to the complexity of the game - there were doubts, but the bad feelings came from that attempted second version. That, more than anything else, had felt like a creative failure.

Anyway, I'm really happy with where the game is at now. It's tidied up a bit, but it's still the same complicated little knot of spell ingredients, the same little problem-solving maze, that it was always meant to be.

game#10 - Getting Over It with Clumsy Bird Person

edit:: oh, right! The theme was EMOTION. When I figured out the emotion I wanted the rest of the game fell together effortlessly. I can't really put it into words, but sort of like, trepidation/uncertainty/fear? "I don't want to jump" + "I have to jump" + Whatever feelings you get after jumping.

I'm on game#11 now, theme APPENDAGE.
Appendages falling off?

game #11 (https://twitter.com/droqen/status/1447697307726749708) had ghosts with their tongues getting chopped off

game #12 (https://twitter.com/droqen/status/1448083520648265733) was CASSETTE PLAYER, STUCK - honestly like, an amazing pair.
i made a feel-y game selection screen!

game #13 (https://twitter.com/droqen/status/1448448052747030539) was GRAFFITI, ROOF - i didn't use roof at all... here are my notes:

GRAFFITI, ROOF
roof. roof... roof.....
idk what to do with graffiti. it's art, i guess? graffiti is art?

googled graffiti: both singular and plural; the singular graffito is rarely used except in archeology
googled graffito: A graffito (plural "graffiti"), in an archaeological context, is a deliberate mark made by scratching or engraving on a large surface such as a wall.
oh hell yeah. here we go: a game about leaving marks on walls in identical rooms in order to help you navigate them.

I've been finding myself thinking about this interview with Agnes Martin (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=94.0), just her attitude is really relaxed and comfortable. (thanks phil from paradise for linking this to me)

I'm not sure posting on Twitter every day is my favourite, because it takes me out of the mindset of just making the thing, of being alone. But I guess the desire for aloneness comes and goes.

Quote from: Agnes MartinThe only thing you can think about painting is that you want the painting. And see, we get everything we want, so you have to keep in mind. And, you want it to appeal to other people.

I do want it to appeal to other people. At first, though, I just have to follow the work. Take no credit: just make the right decisions.

Bright green is poison. Just an environmental mockup. A lot of this is just set dressing. What's the interactive part? I want to strip it down and keep it simple, add only interactive elements, but maybe I need to learn to use both.

Interactive layer on top of a pretty, environmental layer.

20. Impressionist Art

-visible brush strokes
-unusual compositions
-emphasis on light and color
-subject matter and their movements
-strange visual angles

I don't really know what I'm doing with this one but I know that 'impressionist art' is more form than content; so I need to determine what the content is, or rather, I need to decide.

Allergy Souls (https://twitter.com/droqen/status/1444077328875802629) and 'Dying on a nice walk[..]' (https://twitter.com/droqen/status/1449547228486512644) both have a relatable sort of gamefeel; the content is meaningful. Compare to the previous forum-post, POISONOUS, TICK, whose content is abstract game-content. "A poisonous planet." The idea of being poisoned-in-games, not the direct visceral experience of... hmm... being poisoned.

I suppose if I have a goal it is to create something strange and abstract but not drawing heavily from existing games. Present my own abstract videogamey impression of a real thing, not an impression of someone else's impression.

21. SWORD

I recall starting from a place of 'swords', but it was videogame swords. Then I started to think very intentionally about 'real' swords. What do real people do with real swords? I thought about the value of the sword as artifact; how owning a sword might have been rare. Valuable. That thought never really went through, but I still like the thought. What is your relationship to this object? Anyway, today's notes follow:

relatable sword fantasy, not a videogame-wrapped version of another videogame fantasy. MAKING a sword? RELATING to a sword? sword broke

duelist partner

22. SPEED

"I want to make a game super fast today! I should spend some time thinking about how to do it faster!"

No, lol. Rumination did not help. I guess it did help me re-arrive at some type of conclusion about accomplishing things:

Do them.

24. BIRD'S EYE VIEW

Wanted to make an "overworld" kind of thing, but I ended up focusing on style today. Thinking about LOOTBNDT's style.

25. OPPOSITE

Starting work on this today soon!

25. OPPOSITE (cont'd rough notes)
Webster's 1913:
standing or situated over against or in front; facing; a house opposite to the Exchange

- I love the phrase "a house opposite to the Exchange", and also "standing or situated over against or in front" lol

W:
Extremely different; inconsistent; contrary; repugnant, antagonistic.

One who opposes; an opponent; an antagonist.

You are the antagonist. You're trying to kill the player, who has the power to save/load, as well as pause the game. How can you kill the player? a SHMUP, where you are the endboss?

Hmm takes too much AI?

Mirror, mirror...

STARTED AT 6:30

26. SURREALIST ART
STARTED AT 7:49 AM   
Took about 3 1/2 hours
Focused on visual style for the first hour or two
Didn't have a game
Strongly resisted the urge to discard the game and instead look at what I had and see if some mechanics could be mined from the remains
Removed an entire game mechanic right before GIF/release. Feel good about my choice!

Rough notes:

27. Shovel
started at ~7:20 AM, no food yet
Digging...
Vampire (Shovelheads)
Shovel hat - pretty silly wide brim, low crown hat. looks like it could belong in a Dark Souls game.

game idea - digging holes with a shovel (Link's Awakening) to find something? problem - what encourages the player to dig in one place and not another? what's the method of feedback?

game idea - side view excavation game thing? hmmmm minesweeper?

28. Mask
Putting stickers on a cassette tape, please

Today I made a cassette-tape-case-decorating game (https://twitter.com/droqen/status/1453857071204536322) for use in the 'metagame' layer of The Droqtober Collection...

Okay, so I actually had the whole idea since the beginning of how to connect things up. I think this was an absolute misuse of 29. SCREECH, but I did just typo it as 29. SCREEN while listening to some Vaporwave Chill.

SCREEN would have been a highly appropriate prompt.

Reflections:

One of the things I like a lot about droqtober is that at the end of the day, I get to put the project down. It's done. This is a powerful way to control scope creep -- not as a production concern, but as an artistic-motivation-inspiration-fuel concern. When I went to bed yesterday, I knew I still had more left to do. When I woke up today, I knew what I was going to be spending the day doing, even if I didn't know exactly what form it would take. And I don't mean I "knew" like I know when I wake up tomorrow I'll make a new game... It's a much more restrictive knowing.

What I mean is that the Day 12, 28, 29 project was scope creeped as far as Droqtober goes. The work spilled over, and worse than spilling over from one day into the next, it spilled into hour after hour. Most of these games are done in 3-4 hours. On days 28 and 29, I ended up working more like 8-9 hours...

For a schedule without weekends, that's a lot. I'm not saying that it's a bad thing, but I do want to acknowledge the amount of energy it took... I'm tired and I wouldn't want to work on something like this that lasts much longer. I'm glad it's done.

Also, taking breaks remains vital. More breaks, please!

I guess what I mean is that yesterday and today were stressful because I was spending a lot of time holding several moving parts in my head. Things were disconnected, and if I lost the thread they would never be properly connected. That's how it felt, anyway.

I'd like to keep things simple, to know how things are connected and to make sure it's not complicated.

30. ABSTRACT ART

A postmortem.

I've been making daily games for #droqtober for the entire month and sometimes I still have problems making something I like. Today it was an hour and a half spent on this snake thing. I even watched a very nice video about how snakes move (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-AKPFiIEEw). I enjoyed it, but it didn't make me feel like implementing any of it. I had this platformer, and then you had this sort of 'spinning in the air' animation when you jumped, and I thought, hey, that looks like a buffering/loading ring! Maybe I'll do something with that - a visual trick that makes your snake-in-the-air unexpectedly transform into a buffering circle, loading something. I implemented something and it gave me a headache, switching the levels while you turned into a buffering circle. I had done enough quick visual movement for #27.

(https://i.ibb.co/jM27SPT/image.png)

We went for a walk.

On that walk, nothing game-related happened, but when I returned, I threw the snake platformer away and scribbled some careless thing, in red pixels:

(https://i.ibb.co/XD36pMn/image.png)

I looked at it and thought: I like this. But what is it?
I tried making it something's head. Something's body.
Then I realized if I flipped it, it was a high heel shoe.
I put a leg in it, but the leg was too big. I wouldn't be able to fit a body.
I put a head on the leg instead.

(https://i.ibb.co/Sx8YHLT/image.png)

And so, "You got the high jump shoe (https://twitter.com/droqen/status/1454597554163826689)" was born.

P.S. shoutout to Control the Body (https://gate.itch.io/control-the-body) which I played last night and was probably an inspirational factor, and also is good

my notes from early october 30, really just leading up to starting the snake prototype.

30. ABSTRACT ART
started 9:37AM
stopped
read poetry
started 11:22 AM — late
Inktober's official 30. SLITHER
slither. i could make a game of snake
that doesn't look it.
you slither through grass.

Earlier this month I was at Randy Orenstein's house for a game of Vampire; he played the game & encouraged me to playtest the game a bit! Today I playtested the game with Camila Kukulski and David de la Peña Frigolet, and it was great!!!

Some to-dos before the big day:

[28] - Encourage (or force?) case editing/customization

[29] - Indicate that items can be put down on the desktop
[29] - Larger offscreen album
[29] - Labelled regions on the desktop maybe?

[30] - Make the 3-wide hole a floor (it's too mean right now lol). The stairs need to be doable.

[***] - Indicate The Game Autosaves. That's important: You don't have to complete it in a single session. (Also, you don't have to beat every game.)

[19] - Is the hay necessary?
Should you win if you leave?

[04] - STARTED YOU IN WRONG SPOT

[18] - Art: are the walls too similar to the background?
[18] - Modulo warping could be more useful. Right now it feels pretty bad.

[09] - Redo spell icons. Star = Double Checkmark instead, and then have a normal exit
[09] - "G" = 2 or 3 arrows, like a recycling icon?

[21] - Make the opposing fencer not 'activate' until you're halfway across the field

[14] - Last level too hard?

[17] - Bottom path

[07] - Don't reset previous rooms? Hmm... I'm not sure...

I made a trailer today and tweeted about the game. I'm very happy.

Tweeting postmortem. NUMBERS.

It's very very interesting that 31 unmarked games got so many more retweets than sales! The announcement tweet got 119 RTs, and the game got 51 purchases, at the time of writing this blog post.

My theory is that the story of its creation is more compelling than that of buying and playing it -- as interesting as it is to ME to design and play a game like this, something that asks me to make decisions about what to play and what to trash, it's not this hugely immediately compelling "I HAVE TO PLAY THIS" feeling like Cruel World was.

But, the tale of a droqen who worked hard for 31 days, doing the impossible, and coming out on the other side with a finished game, that's hugely immediately compelling! Maybe I should have stuck with that angle for the itch page? I dunno, fuck the numbers! I'm happy with it :)

Also possible: these are normal numbers and CW was extra weird because of the Timing Constraint. Buy and play it now, or miss out forever?

ALSO possible: It's because I put the link in a separate place from the trailer, like in a second tweet rather than the same one? I really don't know!

Bug/crash report
[X] Mino- crash during batteries
[X] Jseakle- crash while licked by a ghost

[X] Also check if 29 allows you to exit off the top due to album scroll logic

It does not

Oh, lol, I should link the game. It's out.