Lots of stairs inside the castle.
 The outside can be ascended, also.

if you have not seen the actual footage, the alien does something different, less drastic. it doesn't want to make trouble for itself, recognizes you are somewhat of a force to be reckoned with.

post-waking ideas!

the alien has gear in the castle that you can sabotage, and a schedule you can learn or influence in order to get things done.

"Mrs. Iz. Mrs. Iz. You are making a big mistake."

Seen from a first person perspective.

There is a scared character, Mrs. Iz, who is sort of a companion who tries to get you not to investigate certain things in the castle...

There is this weird little grey creature who tries to unsuccessfully do something, who can be picked up and used?

There is an alien who basically seems to ignore you - but if you trigger certain events suddenly becomes a terrifying opponent, who hunts you down mercilessly.

Its behaviours...
- finds the grey thing and resets it
- repairs aspects of the level, using the grey thing?
- in the beginning, the scared character tries to get you away from a CCTV viewer, to reset it or something, "he's coming."
- something announces the alien's voice: "Mrs. Iz. Mrs. Iz. You are making a big mistake." it has a weird buzzy, deliberate voice.
- the CCTV viewer can show weird catacombs under the castle? the alien is doing something bad?
- if you see this and are caught, the alien hunts you down. eliminates you.

I don't get the joy of Millstone out of testing my heuristics in Rift Wizard.

Rift Wizard has shit gamefeel.

I've played some more Rift Wizard.

Theme aside, the system is compelling... but it doesn't cash out as easily as I wish it did; maybe what I want is a power fantasy, and it's putting up too much resistance! The many little pieces allow me to form combos, they're very tantalizing that way, but then the enemies are designed to throw wrenches into not only my ability to win, but my ability to use my abilities! It feels bad, and requires me to take the time to run through the details every time I step through a rift, every time I take a move...

I think that there's only so much time I'm willing to dedicate to each move, and it starts to feel bad that my own impatience* is a major factor in why I can't make progress.

*but it's not so much impatience as it is the feeling that I'm wasting my time, that if every turn is going to be significantly longer I'd rather waste my time doing something else. I'm losing patience.

Raw search and heuristics.

I'm hitting my raw search limit, and so I need better heuristics. How do I develop better heuristics? The game (Rift Wizard) allows me to develop new heuristics through... ha ha, more raw search! Now that's interesting. A game may be deep, but since depth is raw search + heuristics, is the sub-game of developing heuristics ... deep, too?

How deep does learning go?

Quote from: The Many Deaths of the Black Company, p382No world lacks its villains so self-confident that they don't believe they can get the best end of a bargain with the darkness. I married one of those. I am not sure she has learned her lesson yet.

and not making broken games, or breakable games. i want to do the breaking. i'm selfish that way.

(i'm sure the game will be fragile in its own beautiful ways all on its own.)

Quote from: @droqenbreaking games as a player and as a designer.
breaking them from both sides.

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full quote:

Quotei enjoy doing things that should not be doable
maybe that's the other side of breaking the horizon
as a player you do something that seems unintended...
as a designer i've thought to recapture it i ought to create the illusion of intent, for a player to break through, but it's not quite a perfect symmetry. having just experienced an 'impossible system breakage' experience as a player, i enjoyed knowing that the lack of intent was legitimate, but it's impossible to explicitly design that kind of thing.

with starseed pilgrim i guess there is a similar sort of feeling, but from the designer's standpoint. the player doesn't get to experience "doing the impossible against the designer's expectations" but it makes sense that as a designer i wanted the game to make possible something impossible, against the player's expectations...

i was never designing that part of the game for myself to play, i was just designing to satisfy exactly this same part of me that enjoys breaking games. oh, boy. does this all make sense? it was all very stream-of-consciousness.

breaking games as a player and as a designer.
breaking them from both sides.

brr what am i writing? ? ?
i'd like to compress this all into a nice little tiny thing
anyway the point i want to remind myself of!

compelling aspects are fine!! if a game is not compelling, it is not played. it must be compelling to survive asking people to play it. that's what i think? sliding rocks across the ice is fun for a while but gets boring... even if it's still a fun activity. how do we make it more compelling? add a goal, add obstacles, add rules. not just any goals, any obstacles, any rules -- no, we add these things that make the activity more compelling.

the activity of sliding rocks across the ice is itself a prototype, not doing the above work of making a compelling act more compelling, but of taking individual elements (slidey ice, a rock) and creating an activity out of those elements

But, all these words are highly useful at a high level, as a goal, as a means by which to understand what makes a videogame or any other work of art spread.

Ideas are creatures that live in the psychosocial medium of our minds, passed from person to person as well as from memory to memory, from thought to thought. Reading about a videogame is one sort of idea delivered via the written medium; playing that same videogame is often more ideas by several orders of magnitude, delivered via the played medium.

Hearing about someone's videogame idea is another set of ideas delivered via the oral medium.

Thinking about your own videogame idea is another set of ideas, too.

Seen through this lens it's perhaps more understandable to me why I see addictive, compelling, and engaging in a worse light than beautiful... They place the focus on the reader, viewer, or player, as someone driven, by the work, to be addicted, compelled, engaged.

To say that a game is "compelling" feels like a statement devoid of useful meaning about the game - it's simply a statistical statement that "a reasonable proportion of people who played this game felt compelled by it."

I'll briefly explore a different term which has less negative connotations:


I think it's commonly understood that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but that as humans we also have a broadly shared sense of beauty - not at the individual level... but at the group level, the statistical level.

(A quick lesson in statistics: supposing it's true that 33% of people find the Mona Lisa beautiful, the claim that "there is a 33% chance that if you look at the Mona Lisa you will find it beautiful" is basically nonsensical. This is, imo, a huge error that I see made all the time with regard to statistics. That is not how this sort of data works.)

Beautiful things tend to be those we enjoy being in the presence of, enjoy engaging with, in an enduring way; it places the onus off of us as observers. Generally one does not stop "finding something to be beautiful." Rather, it ceases to be beautiful. The beauty is a transient feature of the thing being admired, not a feature of the admirer.

I can read the plot summary of a book or film easier than I can read a book, or watch a film. The difference is that consuming the entire piece of media takes a lot more time. What keeps me spending time?

It isn't "fun" for books or films and likewise it isn't "fun" for games - though of course fun is a small piece of the puzzle, it is as simple as "anything that makes me not stop consuming it." Addictive, compelling, engaging... I don't like any of these words; our emotional landscape includes fun, suspense, even that strange cocktail of emotion that compels people to slow down and stare at car accidents on the side of the road... I guess that's morbid curiosity, which is a subcategory of curiosity.

QuoteThe book also introduces the term meme for a unit of human cultural evolution analogous to the gene, suggesting that such "selfish" replication may also model human culture, in a different sense.

The Selfish Gene - Wikipedia

Quote from: @droqenvideogames are not organisms, but videogame genres are.

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https://omnivorescookbook.com/wprm_print/15683

QuoteThe order should be: soak the noodles => marinate the meat => mix the sauce => prep and chop the herbs and veggies while soaking the noodles => stir fry