By contrast to malicious game design which is built around... pranks at best and cruel jokes at worst, magical game design is built around magic tricks.

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025683/Board-Game-Design-Day-King

Fairness is a new concept. For most of human history, cheating was the norm in love and war and games.

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When presented with a process whose results are important to me (VITAL PROCESS?), it's pleasurable to compute what the results are going to be. If I'm entirely incapable of attempting to compute the result, I'll be frustrated... but if the act of computing is too trivial, the pleasure will go away... and if the act of computing is too expensive, it will become tiresome to compute in its entirety. However, for a suitably vital process, I will still be driven to compute it in its entirety, however tiresome, and burn out afterwards.
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Unlike most of my other games Starseed Pilgrim was quite emotional... resonant poetry for people who still love playing with systems?

I've been moving away from thinking about literal representations of things, but what if I've been thinking about representing the wrong things? For example, in Oath, I've been thinking about how Favour is not just a game mechanic, it represents a facet of the world -- the shifting favour of the inhabitants of the world of Oath, as well as your relationship(s) to them.

But, Starseed Pilgrim was much more about an emotional experience, a state of ruminating. It was about thought and feeling and cognition. See front step to tianjin - it's much more about a state of mind; it doesn't dwell on the literal existence of where I am or where I'm not; it just touches on those things briefly.

I can talk about states of mind.

something i'm fond of is designing levels first by composition (i.e. using a tile editor to draw a bunch of tiles that look good) and then to find a way to make it enjoyable to play. i came to think about this process more clearly after reading bennett foddy's piece on mkapolk's process of designing "[fr0g] clan official server 24/7 zk map (for stranger)":

QuoteMy process for making the levels was to scatter geometry more or less randomly and then try to traverse it. Sometimes when I was going down a map if I thought that an area shouldn't be a dead end I'd add some more stuff to it, but that's about as far as it went.

but maybe i should have realized it earlier when i heard sylvie's description of how she designed JIGGLY ZONE

-- actually i don't know where i heard this. was it from sylvie herself? (researching)

Closed Systems

I've always enjoyed things that feel like this. It's not just generation ships or things that really do go out of their way to feel like 'bottle worlds', it's also the feeling of something being... cleanly, elegantly designed, self-contained, focused. Focus is a good word.

In games, there's a very special feeling I get from full-world simulations. Heat Signature, Dwarf Fortress, Oxygen Not Included, Crusader Kings 2... these games convey a sense that the entire world is 'one mode,' simulated, in a roguelike way. This isn't the only way to do this, of course...

Mount and Blade simulates a whole world in modes - you move between the world map and combat scenarios. The combat scenarios feel a bit tacked-on to me, though...

Up Close and in Real Time

On the other hand, I hate pausing these games, zooming around the whole world. No -- that's not quite true. I actually really like it, but it takes away from this feeling of wholeness, of living and breathing this world. It's seductive, having a tool so powerful available to me as a player. I love pausing these games, zooming around the whole world, and that's the problem.

I like playing Probability 0 and Dungeon Bounce. Cave Story and Dark Souls and Ynglet. I like getting into a flow, experiencing this "Up Close and in Real Time" effect.

Maybe zooming out to an overworld isn't a problem: it can give much-needed context? The problem is when the "Up Close and in Real Time" mode is unimportant, anything other than primary. Frequent interruptions have that effect on this mode for me. (Also see my above comment on Mount and Blade.)

... is this a Cursed Problem?

I'm going to have to think about this some more tomorrow.
Successful games to consider:
- Uurnog Uurnlimited
- System Shock 2
- Elona
- 31 unmarked games [Oct 25, 'Alien'] (too small though. look into scaling solutions. how do other games do it?)
- Starseed Pilgrim? (not a 'whole world', but still feels like a 'big' simulation. again a scaling thing: it's conceptually small, even if it feels traversable/large)
- Dark Souls? (maybe not a whole simulation)
- Clockwork Calamity in Mushroom World? (maybe not real-time enough)'
- Blessed Surface (I found it too... unpolished?)

Hmm. I didn't get into it. But:
- Noita

It really is terrible not having a pause button! And the way you can lose all your progress by slipping up... oof, that hurts. I boost jumped into the darkness a moment before it would have been the right time, and man, does that suck! hahaha. This game is not particularly kind.

External Context Problems
Answers questions regarding why someone plays games. Examples:
- "I play this game when I'm bored, until I get tired of it"
- "I play this game during my lunch break"
- "I play this game during my spare time before bed, until I've finished it"
- "I coordinate a time to play this game with a large group of friends, then we all get together and play it"

These are all different contexts and require different high-level context design patterns to serve them.
(Note that these are not patterns, they are just descriptions of a way someone would play a game... patterns would be designed to solve these 'problems'. These are more like fake case studies. Seeds.)

Game Structure Pattern
How is the content of the game laid out?
- There are 16 randomly-generated levels. If you run out of HP, you restart at the beginning. If you quit, you restart at the beginning.
- There are 8 dungeons connected by an overworld. (At any given point in the game, how many places can you go next? How many dead ends are there?) (Do you know where you have to go next? Do you have a choice?)

This is hard to describe, in part because it has so many subpatterns. Also, using exact numbers is not really pattern-y ("8 dungeons"), but these are not patterns, they are again... just seeds.

"several dungeons connected by an overworld" could be a pattern. maybe it could solve the context/problem "i want a game to play during my spare time before bed over the course of a month or two, to chip away at until it's finished, and to come away with a sense of mastery and satisfaction."

I'm going to be going over all the little things I made over the past year or two... they're prototypes, I guess? I don't want to call them prototypes rather than games or toys, but through the lens of the commercial games pitch, they're prototypes.

Hi, droqen here!
Today we're going to be designing a videogame pitch to a videogame company!
But first, don't forget to like and subscribe! And hit that notification bell!

Actually first, what's important is for me to figure out some big thematic inspirations- like, am I interested in a game set in space, on Earth, or in your mind? I should probably figure out some motifs that I find myself returning to again and again...

If I'm going to promise to make something, I had really better be sure I can uphold my end of the bargain.

At the bottom end of working for myself, every action became laced with a fear that it's not enough. While I think this was driven by not having enough money, it was very much a mindset thing. If you're rolling dice are you excited about the high end, worried about the low end, or just expecting the average? The mindset I want to get back into is to think about money in this middle space, where I have moderate expectations that I fully expect to meet.

I've experienced this high end -- Starseed Pilgrim -- and now I've experienced the low end. Failing and losing a bunch of money sucks. It happened over the course of a literal decade, though, and I didn't really even notice it happening.

Maybe I should have listened to my mom and gone to business school.

Maybe not, though ;) I'll just work with or for someone else who knows how to deal with this stuff. Save myself for game design.

At the heart of all this: worrying about money is poison. The flipside is that I've finally come to value financial stability over spiky "wow what if this blows up" gambling-on-experimental-game-design dreams. Now that I value it, I just have to learn how to find it :')

not exploitative (indifferent to harm, intentionally beneficial to oneself),
but malicious (intentionally harmful, indifferent to self-benefit).

I want games with impossibly beautiful form and content:

Game design finely crafted, comfortable, elegant.

Don't tell me one concrete thing; fill my head up with a whole formless orchestra of the whole idea you want to convey.

The Chorus of Imagination, A Pattern

The pattern captures all solutions to a problem; I want art that evokes the space of all relevant ideas to what is being expressed.

The best example that I can come up with right now is that if I am writing a story about love, to specify the hair colour of one of the lovers detracts from the choral fullness... it is a fundamentally unnecessary detail that makes the work more concrete, but less whole.

Isabella's Mochi Donuts charges $20 for six donuts. They are pretty unique donuts (mochi?!), nicely decorated, and they have great flavours constantly rotating in and out.

On Christmas, they increased the price to $25 / six without a reason or warning (as far as i could tell!) and it really turned us off of buying more donuts there.

2022 Jan 3
Played the first official game of Oath with the crew.
The turn order was D, me, R, M, and J.

It was a bit rough going to start out with - the game is hard to explain! But as the afternoon progressed into evening, everyone started to get the mechanics and warm up to the whole thing. I think the last rule we explained was the rule that prevented M from taking the Darkest Secret from me... but he took it some other way.

The rule makes such beautiful thematic sense. It doesn't explain itself but I feel the need to explain for it. Fascinating stuff. I don't know how lucky we got with this game or whether the game itself is just incredible, but there were moments throughout when someone seemed to be getting the upper hand, and was a real contender for winning. Truly incredible.

Anyway, it helped that most of the time nobody was terribly concerned about winning or losing. Of course we tried to win, but the attitude around the table was jovial. We all were telling our little stories about the world, not just playing extreme tactics.

the slowest, subtlest vampire film i can imagine

about love, i guess, but

[spoilers, of course]

at the end of the day i feel like what it's doing

is portraying love between very old people

who are also, still, monsters

so old and experienced and yet still living and breathing and carrying on. sustaining. pursuing passions, but in an ancient, patient way.

the film itself is just as ancient and patient.

i can't tell if that's a good thing.

I don't wear a white shirt under my jacket because it gives me -1 to Suggestion, and I want to be able to Suggest well. But I don't really feel in tune with the world, making this decision
 It's a stretch.

Procedurally generated content in a replayable game seeks to offset this, but so does a massive amount of content - see Hades or Wildermyth. Poetic empty space can only go so far, but anything can only go so far.

As I get older and see more patterns emerge, will life seem less & less real as I see things repeated more & more?

It's not the fact that life never repeats, but it's true that a video will repeat in a more perfect/unnatural way as compared to things I would observe in reality...

WHEN SOMETHING REPEATS EXACTLY, THE HUMAN BRAIN REACTS DIFFERENTLY.

What implications does this have for deja vu and also the fictional ideas of time travel and precognition? If you see something exactly the same way twice, the brain has a deep reaction. How many times does it take for this repeated thing to lose all sense of reality, and is that the fundamental/deep change or is there a different, more higher-order effect?