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...

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.

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. 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.



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:



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.



And so, "You got the high jump shoe" was born.

P.S. shoutout to Control the Body which I played last night and was probably an inspirational factor, and also is good

Quote from: Jason Grinblatan mmo whose servers are only accessible when it's raining in your area

link

Hit three keys on your numpad (1-9), then hit three new keys, then hit the last three keys you didn't hit the first two times.
This is a pretty satisfying-but-awkward little loop!

The rest of the essay on the excitement of this kind of play is harder for me to wrap my brain around but it feels important. Like, the answer to resolving crunch lies along the same path.

Designing games has given rise, as we have seen, to degenerate strategies. Crunch. Creative tasks suffer from wide-open possibility spaces.

Being punished for doing too well -- for running into a well of creativity too rich not to crunch on -- is a material property of our bodies, of the world around us.

This essay lived in my mind for a while--I'd like to make a note here that the BEAUTIFUL FORMATTING helped a lot. The passion w/ which this #game-design-essay was conceived made me give it a second thought, then a third--and I just so happened to fall into an extra-meaty couple days of droqtober.

I was thinking, most of all, how I related to the treasure cap to creativity, motivation. This section, specifically:

Quote from: @jseakleHow does it play?

Often, you don't notice it. In most zonas, you never come close to 10.

Sometimes, it's crucial — there exist some rare infinite combos in the game, and if there were no cap, you could never leave and farm infinite points. (infinites were still a bit too strong, so the latest build has an additional anti-infinite measure.)

In between those cases, it's frustrating! The game is all about optimizing limited resources, using one wand to do 3 different things. But sometimes, you optimize a bit too well, and suddenly you're left with extra treasure wands you can't use.

When making games, often, motivation runs out. You never come close to "going infinite" with a project, so to speak. Sometimes, you run into an 'infinite' well of motivation, and if there were no physical constraints, you could never leave that well and be infinitely creative.

It's frustrating!

Essay by @jseakle

Quotei'm playing a lot of Cinco Paus again, and I've been thinking about

~ ❈ The Treasure Cap ❈ ~

What is it?

A vivo (run) in Cinco Paus is divided into 50 jogos (games) of 5 zonas (zones) each. To survive, you'll need to find ways to create lots of the 5 types of treasure, which open doors, heal, identify spells, build into permanent upgrades, and score points.

Within each zona, you are only allowed to create 10 treasures total. After that, treasure creation abilities will do nothing.

How does it play?

Often, you don't notice it. In most zonas, you never come close to 10.

Sometimes, it's crucial — there exist some rare infinite combos in the game, and if there were no cap, you could never leave and farm infinite points. (infinites were still a bit too strong, so the latest build has an additional anti-infinite measure.)

In between those cases, it's frustrating! The game is all about optimizing limited resources, using one wand to do 3 different things. But sometimes, you optimize a bit too well, and suddenly you're left with extra treasure wands you can't use.

Doesn't that suck?

No. It's amazing actually.

Complex systems naturally give rise to narrow, degenerate strategies. Many games suffer from wide-open possibility spaces that you should just ignore if you want to play optimally. The treasure cap resists this. Instead, advanced play means evaluating your position early, realizing you're likely to cap next zona, and thus going out of your way to burn your resources "inefficiently" so that they won't be completely wasted later.

This is a very exciting kind of play! Using tools that are normally very valuable to set up tiny bits of marginal advantage because you're just too rich to use all of them normally is such a unique and delightful feeling. More games should punish you for doing too well — as long as they provide outlets for you to preempt this by spending your resources in "worse" ways that are still better than nothing.

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.

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, I don't mean to prescribe. You might find that you love the idea of a thousand crepusculant lucifers. Maybe it's a joke that keeps on giving, or it's representative of a consistent style. I'm thinking about the name crepusculant lucifer in my own (narrow, personal, particular!) way.

How long will it remain relevant, interesting, worth it to you? How long will it keep on giving?

Right. The latter part of the subject line: Juicy oatmeal is still oatmeal.

I'm intrigued to apply this to juice, too. Juice can hurt when it's overdone, when it doesn't "get out of the way" like "laser cannon," but instead dominates the mental landscape like "crepusculant lucifer" does.

Re-using the same juice over and over can't carry an experience forever; that's okay! It doesn't have to. But when designing juice, ask yourself how often it's going to steal the spotlight (think in literal numbers: will it be center stage 1 time per player, or 1000 times across a whole playthrough of the game?) and then ask yourself how often it deserves it.

Adjacent "laser cannon", "crepusculant lucifer" is hilariously overwrought.

Suppose a work is not a series of interesting choices... just a series of interesting moments. Once those moments cease to be interesting, the user disengages; it is no longer performing its function.

We do not continue to eat a meal once the food is gone and all that remain are bones and cutlery, even if those things are beautiful.

What's wrong with oatmeal?

In So you want to build a generator... Kate Compton describes "the 10,000 Bowls of Oatmeal problem."

Quote from: Kate ComptonI can easily generate 10,000 bowls of plain oatmeal, with each oat being in a different position and different orientation, and mathematically speaking they will all be completely unique. But the user will likely just see a lot of oatmeal. Perceptual uniqueness is the real metric, and it's darn tough.

Boiling this oatmeal problem down to one of perceptual uniqueness misrepresents the problem.

When writing, when drawing, when making a game, when creating any bit of content, ask: What is EXCITING about it? What is NEW here? What is it doing that might make you burst into your friend's room and holler, "Look what I found!" or "did!"?

Rather than Perceptual uniqueness, consider instead the simple benchmark of Delight, or if you like, Fun. Sometimes you need to generate oceans of content in order to properly enshrine a particular beautiful thing -- in Probability 0, old and crusty thing that it is, the level generator is, to my eye, stupidly simple. It is a game about jumping and shooting and awkwardly positioning yourself around corners. The levels that it generates are just... not that interesting or valuable on their own merit. That's alright, though. They are there to be forgotten. The delight comes from jumping, shooting, and awkwardly positioning yourself around corners, among other things. The levels are not designed, they are in your way, they are passed through, and they are occasionally destroyed.

So, getting back to Backus' "crepusculant lucifer" question. What's the "better way of naming things"?

Crepusculant lucifer as a name is hilariously overwrought. It makes me curious about the definition of a word I've never read before: crepusculant. It suggests something strange and abstract and dangerous: lucifer. But the phrase "better way of naming things" implies that the question might be "Can I hand-generate a hundred bowls of oatmeal like this?" Each name is its own little work of art, its own potential source of delight.

There is delight in "crepusculant lucifer," but it's not delight you can repeat ad infinitum. It is a work of art, and it stands alone.

There is no delight in "laser cannon," but at least it gets out of the way.

Quote from: @nihilocrat / Kenny Backuswhat is a better way of naming things in a sci-fi videogame?

[48.8%] "laser cannon"

[51.2%] "crepusculant lucifer"

84 votes

link

Today I made a cassette-tape-case-decorating game for use in the 'metagame' layer of The Droqtober Collection...