Open Oval Opal Oven

thinking about games

[openovalopaloven]

Overwhelmed

I spend a lot of time thinking about the poetry I’m writing and the games I’m playing, and the games I want to make. And today I’m feeling slightly down. I feel old, and tired, and I feel like all of my ideas are already obsolete. I’ve been down a Bennett Foddy rabbit hole today, reading his recommendations for new games and watching people play his games... sigh.

[openovalopaloven]

First clumsiest frog animation

I learned so much from doing this. I spent a lot of time trying to get the line drawings into GIMP and convert them to solid black lines on a white background. I didn’t find a good easy way to do it -- in fact I think I had a different procedure for each layer, which made for lots of artifacts, different line thicknesses, etc. The back legs are a mess. I can do much better.

I think I’ve finished my time with Hyper Light Drifter, again. I beat the arenas with the Alt Drifter and that’s a good stopping place. There’s just so much about it to love. 

I like that characters are always telling you their own stories -- how they themselves fit into the overarching story (but of course they don’t know the overarching story, they only know their own triptych of it). 

[openovalopaloven]

Perpetual Beginnerism

I’m drawing for the first time in about 17 years. FROGS!

I’ve also been making music (on a very limited and amateurish scale), and slowly finding out more and more about the Godot engine, by putting together little practice projects. All of this is in hopes of creating a video game completely on my own. 

I played a little of The Marvelous Miss Take, and really enjoyed it! The soundtrack and the vibe of the game are both really great, and I enjoy any game that lets me be sneaky. 

[openovalopaloven]

We can be H.E.R.O.es

I haven’t been playing anything. I’ve been trying to learn the Godot engine. 

It’s complex and difficult, but no more so than any other. I’m realizing that part of my problems with Unity came from not really understanding how C# works. GDScript simplifies a lot of those difficulties or avoids them altogether. 

Otherwise, the editor is a pleasure to work with. Things seem to be where they should seem to be, for the most part. 

I’m working on a clone of H.E.R.O., the old Commodore 64 game. Not sure how well it’s going to go... we shall see. 

Other current obsessions: Nahre Sol, teenage engineering, Death Grips

[openovalopaloven]

Hyper Light Diamonds

More about Hyper Light Drifter. I’m replaying it as the Alt Drifter now, and loving it all over again. I’m cruising through areas that gave me problems the first time through -- that’s certainly fun. 

I want to think about write about the diamond motif that’s everywhere in the game. It acts in service of visual cohesion, certainly, but it’s worth paying attention to where diamonds can be found and where they can’t be found. There are large, landscape-size diamonds, as large as the layout of the world, and then there are smaller ones, like the diamond-shaped halo around the mysterious jackal’s head. For the most part, characters carry the smaller ones with them, either like the jackal, or internally, as in the Drifter’s visions of his (her?) ultimate enemy. The diamond shape conveys power, a resonance between inner visions and outer things (as well as largest and smallest things), and a certain amount of danger.

My favorite “conversation” triptych in the game comes from the bison who sits in the battle arena elevator lobby, smoking a pipe. He relates his story of being consumed from within by pink fluid and from without by blackness. This black inky void seems to be the other side of the diamond’s coin... in fact the shape of the pink light surrounded by the black in the bison’s third panel is a negative of the Drifter’s enemy (a top-heavy, broad-shouldered shape with a diamond in place of a head). 

[openovalopaloven]

Hyper Light Drifter and the kippled imagination

I’m playing a lot of Hyper Light Drifter. I finished the game, and restarted with the Alt Drifter. Going through it a second time brings a few of its features further into relief, and I want to talk about those, but I also want to note that it’s simply amazing to be able to enjoy a game this much on a second play through. 

I’m noticing lots of little things: purely incidental touches in the sides and corners of level maps that make the game world feel lived-in, and in many cases, died-in. Quite often, the character meets grisly scenes over which a peaceful layer of moss has grown. Partially dismembered corpses huddle around some important artifact as though waiting for it to reanimate them, or cling to mountainsides, seemingly stranded there. Body parts, fluid smears, random discoloration, and miscellaneous kipple are everywhere.

Reading all of these little details, most of which can’t be interacted with in any way, one assembles a different timeline than whatever the Drifter is contending with in the frequent visions/cutscenes. From a (perhaps) forensic point of view, there seem to be different vintages of corpses in different parts of the game world and in different parts of the world the character inhabits (the one with the porous boundary between internal and external). There was not just one apocalypse, there have been numerous nightmares.

Being able to dance through such a world so effectively, and kill far more efficiently than anything else in the game, gives one a monstrous feeling while playing, if one dwells on it. 

[openovalopaloven]

Birthday games

I turned 40 this past Friday, and spent the day climbing and goofing off. On Sunday, some friends came over for a games and drinks party. The only game people really played was pinball (Gottlieb “2001″ which I have in my office), and I think most of the plays were racked up by children, who used it more like a toy than a game (i.e., they didn’t care if the ball drained, they often restarted games in the middle just because they enjoyed the score reels resetting). A few adults got in a few good games. I was hoping to play Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime with three friends, perhaps in a captain role, “make it so,” all that. But it turned out that more people showed up than expected, and it would’ve been actually difficult to play a game in the middle of what was otherwise a big, loud, enjoyable party. 

My sister sent me a tiny tabletop game called Iota that plays like a combination of Set and dominoes. Pretty fun! Would be a great bar game if it didn’t spread so much. I found the visual/cognitive saturation I remembered from Set to be a little bit less distressing because of the turn-based system. That is, after a while, I just couldn’t see matches anymore. It’s not fun to gradually lose your ability to play the game by playing it...? 

[openovalopaloven]

Sojourn or journal so

So Tracy Fullerton, in Game Design Workshop, suggests keeping a game journal. I don’t know why I never have done this before. I think about games all the time. I play games all the time. I’ve just finished a manuscript of poetry which creates games as it goes. I’m a beginner game designer. I’d like to aggregate some of my thoughts and impressions about these things here.