mDiyo's Hobby Corner

Wednesday, March 17, 2021

Reclamation Project Outline

Reclamation Project - Part 6: Perspective (Phantasy Star II)

I'm a sucker for ye olde JRPGs. There's something about playing a game in an old style with an expansive world and a cohesive story that tickles my whiskers in a way that very few games actually do. My younger self would take the sparse details of this world and expand it out into a fully-fleshed out experience, filling in all of the details that were missing.

Most of the nostalgia for Sega Genesis games comes from the sound. There's nothing quite like opening the game on a blippy, peaceful tune. The overworld music is catchy and full of pop, and the battle music takes you right out of whatever you're doing and dumps you into a desperate situation where you have to fight for your life. The game is brutally hard and full of grinding, and you will wind up dead multiple times if you're not overly careful.

One of the things that always stuck out like a sore thumb in this game is perspective. There are conventions that are put in place so that the player can get a sense of the world around them, and suspension of disbelief willing, they can enjoy a fun romp through a fantasy land very different from our own.

It all kind of works together if you squint at it really hard, pretend that things have to be this way, and excuse everything because "video games". Most of the weird things about games that still continue to this day come down to technical limitations. There may be limited memory in the ROM for sprites, or the amount of time that you had to program an entire game in assembly could have been cut short.

Phantasy Star II was made in 2 1/2 months. That's amazing! Given the sheer amount of content in here, it's a testament to the developers that they managed to cram all of that into 771kb. The size of this blog post is larger than that... technology has progressed so far since then.

Let's take a look at some of the glaring flaws that the game has. The biggest thing that has always bothered me is the perspective in the game. I'm sure things ended up as they are due to the rushed timeline and technical limitations, and the game does hold to the conventions of the time... but the conventions themselves are jarring.

Overworld, inside town

Going from the outside of a town to the inside is... how do I put this? The character is the same size but the size of everything around them has changed. The characters themselves haven't changed, and in fact they are exceptionally tall for an RPG character. That makes the change from humongous trees to small trees all the more egregious.

Shops are so different they take on a separate visual style The characters are completely gone now and the way that the game is presented has changed. We now have a text box, an image of a character in some kind of building with bottles and shelving, and a basic UI for shopping.

I can forgive this more than the others. Interacting with a shop is a different style of gameplay than adventuring or combat. It makes sense that the way you would interact is different than the usual. The absolute waste of space, on the other hand, is, well, wasteful.

Overworld, inside dungeon

Moving to the inside of a dungeon is worse. The hint of perspective is that the areas are large and expansive, but the rooms are empty and bland and I could have sworn there was a ton of monsters outside. The speed of the character is consistent from one screen to the other, which is okay, I guess. That's a remnant of how the character moves on all screens, not just inside.

The biggest offender in all of this? Randomized battles.

How big is anything? Exactly as big as it needs to be so that you can make out the details while still giving the player the sense that they are in the world... somewhere. It's a band-aid of a fudge that takes what little memory the systems has and makes it work.

Dungeons themselves have a different problem. With the complete lack of relative size to anything else and an inability to measure them, the only thing that actually matters is time. How much time are you spending in all fifteen dungeons? Around 90% of your 30 hour playtime.

Courtesy of www.fantasyanime.com

The first dungeon has four floors. The only thing that differentiates which floor you're on is the rough layout, how many times you've went up or down a teleport pad, and what kind of monsters are there. The deeper you go, the more likely you are to find a nastier version of something that you just fought. Everything else is completely empty.

The most interesting dungeon in the game is the Biosystems Lab. This dungeon has container vats of unknown creatures, odd machinery, and hazardous glowing liquids in the basement. By the time you reach the bottom floor you've likely exhausted yourself to the point where you're running on empty, and if you haven't died three times in the dungeon then you're obviously grinding yourself to some worthwhile level where the experience starts running off rapidly.

The game does have some nice world building after this point, but as far as actual gameplay goes this is the peak. There are somewhat interesting things going on after this, but the dungeons get confusing, lazy, boring, and even more empty as time goes on.

I've been playing the modernized mod of Phantasy Star II to see if a bit of tweaking could make the experience worthwhile. It has its ups and downs, and the multiple hours of grinding have been smoothed out and condensed into a much better path, but I'm afraid that it's going to run out of steam sooner or later. As much as I like this game, it has a bunch of flaws that can get in the way of fully enjoying the experience and...

...wait a minute.

1. The experience is fun and memorable
2. The experience is fundamentally flawed in a way that is disappointing or maddening
3. The act of solving a problem with the experience itself is a worthwhile endeavor.

The criteria for wanting to make something is perfect here.

1. The music is fun, the world setting is great, the characters are interesting and varied, and the progression of RPGs is always fun. It might seem lazy in other games, but I do love how monsters are re-used here.
2. The entire game loses steam around a third of the way in. It gets repetitive, grindy, and the dungeons that make up a disproportionately high amount of content are empty. The planet of Dezo is just... empty and shallow.
3. One of my childhood dreams was to fix the perspective and make the gameplay more engaging.

You know what? We'll come back to this later. My mind is spinning with ideas and plans need to be made.

Monday, March 15, 2021

An Overview on the Lifecycle of Slimes

~ Royal Archive ~

Year 821
Slime-Craft Guild
- Selena Arcadia Eoghan -

Slimes have been around as long as we have been alive. According to the oral traditions of our people, the land was once a vibrant place full of so many different plants and animals a single person could never count them all. The sun rose every morning to a cacophony of bird calls, beasts with hooves and horns ran wild, and the hills were covered in trees as far as the eye could see.

Today the landscape is barren. The grass that we so carefully seed in our cities has all but died out, with only the toughest kinds remaining. Some of the plants and fungi have taken on distinct slime-related qualities that deters the wild slimelins from eating them. Larger slimes used to dominate the landscape, but with our efforts at hunting and destroying their spawning pools the local flora is slowly returning to its natural state.

This overview details the general life cycle of a slime. Normal slimes go through three phases: Slimelin, Aberration, and Pool.

All slimes appear to follow this general pattern. The sheer variety of types makes this hard to classify, as some aberrations will mutate further in their life multiple times. Specific types will be discussed in detail in their own papers.

Young slimes, or Slimelins, are strange creatures that inhabit the world on a small scale. They are found hiding in crevasses, caves, or anywhere that a sufficiently small creature can hide. They are often seen eating bits of plants or fungi, or anything else that they can possibly get their bodies around.

Slimelins are scavengers, bottom feeders, and occasionally predators. They seem to absorb anything that was once living. Some have been seen eating tree roots, dirt, or even small rocks. The less digestible material is left remarkably clean near the place it was found.

Slimelins and insects appear to use each other as sport. Insects will instinctively attack a slimelin on sight. The most successful insects have hard outer armor with spikes or horns that can successfully pierce the bouncy outer skin of their prey. Less successful insects are swallowed whole by the small round creatures, disappearing into the inner gel of the slime over the course of a day.

The body of these creatures are composed of two major parts: A tough outer skin and an inner gel.

The outer skin seems to act both as a protective layer and as a muscle. It defines both the shape of the creature and acts as its first and only line of defense. It contracts or expands as a whole. The skin becomes pliable and hard when removed from the rest of the body.

The inner layer is a gooey substance that somewhat resembles tree sap. It forms a thick gel where food is broken down and energy stored for later.

All slimelins are very resilient. Their bodies are elastic; they can compress, expand, or bend themselves into odd shapes at will. They can absorb blows across their entire body, bouncing around somewhat uncontrollably in the worst case scenario. This lets them roll around, use their entire body as a battering ram, or survive seemingly impossible falls.

When a slimelin absorbs enough food to grow beyond its bounds, it heads back to its home pool to start the next phase of its life. Many young slimes will wander very far from their home

The slimelin throws itself into the pool. The outer skin is shed and re-absorbed by the pool. The gel grows hard and smooth, forming itself into a core. Part of the pool is absorbed and grows into a fully fleshed out abomination. The pool is thought to be similar to the center of an egg, with the slimelin reconstituting itself into a new form at the end.

The process is usually the same but varies in time; on average, it takes a week. Some species have been known to complete the cycle in two days, while others take an entire month to gestate. When the slime re-emerges into the world it has grown new features: a face, an individualized body that has distinct parts, and a much higher intelligence.

The newly formed core of the Slime functions at the brain of the creature, storing memories and controlling the body. If the core is removed the body remains motionless and quickly decomposes into a thick, viscous mucus. The core can survive roughly a month if left alone or exposed to the elements. It can survive much longer if fed, usually through a solution of sugar water. Storing a core inside liquid slime is not recommended as the core will reconstitute as a creature.

New adult slimes will resemble the slime from which their pool was made. They will constantly change to fit their surroundings and seem to possess an intelligence that exceeds that of other known animals. Many slimes will mimic a familiar sight in the environment, such as a plant or another creature. No slimes have been spotted mimicking humans, but we suspect it will only be a matter of time.

The exact behavior of particular types of slimes is beyond the scope of this article; every variant seems to have its own peculiarities and interests in how they see the world. Some seem to embody elements or other ideas, such as water and the wind itself.

At first, we thought that pools were the result of a large amount of corpses piled into a hole. Now we know that it is a sort of end of life stage for the species. It is not yet known what dictates that a slime turn into a pool, but they are never found close to one another. It is currently thought that pools are similar to a bee hive or a bird nest, and that the entire local area will be claimed as a territory of a single slime.

No active slimes have been observed to turn into pools. The only known transition was found by chance in the year 818 after a Tinker had found a particularly large slime midway through its metamorphosis. No slimes were observed in the area for 100 days before or after the pool was found. We suspect that the area had not been claimed yet, but the means of claiming a territory are not yet known.

The half-formed pool was burned 100 days after it was found. No slimes have been sighted in the area since. The only conclusion we can draw is that the area has been marked as a territory somehow. Unlike other burned pools, this area is still devoid of the creatures. More study needs to be done on this phenomenon to understand it better.

This concludes the overview on the life cycle of slimes. More information will be added as our understanding of these creatures grows.

Sunday, February 7, 2021

Problem Solving Engine

I've been struggling a fair bit lately. The problem is... well, it's not. I haven't had a real problem to deal with for quite some time now. The complete lack of a problem has led me to re-analyze and re-experience everything that I can just to figure out what's going on when I have nothing that actually matters more than just sitting here. The only thing that's really clear right now is that there is something that figures things out for me. I call it the Problem Solving Engine.

The problem solving engine is that feeling in the back of your head that looks at something and tries to organize it without you needing to do anything. Its goal is to bring order and satisfaction to a world where everything can change at a moment's notice. The engine can be applied to basic survival needs or to that one boss in the video game that you couldn't get past and suddenly figured it out right before drifting off to sleep.

My problem solving engine has been focused on two questions: "How do I survive through the day?" and "What is wrong with me?" These questions are baked in analysis, fear, and necessity. The first question is rooted in the lizard brain; it's the thing that tells you that you need to survive today for the sake of living tomorrow. It's something everyone has to a reasonable extent, or we'd all stop eating and walk into traffic.

The second question is more pernicious. It's a kind of all-encompassing question that keeps turning back on itself, The question must be answered and it must be acted upon or things will never change. Without the knowledge required to answer the question, you would be forever trapped in time unable to move forward or backward or any other way that wasn't "all these things are wrong with me". The question itself has weight, power, and compelled me to act.

The only time I really got away from the survival mindset was when I found something that I really, really wanted to do. The problem solving engine could stop focusing on the ever-present questions and could start working on something else for awhile. I could forget anything else for days or weeks at a time and just immerse myself in a new game or a new place or just talking to a friend for awhile. The easiest way out was to solve a problem that was difficult and meaningful in some small way.

That was true a few months ago. It feels like an entire lifetime has passed since I finally had an answer to these questions. It's... freeing. The entire weight of my problems has been lifted off of my shoulders and is floating around in the ether somewhere else, never to bother me again.

I've been floating around in a daze. Everything felt like a dream that I could wake up from and go back to the cruddy way of life I was living before. I've been waiting for the rug to get pulled out from under me, just watching out for some small thing to set me back to before I could even think about getting here. That pernicious fear is something that has reared its ugly head, and I keep shoving it down until it drowns.

I'm mostly past that. So now what?

The past month has been mostly spent mired in nostalgia. It's been quite interesting seeing how much my preferences have changed. I've gone from escapism and guilty pleasures to unfettered creation - when my head allows it - and I feel like I've gotten more things done lately than I have most of my life.

I had a kind of pathological aversion to something that I had done before. It seemed like I kept trying to find something new and exciting or I wouldn't have any purpose in doing anything at all. There's a kind of hunger behind it; constantly seeking new information, constantly craving answers that I didn't have to solve something that couldn't be done. That problem is completely gone and I can re-experience everything to my own liking.

The problem solving engine is alive and well. In fact, the problem solving engine is doing better than ever. I don't think I could turn it off even if I wanted to. This engine lets me feel useful. My body may be a steaming pile of crud, but it's all I've got and I can do anything I set my mind to.

There's nothing stopping me anymore. There's also nothing propelling me forward. It's been weird; the problem solving engine has applied itself to that dreamlike state of "what if?" and "this is my life now" and has mostly settled on "There's a 0% chance that things will revert so badly that I have a migraine for 3 months again." I want to say that is a relief... but in reality, it's nothing.

I wanted nothing. Absolute nothing, the inability to feel and change and be anything that could be real or fake or even remembered. That kind of absolution is unsatisfying and meaningless. The absolute lack of anything that had any real meaning in my current life meant that I had no frame of reference and nothing that I actually knew I could do. I can fix things when they go wrong and I can improve things when they're bad.

What can I do when they're good? The problem solving engine doesn't stop. It's a consuming feeling, gnawing at the edges of reality, seeping down to my very core. The feeling wants to be useful. It strives to improve my situation in all circumstances, no matter how good I may be doing. That kind of feeling doesn't go away with time; the engine hungers, never sated, always striving for satisfaction and perfection.

"What can I do when times are good?"

That question is what I've been wrestling with since the start of this blog. I want to do something with my life. I can't stand the thought of being reduced to a drooling pile of flesh that can't do a single worthwhile thing in my life.

"I can change the past."

That... is an answer that I did not expect. What kind of crazy answer is that?! It's completely absurd to try and change what was before. We have history to respect. There are lessons to be learned from the way that we lived and grew and did the best we could at the time. Everyone makes mistakes, some worse than others, and each time we make a mistake we grow and change our behavior or perspective with the inadequacies we've stumbled into.

The very nostalgia I had been swimming around in was the answer that I had come to. Things were different back then, and I have a different idea of how things should be in my head than they actually were. The amount of fantasy, just trying to improve something because I couldn't improve myself, was overwhelming and awesome and one of the only things I cared about. In fact, it's one of the only things I care about now; I can enjoy other things, but there's still a potential to be had from the worst sources.

Each and every piece of content I've been going through has gone through a process of reclamation. Entire years have gone to waste as I struggled to survive against everything that was going against me. I don't just want to see the works of our past for what they are. I want to see them for what they could be, what it might have been if they had just existed in another time.

The problem solving engine is taking one thing at a time and spinning it into a new creation. It's been overwhelming, but good. The creation process is pure and no longer tainted by fear. I think... I'd like to make something as a way of bringing everything together. Let's take my experience and turn it into an experience that I would like to share with everyone.

I don't have any questions left to ask of the universe anymore. I think that's for the best.

Sunday, January 17, 2021

Does a Perfect Video Game Exist?

A perfect video game is a game that everyone on the planet can enjoy from the day they start playing it to the day they die.

I don't think a perfect video game will ever be made. Not every game appeals to every person. Each person is going to have their own taste in the way they experience a game, and what is ideal for me won't be ideal for anyone else. Nor should a perfect video game exist; if one did, it would make every other video game pale in comparison.

When I think of the closest thing to a video game can come to perfection, a few names pop up again and again. Minecraft is the first and closest example that currently exists. It can be played by anyone for almost any reason at all; the missing piece of narrative can be found on Youtube, in every person sharing the story of their Minecraft world with anyone willing to watch.

Skyblock!

Minecraft is such a joy to play. It's an infinite world that resembles a sandbox that has so much variety in the types of sand that it may as well be something else. The game can be understood immediately by anyone looking on, even for the first time. You can play by yourself or jump on a server to have fun with friends or strangers. When the game runs dry, all you need to do to reinvigorate it is download someone's map, install some mods, or even step away for awhile and let your mind wander.

I've built my fair share of Minecraft worlds since release. There's a whole youtube series on a modpack called Magic Maiden where cute little maids were perfect stand-ins for soldiers. Being able to command my own personal army while delving into a dungeon and completely wrecking the entire world as I went along is such a unique experience that I was still playing it up until 2018 when the Aquatic Update released.

In the past, I would have said that Minecraft was a wonderful game with a flawed experience in its gameplay loop. The end result was always worthwhile but it took a long time to get there. Mods in Minecraft's early life span were very popular to shore up some of the missing content and add in systems that could be in the game someday.

Now, the game doesn't really have any glaring flaws. The worst I can say about the game is that you can't get more than 200 people on a server or that it doesn't run well on every computer.

Who put Touhou in my randomizer?!

Super Metroid is Nintendo's shining masterpiece of a platformer that did all of the right things at the right time. , but the game is designed to be played multiple times. You get better and better at it each time the game is played and the game rewards you for getting better.

Super Metroid is one of the most ran games in all of speedrunning experience. The game has a functionally infinite skill ceiling. It's a game that anyone can get into due to the low skill floor. The amount of mastery you can express over the game and the sheer amount of competition that can be eked out of a game that is only 3 MB in size is quite astonishing.

Super Metroid only has a few flaws. The graphics are dated due to being designed for a CRT and the controls are kind of weird to wrap your head around. There's a concept known as the "Metroid Moment", where you can't figure out what to do so you start bombing everything you can see. The very end of the game has a door that you can save in, and can never go back. A proper update to the graphics via hacking and a control scheme that closer resembles Metriod: Zero Mission would fix nearly everything.

Super Metroid by itself isn't that interesting to me. When you strap on another game and randomize both of them, well... a thousand hours of my life have been very well spent. I have some friends that like to race against me and there's a niche speedrunning community around this ascended meme that I can poke at any time. It does help that both of the games are masterpieces in and of their own right; putting them together like this has to be the crowning achievement of ROM hacking.

The experience of running two games side-by-side and figuring out the best route to get from point A to point F is quite compelling. The technical skill to do this fast is also quite fun. The worst thing I can say about strapping two games together like this is that Super Metroid has roughly 40% of the time in any given run but requires far, far more skill to pull off at any decent speed. That and the bugs.

Courtesy of reddit

Mabinogi is my go-to for a general gaming experience. The sheer amount of content that you can pull out of an MMORPG that is currently 16 years old is something that only really happens in a game that's constantly worked on by a large team. The game is still putting out content to this day.

Mabinogi's combat system is quite unique. It is best described as rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock meets Dark Souls. Most of the skills have strengths and weaknesses, including the basic attack. You have to be aware of what each enemy is doing and have the game knowledge of what every skill does. Skills have massive penalties for guessing wrong. There are large charge up times and huge moments where you get stunned from an attack and can't do a thing.

Characters aren't broken up into classes like other games in the same genre. Instead, your character can learn every skill in the game. Characters are differentiated by the amount of training they want to do in a skill, and a lot of skills have learning requirements based on the level of other skills. Spend enough time using each skill and you'll feel like you master both the mechanics and the skill leveling system.

Mabinogi's crafting system puts Minecraft to shame. Every skill in the game can be trained, including life skills. Each skill has a minigame for processing or finishing a product, and the end results can be worn or used for other crafts depending on whether it's a utility skill, like carpentry, or a finishing skill, like handicraft. Enchanting is present in the usual MMO modifier style, but it's generally forgiving to use. Just ignore the pay-to-win reforging hammers added in 2016 and all is fine in the world.

Dungeons complement both of these ideas so perfectly that I'm surprised I haven't seen it elsewhere. You can enter an instance of a dungeon, fight off room after room of enemies, gather some of their loot, and pick herbs or mine ores along the way. You can get weapons, crafting items, or enchant scrolls at the end of the dungeon, but it's random so you're encouraged to try the same dungeon multiple times.

The story is something else. Mabinogi's entire world is steeped in Celtic lore, until it's not. One day you'll be working through the rolling plains around Bangor and hearing the story of Lugh, the Knight of Light. The next day you'll be exploring the icy land of giants or the lost desert of the elves. The story progresses from searching out the shadow world, to gods and alchemic magic, all the way up to divine creatures trying to corrupt everything in the entire land. Quality here is good and the variety has to be played to be believed.

No old MMORPG is complete without completely arbitrary side content. There's a land of forever carnival called Festia that rolls the idea of carnival rides, christmas, and various other holidays together in a place you can warp to at any time. You can bring out your inner merchant

I really want to play Mabinogi again. Unfortunately, the game has bright white full-screen flashing that easily causes migraines if I see more than two. One of the reasons I played so much of the game was that there was a modding system that could change some of the client-side graphics. Flashing could be disabled, shadow mission instances could have maps showing where the orbs were, and there was a bunch of other useful effects that mods provide.

As much as I want to play the game again... I do not wish to torture myself. The modding system is updated sparsely, if at all. Some of the content is still a huge amount of fun, but some of it false flat compared to everything else the game has to offer. Ranking up skills require ability points, and when those are gone the urge to train anything vanishes.

There's also a few things that don't belong. Shakespeare does not belong in a game about gods and celts, and neither does alchemy. At least alchemy was worked into the story in a way that made sense... sort of.

This game is perfect! Except for, y'know, the bugs

I do think that a video game in a single category can exist, and maybe even cross across quite a few genres to pull in a lot of people. Minecraft is certainly evidence of that. I don't even think that a perfect video game should exist. There's a lot of value to be found in the flaws, quirks, and bugs that come with games. Sometimes the flaws can make the experience that much better. The bugs make things more memorable at the very least.

Friday, January 15, 2021

Reclamation Project - Part 5.5: Deciding how to move forward

Any time I sit down on a project that I'm interested in, I like to get ahead of myself just a little bit. The process works in a loop: I pull myself ahead a little bit to anticipate what's going on, compare that to the existing work, decide how long it's going to take based on previous steps and experience, and I make a decision. This process has some of the benefits of foresight, hindsight, and analysis baked into the work. There's a lot of value in trying to predict what I'm trying to do.

Sometimes that process runs into a roadblock. For this project, the roadblock was simple: I want to make a game, a platform, future games, artwork, designs, and self-evaluate all of that simultaneously. The roadblock was also far more complicated than I could have anticipated.

Building on top of a project that is a gibbering mesh of experimentation, prototypes, ideas, and eclectic half-built systems is sort of like riding a unicorn on top of a mine cart track in the dark. It's definitely possible to move forward because the unicorn glows in the dark, but it's bumpy, uncomfortable, magical, and I'm sure I could get to the end... but not without getting thrown off and hitting my head somewhere.

I've decided I'm going to take my base project and wrangle it into the one thing it doesn't have currently: plans. There's a lot of digging I've had to do just to get things in order. I've had to uncover ideas that are years old and try to tie them together in a nice bow. Some of the concepts don't work very well together and some of them work too well, so I'm having to segment out the different ideas that are basic and the ones that are game specific.

Essence HUD for Hyper Metroid Remake

I'm currently working on a design document to refine a lot of these ideas. They work pretty well in my head, and a good deal of them are based on working code. Taking the design and turning it into something real should take a lot less time than writing everything from scratch.

I would very much like to take this design and show it to others. If someone has the impetus to actually work with me in the future, it would be very, very valuable to show them a design doc so they can wrap their heads around how the systems are supposed to work and interact with each other on a conceptual level.

Once I have the base project built up I can go into detail on how to dissect and rebuild a level. I can also share artwork and the process of making it for a game with a particular design in mind without stumbling over everything. I'll probably release a working prototype with my avatar as the main character, so stay tuned for that.

Working screenshot of a broken UI image. Circa September 11 2020

Monday, January 11, 2021

Progress Update - January 2021

I think this was inevitable.

It's one thing to tear apart a game. The entire thing is like a puzzle; I can pull out each individual piece, examine it, take a lot of notes, and put that piece in a box for later. I can break the piece down into the bits that comprise it, the process it was made out of, and identify every single limitation that was placed on it. I can even start making a new piece to slot back into the same slot.

It's another thing entirely to put the game back together. Games are built in a completely different way than you would build a physical device. Every single thing that exists is something that only works in your head. There are no properties to the game until we actually define what a game is. Even using another game as an example, we can make changes to the end result that turn the result into something unrecognizable.

...

Trying to put anything into words is difficult. I keep using analogies to try and relate what I'm currently experiencing to something concrete and real. That way of doing things has served me well until recently, where everything seems to be going right in a lot of ways that I never expected to happen. Today feels completely different than a month ago, and I think that's a good thing. Difficult words still mean the words come out instead of getting jammed somewhere and buried so deep that they can't come out.

I am finding myself with an abundance of time. A lot has improved in my life lately. I feel like everything I know has upended itself and I've been wandering around scattering pieces of thoughts and ideas around for so long that I lost track of where I wanted to go. It's hard to explain exactly what has happened... it feels like I can think now, and anything that I want to do gains 100% of my attention. I have been putting in maybe 30% until recently.

30% isn't right. 30% is all I had. I was spending so much time trying to figure out my problems, fix everything in my life, and move out of my absolute hell that was a series of migraines and sleep deprivation that led to more migraines and sleep deprivation, I didn't have time for anything else. My other hobby is giving me a lot of hope for moving forward. Let's focus on this one for awhile.

I don't just want to gather up my thoughts. That's all I've been doing for the past few years. Instead, I want to make new and exciting experiences and entire worlds out of the ideas that I've simply ignored for so long. I want to take other people's works that are both wonderful and terrible and make them into something great. I want to create a system that can work with all of that, and to build upon it in the coming months.

There's a lot of designs I have stored in scattered files, fragmented and disorganized. Let's turn those into a fully fleshed out design document. Heck, let's overdesign the entire thing so that way any game that wants to come into being can just pull parts out of the design and ignore the rest.

Some of the design already has working code. The code has more structure to it than loose files, but like everything else I've done for the past few years it's unfocused, unpolished, and hidden. I'd like to build a game on this system. Maybe ten. Who knows; I'm not one to pick anything and go halfway with it.

...

I'm not sure how I'm going to organize a design page yet. I have been putting off doing this for awhile; peeking into my creative process is something that I am not too keen on sharing, but it's better than languishing on the sideline or "suddenly pineapples" happens.

The end goal is to remake Alisia Dragoon. How do we get there? Plans. Lots of creativity. Lots of effort. Lots of love. A bit of snark and a blog to document it all.

Wednesday, March 17, 2021

General

Game Specific

Chronological