incidentally i have been very slowly reading through moby dick over the last few months, and while it is easily the most beautiful book i have ever read, i want to talk today about something decidedly more mundane: video games. specifically, three imaginary video games i want to exist, but probably can’t make on my own. trying to make these games is self-ruin. three white whales. i have tried, too. still i can’t help but dream of them. they are like cold fire.
game 1
let me start with the most recent, least consuming fantasy.
the idea of game 1 came about when i was reflecting on my experience with Vintage Story. Vintage Story is an absolutely excellent survival experience. it strikes a very good balance of time pressures that force constant activity from the player. it has a really incredible diversity of resource acquisition, processing, and crafting recipes that make milestones feel earned—there are just so many different things you have to do in order to achieve what in other games might be mindless early-game content, like obtaining leather armor, wooden planks, or paper. spawning into Vintage Story (and, even more so, its ancestor TerraFirmaCraft) for the first time is a genuinely scary experience, like actually being left in the wild to fend for yourself. coming across new animals or generation features creates a sense of naive tension few games can boast.
this tension wears away with familiarity. i love Vintage Story still and play it often, but i feel it has lost much of the drama. with a lot of these games, the focus shifts from merely surviving day-to-day to actually dominating over the environment; a few hours in to a new playthrough and i’m already deciding what the roof of my cabin should be made out of, aesthetic methods of expanding my cellar, and endless decorating with hammer and chisel. it’s still satisfying to achieve things in Vintage Story because achieving things in it is such a wide breadth of different tasks and pressures, but the fear is gone. i find myself playing Vintage Story and wishing i was still playing the caveman, throwing spears and living in tight corners of the world.
so let’s imagine game 1 as a hardcore survival game, where you are a randomly generated alien who crash landed on a randomly generated planet. your needs and what the planet provides are always completely random, though constrained such as to be compatible. on one playthrough, you may need to eat certain plants, sleep, and stay warm. but maybe you spawn as an alien that needs to move a boulder to the west at least 1 kilometer per day. maybe your organs are on the outside and must be kept wet with a rare liquid. maybe you are a parasite that survives by passing through the digestive system of another animal. the idea here is that there is never a sense of familiarity. every playthrough you are given novel challenges that require novel strategies, and the player is never sure what threats may exist. perhaps even the goal of the run could be random. maybe you need to survive 10 days. maybe you need to reach a specific location. or kill a specific enemy. or sacrifice yourself to your god in a specific way.
the problem with game 1 is that it is really difficult to program. i tried it, but i could not find a way that was conducive to rapid iteration. i really get caught in the weeds trying to pull stuff like this. i’m really just not a skilled enough programmer. i also think it may not actually be very fun.
game 2
game 2 is a project i was working on over the summer, starting once again from scratch, and once again i think i’ve burned out on it. i’ve mentioned in the past how much i love Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, and traditional roguelikes have always been a satisfying format for me in general. well i want to make one, bad. the first game i ever programmed was ripped straight from the roguebasin tutorial something like a decade ago now.
anyway game 2. traditional roguelike. the hook would be that there is no stat progression. your power level would be determined completely by what items you have, and different items are not different just by their specs but by their behavior, too. i love weird items in these tactical games, and i think a game that leaned all the way in would be excellent. why not be able to eat your sword, or quaff a tincture that gives you chess knight movement for a few turns. would be structured a bit like pokemon mystery dungeon but with the difficulty closer to shiren. i love the PMD concept of shorter dungeons where the goal is to rescue someone. thematically it just works for me. i think a more mature game could expand on these themes too. a little hub area with a ragtag rescue organization. i liked how communal PMD felt. also gives me some interesting pressure and anti-grind ideas—the main issue with PMD (other than that it is too easy at baseline) is how trivial it is to grind away the challenge. i do like the idea of having some “meta” progression but in a way that you actually have to work for it, and stockpiling would be punished. say you keep some items in the communal storage. well, someone else is gonna take it for their mission if you leave it in there too long… also, having items be the only form of progression would make difficulty settings very easy to balance. easy mode would let you stockpile whatever you want and keep inventory on death; normal mode destroys your inventory on death, and stockpiled items disappear over time; hard mode the same as normal but kills your save when you die.
could keep talking about this but again the issue is that the scope is way too big, and i keep failing to program it. also would need a lot of assets.
game 3
it’s a smash clone. man i just want to make a smash clone so bad. i have some radical ideas. i love melee but i hate what dash dancing did to it. idk. if you or anyone you know is working on a game like these (or wants to), please hire me as a design consultant. actually i’ll do it for free if you put my name in the credits