making choices on server map - part 1

Hey, not sure I'm managing to fit in a video this month so you get a design blog instead!
(Which is interesting, have I reached a point in recovery where this is less effort again?)

Okay, game structure. I discussed the basic idea of 868-BACK's server map in a previous post (on Patreon), to summarise:

• In 868-HACK after you hack a server, there's another random one after it, with difficulty increasing until you lose.
• For 868-BACK I've introduced a choice, selecting servers on a grid.
• Why would you ever choose a harder server? Because their data is more valuable (because there's a score multiplier).
• Servers also house devices, letting you gain additional powers as you progress in the game. (Unlike HACK where the only progression is increasing difficulty.)

Now, the idea of a score multiplier is sound, but still: why would you choose a harder server? As far as I've described, the optimal play for a high score might still be to always pick the easiest server, to minimise your chance of losing and get more points in the long run. HACK had this lovely tension between survival and score - your score is "points per round" times "number of rounds" so you can do better by increasing either of those values, and the ideal maximum is some incalculable midpoint between safety and foolhardiness. But making that work well relied on the danger increasing fast enough that you can't take "number of rounds" to infinity. If in BACK I'm putting this danger curve in the player's control, where does the pressure come from?

So: I've limited the number of rounds! This loses that beautiful multiplication by the number of rounds - but I've decided to be very comfortable with losing specific elements: the sequel is a new game finding its own way, and the original isn't going away. With a limited number of rounds, you get a high score by maximising your per-round score, so there's an incentive to attempt difficult servers.

We also don't want the optimal strategy to always be "pick the server with the highest mult". I'm not too worried about that because it's a multiplier: you still need to get the points to multiply. Probably there will be a sweet spot in the middle, and probably finding it will be tricky and depend on all the details. (And the details are interesting! I'm discussing this here at a very abstract level by just looking at difficulty as number of powerups, but it's really about getting to know the specific powerups and thinking about the complex ways they can interact.)

Next point: what should the multipliers be? My first thought was multiplier = number of powerups. (Yes the difficulty modifiers are still called "bonus powerups", deal.) But I probably still want some servers with no powerups because the game is complex enough to get started with anyway, so to not give zero for those my second thought was multiplier = number of powerups + 1. Generally start with the simplest idea: if it works out then it'll also be easier on players, and if it doesn't well you haven't spent too much time going in the wrong direction.

Obviously these numbers are "wrong": e.g. a server with one powerup isn't twice as hard as one with none, it's maybe 1.25x, so giving it a 2x multiplier isn't accurately giving a reward commensurate with the difficulty. But it doesn't have to be! I don't really mind if the gradient here is quite steep giving players strong encouragement to play with powerups: that's where the game gets really interesting, and it's more important for a scoring system to encourage doing interesting things than to measure of how well you played.

As I mentioned above, the scoring isn't the only reward for hacking a server: we're also collecting devices. Intuitively, the more powerful devices would be accessed through the more well-defended servers. But wait: if we keep the dead simple rule of "+1 powerup = +1 mult", those servers are already offering the best reward! Should I put the best devices on easier servers so there will be a choice of better scoring vs. better abilities? Or should I make the rule more complicated, e.g. "+1 powerup = +1 mult OR +1 device tier"? In the end what we've found playing it is that each additional powerup tends to increase the danger level superlinearly, as you increase the risk of nasty interactions between the different powerups. So a mere linear increase in multiplier doesn't cut it by itself, and it works out perfectly to give something like "+1 powerup = +1 mult AND +1 device tier".

(Okay, this is really long, I had two more main points to make but I'm tired and it's gotten long. So my conclusion is: writing is still more tiring for me than video, but this was too big a topic to get through in one go no matter what the medium and that is probably why I wasn't getting around to doing the video.)

archive - patreon "about"

I've updated my "about" page on Patreon to reflect my current situation. I just wanted to keep a record of what I wrote at the time (July 2022) so I've copied it here:

Hi, I'm Michael and I make videogames.

I used to make really a lot of games. I did jams and made small games really quickly, and I spent a long time making bigger games. You can find my work on smestorp.com; there are several available for free and some bigger ones for sale. There's also a discord where people talk about my games - I don't run it, some lovely people set it up. There's even been a jam where people made games inspired by my games (this writeup about it is really nice).

In 2020, like a lot of people, I got very sick and couldn't work much for a long time. It's bad. Making a living from my work has always been precarious, but it had felt like I was getting there and I had been confident of making something bigger again soon, and this illness has completely disrupted that. Since then I've done some small updates on my previous games, made a few small prototypes, but I'm not anywhere near releasing something new.

My health has improved since then. I'm not back to where I was, I still experience fatigue, but the shadow has passed and I'm getting better. I have more energy and more ability to concentrate, and I'm itching to use that to MAKE STUFF again.

I have two children - one three years old and another being born soon. It's chaos. I'm definitely not going to be on track to release anything with a newborn around so here I'm asking for support to get through. I've been learning how to manage myself to be able to do creative work with less focused time and less energy, but simply having money would do more to help free me up to make things.

I've started making videos to talk about my work, games, and other things that interest me. The first is linked above. It's rambling but honest. I'm planning to do these on a regular schedule. This will be my main public output for now. When I have a game to preview I'll make it available to subscribers; that will take time.

There's also a lot of my games that need attention to keep them working on new operating systems, or have rare bugs that would be nice to have fixed, or it would be nice to release on another platform so more people can play them. I've been very dedicated to supporting my games after release but I've fallen behind on that. This is work that doesn't pay very well because mostly it's for people who've already paid! Supporting me here will also help to do this. But my main focus with my limited time and energy will be to make something new.

Thanks to anyone who wants to give anything, and equally much thanks to anyone who takes time to read, listen, to play my games! 💚

CROW FUN

I'm responding to this thread (bluesky link, also twitter link) by Jake Eakle / personman:

these ideas got /inside me/, man!! i don't know exactly how to explain it but it really feels like engaging with this game taught me The Truth.

like, you gotta let things be how they are. sometimes that means stepping back and letting things settle into their natural shapes. sometimes it means stepping UP and putting in the hard work to get them where they're going. both are good! both are true! do you see??

and you gotta meet people where they're at. with complete respect and without hiding the truth from them! without sectioning them off into a little fuckin zone! but still you must PROVIDE.

this game has deeply important ethics lessons for you, if you listen.

(Yeah read the whole thread it's good.)

So on one level like it even seems absurd to say the game teaches ethics, on the surface there's not much that looks like that! It's not telling a story with characters and morals and quotes. You could say that the ideas that Jake's talking about aren't in the game at all, and entirely in his head - but I believe him. It's meaningfully something he got out of it, that emerged from the Jake+HACK system as he spent time with it, not just thoughts he would have had on his own without the game as an - inspiration? object of meditation? friend?

Man, this what making art is all about!

I don't know how much of these ideas I "put in there". I definitely didn't make the game as an allegory to communicate a specific message. But I tried thoughtfully to make good art.

It's this alchemy that happens when thoughtful, heartfelt work comes together with an earnest audience (cocreator?) and it unwinds in them and something new comes out. Different people will get different things out, because it's the interaction between.. some people might not get anything - or might not like what they get - but what I mean by a thing being "art" is essentially this quality of revealing new depths through engaging with it. (Does "better" art mean art that can alchemise with more different souls? Is that a thing?)

Ok that's that thought! One of the really nice things about doing this crowdfunding is seeing lots of different people saying stuff about what my work has meant to them! Thank you everyone!

crowfunding: 868-BACK

Hey! It's been a while since I've written here. I have, though, been fairly consistent about doing a monthly post on Patreon with videos (which are also mostly on youtube). It's been a good process for developing my voice, as always just consistently doing a thing you get better at it and now I'm a more confident speaker! I know video isn't the most efficient medium for everyone - I myself would still much prefer to read text than watch a video, and e.g. when I search for the answer to a problem and all the answers are in the form of video tutorials I'm pretty upset. And my videos are definitely often longer than they would need to be to communicate the information because I'm taking time to think, rambling a bit, and then not editing. But the vibe is good!

Anyway, I'll skip ahead to the present (my last video covers the gap pretty well if you want to check that out) and: I am announcing my next game!

It's called 868-BACK and it's.. well you can guess what it is. What? Michael's making a sequel? I really thought for a long time that was something I would never do, like that sequels are kind of crass. Like - beneath me, I guess? I'd look at these monolithic franchises and just be so bored seeing the same thing being made over and over again. But I'm *_*-CreAtive*^-^, I wouldn't do that! Hah.

Creative work has something in common with therapy, maybe it's a kind of therapy. If you want to keep making new things and pushing boundaries, you have to really look inside yourself and witness what's there. It takes personal growth. Or it gives personal growth maybe? It's all mixed in together, it's just part of being a person. You look at the things that you're cringing away from, the triggers you avoid, and at some point you just have to gird up and go after them.

And it feels sometimes ridiculous when I say things like this because I'm very aware that the things I make don't look "deep" and "serious" because they're full of wizards and robots. Which is just another knot to push past.

Last year I announced I was making a sequel to Cinco Paus! I wasn't very far along with it, and I was trying to figure out what I really wanted to do with it and how I could afford that.. anyway the point is, I was able to convince myself to do a (ugh) seeequel because the original game never really reached an audience, the idea was really to make a version that could (and I'd get to add fancy cool new stuff too, which would be fun to make, but that wasn't why I was doing it). Well, that hasn't gone anywhere yet (see that video I linked earlier for a fuller story but, don't worry it's all good, plans change with the winds but we go places).

Anyway, this year I was reorienting, trying to figure out how to bring in some money, asking myself what I really wanted to make yet. And, a mime wrote to me asking, for the Nth time, if I could add a portrait mode to 868-HACK. Now, 868-HACK started as a jam game made in a week, and then just sort of accreted from there with no good software engineering design at all. It's embarrassing, but to rework it for a portrait display I'd have to go through and change lots of hard-coded numbers because the gameplay code constantly refers to specific screen coordinates. (Okay the thing is, what matters is what gets the job done. I had tried several times to make videogames doing everything "properly" and those projects never got off the ground. I've seen so many other people's projects also go nowhere because they try to do it "right" too. I found an approach that was quick and dirty and let me get out the games I was yearning to make, and it worked(ish). Now I've done a few I'm much better at finding the middle ground between getting it done and making it extensible, but the only way I got that was the real experience of doing it wrong - my CS degree taught me lots of "right" ways but never met them with the reality of messy explorative creative expression.) So I always say no! No portrait mode for you! But it got me thinking, I'd been working in Godot engine, and ported Zaga-33 (a smaller simpler game) to it so I could release it on Android.. how much work would it be to port 868-HACK, maybe a portrait mode and a new platform release would be worth something together?

(Yes he's actually a mime, and he's bloody good too, check this out.)

At some point in there I got out my notebook of "things to try if I ever come back to 868-HACK". There was some damn good stuff in there! What had I been sitting on this for? A bunch of new ideas started flowing too. Before I knew it, I had several more notebook pages tentatively titled "868-HACK sequel??? 869hack?".

Well. Turns out sequels are totally fine! I got past that discomfort with the idea of a Cinco Paus sequel (which is still on the cards!) but that's opened up a whole new vista. It had been really important to me to be being original and constantly doing new work, and all my so-called "broughlikes" are determinedly avoiding each other. Seriously, 868-HACK / Imbroglio / Cinco Paus are about as far apart as games can possibly be while being in the same niche subgenre and interested in all the same things. Sometimes I'd see comments about how my games are all kinda the same and I'd really bristle! No! They are definitely different! (Even ignoring Helix etc. in totally different genres, but people do.) And I'm proud of how different they are, I'm not going to turn around and say that's not a good thing. That drive for difference really pushed me to discover some great ideas. Here's where the "therapy" comes in: sometimes we discover that we have a belief that's limiting us from doing what is there for us to do, and we feel like we're blocked because we're not letting ourselves just do the thing that we could do, that we want to do, and would be good for us to do. But - those limitations we put on ourselves aren't intrinsically bad things! To get past them, we have to recognise that they were something that served us at the time, but their time is past and now we can move past them. Step by step, I'm past the idea that I should avoid things that are too close to what I've done before, and I've allowed myself to consider the (to other people bleedingly obvious) idea of making a sequel to my most successful work.

And a vista opens up. I had been treating everything I'd made before as an obstacle, and so the possibilities of what I could make were gradually closing smaller and smaller every step. But I own everything I've made, I can do whatever the heck I want with it, it's all just resources. I watch my daughter painstakingly drawing a perfect picture one day, and the next day she cuts it up with scissors to stick pieces on something else. Yesterday's meal is today's ingredients.

I'll be posting more details about the design direction and where it's at soon! But, mostly being busy just working on it.

Also (importantly) I have run out of money, so I am inviting crowdfunding support so I can finish the game: 868-BACK on backerkit. Please share, support, etc. I hope you're excited about seeing what I do with the freedom to take the original and twist it into wild new shapes, and I hope for some of you that excitement translates into a willingness to donate up-front. Thanks!

Zaga-33 reborn

(This is the same as I just posted on Patreon but I'll put it here too.)

This took way longer than I expected!

In early March I decided to just spend a week rewriting an old game in Godot to help learn the engine while at the same time making it work on iOS again since I hadn't kept up with updates, and finally releasing on Android. Of course that week I got a bad case of covid. I still got the game largely working that week, but then needed a lot of recovery. I'm feeling great now though: not gonna have any bad long-term effects because I really did take the rest I needed at the time.

And then yeah just the details of getting it working on everything dragged on. It's not what I'm best at. There's still issues with the "google play store" - they cancelled me because I didn't update Glitch Tank often enough and now won't verify me because I live in a different country. Hopefully that gets sorted eventually, but thankfully you at least can distribute software on Android without official approval, so I've released it already on itch.io.

So! Here it is on android platform, eleven years late. And here it is back on iOS, four years after being taken down for not being updated sufficiently frequently.

Incidentally I did add a new mode! I thought about making it secret but that doesn't really make sense after such time, so all you have to do is complete the game once and then tap the moon.

itch.io link for android, windows, macos
appstore link for ios

patreon / videos

I started this blog 13 years ago (not quite to the day) with an exercise of writing a post about each power in the game I was working on at the time. I got about half-way through the exercise and it served its purpose of opening the channel for me, getting me habituated to writing here. I've written a bunch of different things here: little diary entries, reviews of games I like, game design theory, assorted nonsense don't even know what. Most consistently I've posted when I release games, usually with some analysis of the development process.

There's a part of me here, a voice I'm comfortable speaking in at certain times about certain things. For a few years there I was coming to that voice quite often, this was a fruitful channel for the ideas I was thinking through at the time. Other ideas haven't fit as much. Maybe because I assume a certain audience; I restrict myself based on what I expect people who might read this to be interested in. Maybe because I developed the habit of writing here at a certain time when I had particular interests. Writing right now feels a little like channeling my past self rather than being the same person currently I am day to day.

Similarly my twitter was somewhere I posted a lot for a while, dropped off for a bunch of reasons, but still sometimes I have a thought that feels like a tweet to me so maybe I post it. When I look at what I've posted there recently I see "feels like a tweet" means a limited style and set of topics. I'm filtering through the lens of who I was 8-10 years ago when that was more part of my life. Not intentionally it just happens. Cognitive archaeology. We're built of accumulated layers of self and the older ones are still there but less active and less important to where we are now. I wasn't filtering myself then, and perhaps if I'd consistently kept posting there unrestrictedly it would be full of thoughts about massage, foraging, homebrew, childbirth. Topics that until one sentence ago you had no idea I'd taken an interest in.

So how do I communicate now? My voice of the moment, to speak my present thoughts, unfiltered by assumptions of past selves. I saw some tweets from @visakanv about how he was finding it good to just video himself talking and it unexpectedly resonated. People had suggested videos to me before and I'd never felt any impulse to do it but this time I just thought: okay. (I haven't watched any of his videos yet so I don't know if the direction I've taken has any relation to what he was actually talking about but it's not important.) Video has all the complexities of voice and body language, deep subconscious embodied communication, so much less controlled than text where you can write and rewrite until it's exact. So I've started making videos where I talk spontaneously to simply see where it goes. I'll do it as an exercise until it feels comfortable. I intend to talk about various topics not exclusively games, to aim for this sense of not feeling restricted by my idea of who I'm talking to. Maybe I'll try that here too.

I've done a few talks here and there, conferences and stuff, and I have varying satisfaction with them. Public speaking: it's a skill worth getting better at. The talk that felt best to me wasn't recorded and was about a game I didn't actually release yet (Smesport); I just spoke passionately from right in the middle of thinking about it rather than trying to distill lessons afterward for an audience. I want more like that. People have told me through the years that I should promote my games better, talk them up. I've always been reluctant to, preferring to let the work speak for itself. Well, sometimes it can, but it really deserves the best I can give it. The specific ways that people suggest talking about them don't gel with me, but that doesn't mean they're not right at the root, I just have to develop a way that's authentic to me.

I haven't released a game for a long time, I've been sick for a long time, I was about to have another child, and I was really worrying what to do about money. So I've started a patreon. If you want to and can afford to donate money to support me keeping going I really appreciate it. It's been really nice to feel that people value what I've done. I wish I had a new game to sell but I don't; when I do I'll show you but it's really slow right now. I wish some of the games I already made had sold more. Anyway I'm promising to make a video at least every two weeks. There might be other things too, maybe I'll write more or post some drawings or something.

(About my illness: when I posted here previously I'd had some improvement and was feeling cautiously optimistic that it would continue. It's similar now, maybe a little better overall but it fluctuates and some days are still pretty hard. When I do too much one day I take several days to recover, so I have to keep being careful. But I'm way way better than I was through 2020.)

So in typical Michael fashion I'm trying to kill multiple birds with fewer than the usual number of stones. A creative outlet, a source of income, a self-improvement practice, a quiet forest time. Here are the videos: michael in the forest. They're not much but there will be more. From my experience with games I know well that it's very effective to first just make things. I'm not trying to make the best video or the best talk, I'm just doing it and then doing it again and eventually some of them will be quite good.

plague

I haven't posted here for a long time.

In 2020 I got sick. I noticed in May that I'd been very tired for a while and it was getting worse rather than better, and by June I had severe fatigue, needing naps every afternoon - sometimes just falling asleep in the middle of the floor, muscle pain, mind unclear, difficulty concentrating. I think it was most likely the Long Covid; I had a friend in my house in March who was sick with an unidentified disease that could plausibly have been COVID-19 (though at the time we believed it wasn't based on the information currently available), and after that we had mild cold symptoms - of course this was before testing was widely available.

The doctor wasn't much help. He ordered a bunch of tests and told me I did amazing on all of them. Blood, ECG, chest X-ray, apparently everything showed that I was in very good shape. Which is like, kind of nice; as someone who used to just do computer and books all the time I've worked hard on turning that around and getting fit and it's nice to have that measured. But it didn't do anything to solve the problem.

My symptoms fluctuated over time and I more or less learnt to live with them. Learnt not to suddenly try to catch up on everything when I had a good day, because then I'd just collapse again the next day. The one thing that did help, weirdly, was the COVID-19 vaccine. I say weirdly because it's not what it was designed for, but there's anecodotal evidence of other people experiencing this, I don't claim to know what's up. Even if it's just the good old placebo effect I'll take it.

Whatever the reason, I've been feeling a lot better for a few months now. I'm getting my strength back: I can lift things again now that I could lift three years ago but I couldn't lift last year. I don't want a relapse so I'm still being careful and trying not to overdo it. I'm tentatively working again. I still find it hard to make games without the long focused periods of time I used to have pre-parenting, but I feel there's no rush. I guess one lesson I've taken from this enforced break is to stress less about trying to keep up with the indie games scene and trying to make the right thing to make money out of it, or to live up to some fake expectation of being a "genius" game designer. I'll just make something I want to make, when I can manage to. Meanwhile I've been also learning new things and looking into work I can hopefully do in a flexible way around potential fatigue spikes and also still making some games and stuff. I reckon it's good for me as an artist to not just do games games games all the time anyway.

Even though I haven't been releasing new games, people still buy the ones I've made before. It's consistently been a few hundred euros every month which, while it doesn't cover the rent it's not bad for not being able to work at all. It's unfortunate that a couple of the older ones have dropped off from my not having managed to keep up with system updates, and it feels bad how that kind of ties me down - if I just went to work on something completely different for ten years everything I've done would be lost. Or if I got permanently sick. So ephemeral. But anyway, thank you everyone who's bought my games and kept supporting me in these times.