making another roguelike game (yay/boo)

my last couple of games have been pretty trad and i thought that after those i'd make something weird again. i'm interested in all different things, made a pretty wide range of stuff, but recently not so varied. so i had some ideas, big concept theme express, it was going to pile some really bizarre stuff on top of a basic dungeon scaffold but then i started making it and put some systems in place and it just crystallised out into this very trad "collect magic gem for high score" videogame videogame and all the amorphous chaos i was trying to put in didn't fit anymore. scaffold becomes game.

and like, i'm okay with that. it is good for things to take on their own life. and it is a Good Game. it's very much following on in the same vein as zaga-33 and 868-hack, call it a sequel if you want, but it is still doing its own thing and it is still new difficult interesting work to design it. and the ideas that didn't fit into it, maybe i will use them somewhere else.

i guess i'm kind of worried about being judged for making such easily categorisable games. i am disappointment for not doing "outsider art", if you recognise me for that then maybe it is quite dull that what i am making now is so much game product for sell on market.

or, i judge myself. i don't know how much i'm being influenced by thought of money. i know by now that it is pointless to have any expectation of how a game will sell, but it is impossible to not be affected by the huge difference in response to 868-hack from everything else i've made. this is how sequels happen. it's not even necessarily a money thing, just like a feeling of external validation (though obviously i do need the money once hack credits run out). i don't make multiplayer games anymore because nobody wants to play them, but a roguelike on a telephone! yeah interesting how roguelikes are big now, just a few years ago they were weirdo niche but now seems like every third big budget release has roguelike mechanics honest. or at least all the crowdfunding campaigns. "ugh another roguelike" is the new "ugh another puzzle platformer". so i guess i'm the establishment now, k.

but also like, vesper.5 and become a great artist in just 10 seconds both got quite a bit of external validation too. i haven't even tried to put something like that (whatever we're calling them now, not-games art-games alt-games game-fusion digital-tapestries, idk) as product for commerce, i guess i assume that it wouldn't succeed, don't know how valid is that bias.

i guess it is self-discovery. adventure to find out what i will make. i thought i would make all things wildly different, turns out i actually make a sequence of very closely related things; update self-image. can i justify this.

i think i justify it by saying that i am interested in game structure, and it makes sense to experiment with structure by making different shapes out of the same basic materials. making multiple small-ish games with same mechanics gives space for structural expression, because any major features only need to be internally consistent. if you try to fit every possible variation on a theme into a single game that drastically constrains its overall shape (mostly there is one specific shape). the way corrypt devours itself would not be nearly so bold if it was isolated mechanic in one subset of puzzle levels.

so 868-hack was drafting from random setups, iterating over very short game to build streak metagame. new thing has same pieces, opposite configuration. small differences resonate through entire design.