- I just moved house and getting an internet connection is taking its time. So I am unreliable right now. As usual.
- OK I know some of you are waiting for 868-HACK to be released on PC. I've not been making much progress on this. There's not a huge amount to be done but I want to get it right not have BAD PORT. I think it's been really good to do this separately, I've fixed a bunch of bugs while only having to update them in one place - maintaining several copies of a game in different places is such a hassle. Probably simultaneous release is Optimal Marketing Strategy but you've got to sacrifice some things when it's just you.
- But hey the response to that game has been pretty great. Some really nice reviews link link link link link, a few negatives but hey whatever I don't expect to please everyone. A bunch of negative comments about the (DRASTICALLY EXORBITANT) price, but it's achieved my goal of being able to afford to keep doing this for a while more which is FANTASTIC (I just feel sorry for anyone who tries to do this without someone to support them for a few years to get to that point). Talked with indie statik about that. Anyway, way cool, thanks everyone.
- Some concerns about whether .SCORE is too strong for single-game high scores? I suspect part of this is because it's part of the initial set of progs available, whereas other high-scoring progs are unlocked later. But I'm keeping an eye on it, it's interesting to watch. I personally pick it up very rarely because it's so risky, and I've had 90+ scores without it. But basically the problem is: a lot of what's balancing it is that risk (enemies spawned on acquisition, and lack of resources later if they're spent on it earlier) and if you just try enough times you'll get games where the risk pays off. This problem exists in the usual scoring system as well, perhaps less transparently, which was my reason for focusing on streaks (for probabilities multiply out to be very small very quickly). Perhaps I should have omitted single-game scores entirely and only had a streak table? Insufficient bravery.
- I've been making a 4-player game, SMESPORT. It started as a stripped-down dotalike for the 7-day RTS jam, but I failed the jam and kept working on it through several iterations until now it looks a lot closer to Hokra, I should write more about this process sometime. It was shown at a recent Wild Rumpus in Texas, which sadly I couldn't make it to. I'll be showing it at Nottingham Gamecity in a couple of weeks (officially in the open arcade on 20th, 21st, 23rd, 25th but I'll be around for the whole time). Hopefully watch lots of people play it and learn things to tune it to be better. Might try to organise a tournament towards the end of the week if people are into it? It's really intense competitive electrosport.
- I'm speaking at Practice at NYU in November. Can't escape academia. Upstart. Something about roguelikes.
- Yeah still doing little things on Helix sporadically. Ugh who knows, no hurry, I'm finding it good for harvesting procrastination energy anyway.
- Not sure if I mentioned BECOME AN ARTIST on here? Made it with mcc for a jam a few weeks back. I'm still finding it pretty useful for making pretty pictures.
Tuesday, 8 October 2013
Sunday, 6 October 2013
Pierre Menard, player of the scholar's mate.
I'm not a big fan of Chess - it has too much memorisation and menial computation for my taste - but I do partake on occasion. Sometimes my wife challenges me, and she almost always wins. But there was one game I like to mention from time to time which went differently. We opened with a few turns of reasonable seeming moves - I brought out my queen, she responded with her horses. Then I noticed an opportunity for check and just went for it, even though I expected I'd probably lose my queen in the process. She reached to respond and then paused, looked closer, furrowed her brow, and laughed. I looked back at the board to see what the fuss was about, tried to work out which move she was considering and.. couldn't find any. I'd somehow stumbled into a scholar's mate and she - not expecting any such trickery - had fallen for it. Cue obnoxious gloating.
Another time my friend Martin challenged me to play without a board. We exchanged a few moves, it began as an interesting intellectual exercise, but before very long at all - just as it was reaching the limits of our ability to track it - he announced checkmate. Incredulous I thought through the board state, eventually admitting that yes, he'd pulled off a scholar's mate. He'd read of this opening and deliberately set out to attempt it.
Two games which were mathematically isomorphic, having the exact same moves and outcome, but with completely different meanings. One accidental, the other intentional.
How we read a game depends on who is playing. Each move has a process of thought behind it; identical moves can be interpreted differently if they differ in intent. How you understand Deep Blue vs. Kasparov depends on whether you view it as a conflict between Man and Machine, or between individual and collective human effort. A beginner taking a risky opening simply does not realise what they're doing; an intermediate player may be hoping to get lucky, or perhaps to throw their opponent off-guard; while an expert has calculated the outcome and is confident they can handle it. Was that a mistake, a bluff, or a brilliant gambit you don't understand yet?
When we talk about "replayability" in games we're usually thinking of them offering variety by presenting different possible situations and moves. But even identical moves and positions may mean different things. (And of course, as Ben Abraham points out any game is replayable in the sense that any book is rereadable - even if the events and words are the same, we have changed.)
There are only nine games of Rock-Paper-Scissors, and three of them are ties.
(The words in this post are based on actual events, but I have on two occasions lifted them from truth into fiction. The first game may not have been an exact scholar's mate, but it was a close approximation with perhaps an additional move. And let the record show that I thwarted Martin's attempt - at which point he lost interest for he was unprepared for the challenge of a spoken-word Chess game without having chosen his moves in advance. But in a nearby universe these could both be true.)
Another time my friend Martin challenged me to play without a board. We exchanged a few moves, it began as an interesting intellectual exercise, but before very long at all - just as it was reaching the limits of our ability to track it - he announced checkmate. Incredulous I thought through the board state, eventually admitting that yes, he'd pulled off a scholar's mate. He'd read of this opening and deliberately set out to attempt it.
Two games which were mathematically isomorphic, having the exact same moves and outcome, but with completely different meanings. One accidental, the other intentional.
How we read a game depends on who is playing. Each move has a process of thought behind it; identical moves can be interpreted differently if they differ in intent. How you understand Deep Blue vs. Kasparov depends on whether you view it as a conflict between Man and Machine, or between individual and collective human effort. A beginner taking a risky opening simply does not realise what they're doing; an intermediate player may be hoping to get lucky, or perhaps to throw their opponent off-guard; while an expert has calculated the outcome and is confident they can handle it. Was that a mistake, a bluff, or a brilliant gambit you don't understand yet?
When we talk about "replayability" in games we're usually thinking of them offering variety by presenting different possible situations and moves. But even identical moves and positions may mean different things. (And of course, as Ben Abraham points out any game is replayable in the sense that any book is rereadable - even if the events and words are the same, we have changed.)
There are only nine games of Rock-Paper-Scissors, and three of them are ties.
(The words in this post are based on actual events, but I have on two occasions lifted them from truth into fiction. The first game may not have been an exact scholar's mate, but it was a close approximation with perhaps an additional move. And let the record show that I thwarted Martin's attempt - at which point he lost interest for he was unprepared for the challenge of a spoken-word Chess game without having chosen his moves in advance. But in a nearby universe these could both be true.)
Monday, 23 September 2013
Last Hits
Early role-playing games attempted to simulate fantasy novels, making up characters who go on adventures / find treasure / defeat villains. There's a typical progression where characters become more powerful over time: the puny farm-boy eventually becomes an arch-mage, the nomadic barbarian leads an army and becomes king. This gets implemented in game mechanics both by gaining material resources (treasure and gold) and with "experience points", an abstract numeric score determining what abilities a character has access to.
In some early RPGs there was a direct equivalence between gold and experience points - the characters are treasure hunters, their achievements are measured by how much treasure they bring home. In others experience points were awarded primarily for defeating enemies. Treasure and monsters are usually found in proximity so these are closely related, but there's a difference: if you sneak past a dragon and steal some of its hoard, have you really defeated it? Still others took a more high-level approach rewarding heroic quests completed. Different styles of play are encouraged depending on which specific actions are rewarded.
These RPGs were administered by a human storyteller, so they were able to have a certain looseness in their rules; the dungeon-master could interpret reasonable requests and deal with unexpected situations sensibly. When computer-mediated RPGs were developed it became necessary to make the rules a lot more precise and explicit. Rules that work in a tabletop setting could lead to undesirable side-effects in a digital game.
If we give the same reward for bypassing an enemy by any means (killing it, sneaking past it, bribing it), then what happens if you first deal with them non-violently and then turn back and attack them? This isn't the intended behaviour, but if you gain something extra from doing it then optimal play means doing it. But if you don't get anything from doing this, that doesn't really make sense - surely they have worldly possessions that you can loot from them, and if you gain experience from fighting why should fighting an enemy you've already walked past be any different? You can think of ways to deal with this, but a lot of games went with the simplest option: deal with all obstacles by killing them.
So okay we got lots of games about mainly killing, that's not so interesting. But now what happens to this system when there are multiple characters, multiple players? The absolute simplest way you might program it is: when an attack kills an enemy, give a reward to the source of that attack. But in a teamwork situation that doesn't make sense - whoever landed the killing blow might not be the one who contributed the most. Maybe you come up with a more complicated system where you track how much damage was dealt by each character, but that doesn't quite work either - different character roles might deal less damage while still contributing as much to the group (a healer, for example). Maybe just divide rewards evenly amongst everyone involved: this is fine in a strictly cooperative setting, but outside of that it might create an incentive to jump in at the last moment to get a disproportionate share.
Now consider Dota 2 (and family). The basic setup is a battle between two armies in which the human players (five a side) control heroes that help out and influence the outcome of the war. The heroes advance in the now-typical CRPG manner, earning gold and experience for killing enemies. But the beautiful, absurd thing Dota does is to embrace the side-effects of specifically rewarding the killing blow. Experience is divided among everyone near a death, but gold is only given for getting the last hit, resulting in this weird bureaucracy of trying to get the reward from a fight without contributing much to it. It takes a buggy implementation of an oversimplified computerisation of a broken tabletop mechanic and expands it out into its own thing (it's the Game Title: Lost Levels of RPGs). It still pretends to simulate heroism, but in fact we roleplay heartless generals waiting while their armies slaughter each other, jumping into the fray only when the outcome is already decided in order to claim the glory. Indeed it encourages helping in the fight as little as possible, for a surfeit of success is unprofitable - it advances the battle into the opponent's territory before you're high-enough level. We sit back and watch the little people die until we secure more funding. It's pretty realistic.
And hey then also you can "deny" last hits, stabbing your own soldiers in the back to prevent your opponents getting the rewards for killing them. WHAT. This arose as a natural consequence of the previous rule but was then made explicit with the game indicating it with a unique animation and sounds.
CAN A VIDEOGAME MAKE YOU FEEL REAL EMOTION SAY SOMETHING MEANINGFUL ABOUT THE HUMAN CONDITION BE TRUE ART.
Well what about this lovely depiction of how rules can have consequences contrary to their intended effect, how when you make laws to encourage people to do something they'll figure out what the incentive actually measures rather than what you meant them to do, how we can appear to be doing one thing while actually achieving its opposite.
In some early RPGs there was a direct equivalence between gold and experience points - the characters are treasure hunters, their achievements are measured by how much treasure they bring home. In others experience points were awarded primarily for defeating enemies. Treasure and monsters are usually found in proximity so these are closely related, but there's a difference: if you sneak past a dragon and steal some of its hoard, have you really defeated it? Still others took a more high-level approach rewarding heroic quests completed. Different styles of play are encouraged depending on which specific actions are rewarded.
These RPGs were administered by a human storyteller, so they were able to have a certain looseness in their rules; the dungeon-master could interpret reasonable requests and deal with unexpected situations sensibly. When computer-mediated RPGs were developed it became necessary to make the rules a lot more precise and explicit. Rules that work in a tabletop setting could lead to undesirable side-effects in a digital game.
If we give the same reward for bypassing an enemy by any means (killing it, sneaking past it, bribing it), then what happens if you first deal with them non-violently and then turn back and attack them? This isn't the intended behaviour, but if you gain something extra from doing it then optimal play means doing it. But if you don't get anything from doing this, that doesn't really make sense - surely they have worldly possessions that you can loot from them, and if you gain experience from fighting why should fighting an enemy you've already walked past be any different? You can think of ways to deal with this, but a lot of games went with the simplest option: deal with all obstacles by killing them.
So okay we got lots of games about mainly killing, that's not so interesting. But now what happens to this system when there are multiple characters, multiple players? The absolute simplest way you might program it is: when an attack kills an enemy, give a reward to the source of that attack. But in a teamwork situation that doesn't make sense - whoever landed the killing blow might not be the one who contributed the most. Maybe you come up with a more complicated system where you track how much damage was dealt by each character, but that doesn't quite work either - different character roles might deal less damage while still contributing as much to the group (a healer, for example). Maybe just divide rewards evenly amongst everyone involved: this is fine in a strictly cooperative setting, but outside of that it might create an incentive to jump in at the last moment to get a disproportionate share.
Now consider Dota 2 (and family). The basic setup is a battle between two armies in which the human players (five a side) control heroes that help out and influence the outcome of the war. The heroes advance in the now-typical CRPG manner, earning gold and experience for killing enemies. But the beautiful, absurd thing Dota does is to embrace the side-effects of specifically rewarding the killing blow. Experience is divided among everyone near a death, but gold is only given for getting the last hit, resulting in this weird bureaucracy of trying to get the reward from a fight without contributing much to it. It takes a buggy implementation of an oversimplified computerisation of a broken tabletop mechanic and expands it out into its own thing (it's the Game Title: Lost Levels of RPGs). It still pretends to simulate heroism, but in fact we roleplay heartless generals waiting while their armies slaughter each other, jumping into the fray only when the outcome is already decided in order to claim the glory. Indeed it encourages helping in the fight as little as possible, for a surfeit of success is unprofitable - it advances the battle into the opponent's territory before you're high-enough level. We sit back and watch the little people die until we secure more funding. It's pretty realistic.
And hey then also you can "deny" last hits, stabbing your own soldiers in the back to prevent your opponents getting the rewards for killing them. WHAT. This arose as a natural consequence of the previous rule but was then made explicit with the game indicating it with a unique animation and sounds.
CAN A VIDEOGAME MAKE YOU FEEL REAL EMOTION SAY SOMETHING MEANINGFUL ABOUT THE HUMAN CONDITION BE TRUE ART.
Well what about this lovely depiction of how rules can have consequences contrary to their intended effect, how when you make laws to encourage people to do something they'll figure out what the incentive actually measures rather than what you meant them to do, how we can appear to be doing one thing while actually achieving its opposite.
Thursday, 29 August 2013
868-HACK (iOS)
868-HACK (originally the 7-day roguelike 86856527) is now on the iOS app store.
(Sorry I don't have a PC version yet - I was originally intending to release them at the same time but then I got distracted working on other things and it's not ready yet and I figured it was better not to rush it. There is only one of me!*)
*disputed
Okay what's changed from the 7 day version?
basically: A LOT.
- new programs.
- almost all the old programs ones modified (some in very subtle ways).
- a tutorial (skip this if you enjoy figuring out everything for yourself).
- better balanced.
- online high scores.
- streak scores too (sum across consecutive plays without dying).
- more graphics and sounds.
- so many little details I can't remember off the top of my head.
- secret stuff.
I should repeat about the tutorial: some people really enjoyed the blind confusion of working out all the mechanics themselves, and if that might be you then it's totally reasonable to skip it - you can always go back to it later. I've gone back and forth over whether it was right to include one at all, but ultimately most players were completely lost without some guidance and there's very much a game worth playing still there even once you understand what all the rules are. I still find it interesting to play myself and I know every detail of how it works.
Oh also - don't expect to understand everything after just the tutorial. It gives you the basics, but you still have to figure out how to put them together.
Also, several programs start out locked. Feel free to hit "unlock all" if you want to skip that, but I'd recommend going for the gradual introduction, you'll get a better understanding of the interactions between them.
Thanks so much to everyone who's helped out with this, with testing and suggestions. In particular, massive thanks to Leon Arnott, who in addition to helping out by writing most of the victory text and some of the intro text, made numerous excellent suggestions. And then repeated the suggestions when I didn't pay attention. And tirelessly kept on repeating them until I actually got around to trying them out and realised he'd been right all along. He also made a fan page (somewhat deceptive). Bless Leon.
get itttttt
(or, if you don't have one of those devices have patience I'll get a version you can play when I can! sorry!)
(also could someone please beat my high scores? ta.)
(Sorry I don't have a PC version yet - I was originally intending to release them at the same time but then I got distracted working on other things and it's not ready yet and I figured it was better not to rush it. There is only one of me!*)
*disputed
Okay what's changed from the 7 day version?
basically: A LOT.
- new programs.
- almost all the old programs ones modified (some in very subtle ways).
- a tutorial (skip this if you enjoy figuring out everything for yourself).
- better balanced.
- online high scores.
- streak scores too (sum across consecutive plays without dying).
- more graphics and sounds.
- so many little details I can't remember off the top of my head.
- secret stuff.
I should repeat about the tutorial: some people really enjoyed the blind confusion of working out all the mechanics themselves, and if that might be you then it's totally reasonable to skip it - you can always go back to it later. I've gone back and forth over whether it was right to include one at all, but ultimately most players were completely lost without some guidance and there's very much a game worth playing still there even once you understand what all the rules are. I still find it interesting to play myself and I know every detail of how it works.
Oh also - don't expect to understand everything after just the tutorial. It gives you the basics, but you still have to figure out how to put them together.
Also, several programs start out locked. Feel free to hit "unlock all" if you want to skip that, but I'd recommend going for the gradual introduction, you'll get a better understanding of the interactions between them.
Thanks so much to everyone who's helped out with this, with testing and suggestions. In particular, massive thanks to Leon Arnott, who in addition to helping out by writing most of the victory text and some of the intro text, made numerous excellent suggestions. And then repeated the suggestions when I didn't pay attention. And tirelessly kept on repeating them until I actually got around to trying them out and realised he'd been right all along. He also made a fan page (somewhat deceptive). Bless Leon.
get itttttt
(or, if you don't have one of those devices have patience I'll get a version you can play when I can! sorry!)
(also could someone please beat my high scores? ta.)
Monday, 5 August 2013
dota2 thoughts
eclectic thoughts from Dota2:
- I'm pretty lucky to have immunity to the collection urge. The game gives out MYSTERIOUS CHESTS that you can pay REAL MONEY to open and get random COSMETIC UPGRADES which accumulate to form COMPLETE SETS. My reaction to this is simply that I'm confused, I'm not sure why I'm being offered this because it doesn't seem appealing at all. But apparently some people enjoy opening these and trading these, and they spend money on them? I don't understand; it's not that I'm resisting this temptation, I just don't have that bit in my brain that would make me want to do this in the first place. However, as a game-maker this lack of sympathy for what appeals to many game-players probably puts me at a serious disadvantage in terms of mainstream appeal.
- Effects that just do a big chunk of damage, like Lion or Lina's ultimates or Dagon, actually have a surprising amount of subtlety to them. There's more depth than just click - numbers go down. Often you want to use these to finish off a wounded hero, maximising the information you have before using it, and surprising them with discontinuous damage before they can escape. But usually doing this means not all of the damage potential is used (unless you manage to click when their hp exactly equals the damage total), so there's an advantage to using these earlier in a fight as well. Also it helps your teammates to know that it will be used, and the most clear and accurate way to convey this information to them is to use it earlier - though this reveals it to your opponents too.
- It's kind of amazing to be able to play a ten-player real-time online game that might be an hour long, any time of day with usually no connection problems. At least to someone who grew up with dial-up internet and LANs that needed constant fiddling to make sure all the computers could see each other, getting parents to drive computers over to friends houses to be able to have more than one or two people playing together at once, configuring routers to open particular ports so games could be hosted; so much organisation and faff was required for networked multiplayer to exist at all. Now a game can comfortably demand ten players, not even supporting lower numbers - at least with a sufficiently powerful company behind it.
- I'm pretty lucky to have immunity to the collection urge. The game gives out MYSTERIOUS CHESTS that you can pay REAL MONEY to open and get random COSMETIC UPGRADES which accumulate to form COMPLETE SETS. My reaction to this is simply that I'm confused, I'm not sure why I'm being offered this because it doesn't seem appealing at all. But apparently some people enjoy opening these and trading these, and they spend money on them? I don't understand; it's not that I'm resisting this temptation, I just don't have that bit in my brain that would make me want to do this in the first place. However, as a game-maker this lack of sympathy for what appeals to many game-players probably puts me at a serious disadvantage in terms of mainstream appeal.
- Effects that just do a big chunk of damage, like Lion or Lina's ultimates or Dagon, actually have a surprising amount of subtlety to them. There's more depth than just click - numbers go down. Often you want to use these to finish off a wounded hero, maximising the information you have before using it, and surprising them with discontinuous damage before they can escape. But usually doing this means not all of the damage potential is used (unless you manage to click when their hp exactly equals the damage total), so there's an advantage to using these earlier in a fight as well. Also it helps your teammates to know that it will be used, and the most clear and accurate way to convey this information to them is to use it earlier - though this reveals it to your opponents too.
- It's kind of amazing to be able to play a ten-player real-time online game that might be an hour long, any time of day with usually no connection problems. At least to someone who grew up with dial-up internet and LANs that needed constant fiddling to make sure all the computers could see each other, getting parents to drive computers over to friends houses to be able to have more than one or two people playing together at once, configuring routers to open particular ports so games could be hosted; so much organisation and faff was required for networked multiplayer to exist at all. Now a game can comfortably demand ten players, not even supporting lower numbers - at least with a sufficiently powerful company behind it.
Friday, 26 July 2013
Experiment 12
The idea of a videogame anthology, a collection of small games by different people, has come up a few times. And it's easy to come up with exciting ideas around this concept - they could all use the same colour scheme (or each have a different dominant colour), there could be common themes planned out, musical elements, a story going between them (in sequence or from different angles), maybe they could share data between them so doing something in one game affects another.. so then there's a bunch of talk about how this would be cool but then it's hard to actually organise and everyone's busy with their own things so it doesn't happen. A democracy problem; nobody wants the responsibility of being in charge and while we don't actually disagree we never get around to agreeing on anything.
Terry Cavanagh initiated the most recent attempt after playing an RPG-maker chain game. This "chain" structure makes the organisation problem a lot simpler - there's no pre-planning and consensus required, everyone just looks at what's gone before and adds their own thing from there. Way easier to get off the ground. Terry decided on a schedule of 3 days per person, which turned out pretty well I think: it's long enough to do something that's not entirely trivial, but short enough that you can accurately plan for it - once you've spend a week on something then it could take months. And we ended up with strong themes coming through, colours and sounds and mechanics and ideas and words and images, just from doing things in order looking at what others had done, without having to agree on them in advance.
Terry will no doubt be typically humble and try not to take much credit, but he's responsible for prodding and poking and organising to make this happen, and actually making firm decisions for us when we'd all just keep coming up with more wild ideas. Thanks, Terry.
Experiment 12
(windows only right now, hopefully get a mac build soon)
Terry Cavanagh initiated the most recent attempt after playing an RPG-maker chain game. This "chain" structure makes the organisation problem a lot simpler - there's no pre-planning and consensus required, everyone just looks at what's gone before and adds their own thing from there. Way easier to get off the ground. Terry decided on a schedule of 3 days per person, which turned out pretty well I think: it's long enough to do something that's not entirely trivial, but short enough that you can accurately plan for it - once you've spend a week on something then it could take months. And we ended up with strong themes coming through, colours and sounds and mechanics and ideas and words and images, just from doing things in order looking at what others had done, without having to agree on them in advance.
Terry will no doubt be typically humble and try not to take much credit, but he's responsible for prodding and poking and organising to make this happen, and actually making firm decisions for us when we'd all just keep coming up with more wild ideas. Thanks, Terry.
Experiment 12
Friday, 19 July 2013
Starseed Pilgrim
There's a curious dance that people do when talking about Starseed Pilgrim. They're so afraid of spoiling its magic that they weave in and out trying to avoid saying anything at all, until finally resorting to pointing out that hey - someone you might have heard of liked it, and it's mysterious, so um try it out maybe!
I think this undersells the game by making it seem more fragile than it is. If I told you exactly what the relationship between the light world and the dark world is then maybe it would deprive you of one small moment of discovery, but much more of the game is in making use of that relationship, manipulating it once you understand it. I could show you the map I drew of where the various locations are and how they're connected, but it wouldn't even be very useful to you - your world will grow differently to mine. I could tell you every little rule and interaction I've discovered, and it might help you along some, speed up the process for you, but it wouldn't break the game - for there's a difference between facts you've been told and knowledge you understand through experience.
Yes there is exploration and discovery, but the things that are explicitly hidden are not so hard to find. You enter a geometric space that you can move through - you're not told that there are things to find in it, but if you just go ahead and move then you'll start to find them. In this perhaps it demands some personal initiative which is not present in many modern games, but no difficult insights. Simply being unafraid to act without instruction is sufficient. You see a key, you see a lock - there's no tutorial guide telling you to try putting the two together, but do you really need one? And then you see a door with three locks - well I'm not going to spell it out. There are some arbitrary "videogame-y" interactions that you can only really discover by experimenting and observing - stars point to keys, except when they point to locks; hearts become seeds, except when they don't until later - but they aren't really very hard.
This is not to say there are no difficult discoveries, but these are of a very different kind. Starseed Pilgrim's true secrets are the ones hidden in plain view. Basic rules about how plants grow and interact which are discovered in the first few minutes of play end up taking on surprising significance. You have all the tools you need to progress right from the start, but you will need to master them. When you uncover a challenge and realise what you must do to progress, it's easy to go into denial. The lonely pilgrim despairs at their seemingly insurmountable task. There must be something I haven't found yet that will make this easier. There must be a power-up - wall-climbing, double-jump - that will help me here. And so you go searching for secrets where there aren't any, hoping for a way out, trying to avoid doing what you know you must. But there are no short-cuts. You just need to get better at the game.
And that's the secret of Starseed Pilgrim: you can get better at it. It's not about uncovering obtuse facts; it's about mastering a deep system, creatively using its quirks to your advantage, getting better at it until you're able to overcome anything that's thrown at you. Red seeds bloom into a flower if they fall into darkness - initially this seems like a disadvantage because it can crush valuable hearts and enable the darkness to spread more quickly, but eventually you find yourself using it to deliberately to queue up interactions for later. Yellow branches are forced to grow upwards if they can't extend left or right - at first this is usually an accidental waste, but later you will ride them up on purpose. Dripping slime mires you, making movement more difficult, but even this you will find constructive uses for in time - the first time you're pleased to see it rather than disappointed is a beautiful moment. But even if you were told all the rules straight out - which seed best defends against blight, how each world works slightly differently to the others - there would still be much value for you in learning to use them.
So I hope I've managed to dance this dance adequately. I've held back from telling everything I know, but perhaps I've let slip enough to illustrate what the game is like, and to demonstrate that it wouldn't hurt you to be told everything. The pilgrim's magic is strong.
Yes there is exploration and discovery, but the things that are explicitly hidden are not so hard to find. You enter a geometric space that you can move through - you're not told that there are things to find in it, but if you just go ahead and move then you'll start to find them. In this perhaps it demands some personal initiative which is not present in many modern games, but no difficult insights. Simply being unafraid to act without instruction is sufficient. You see a key, you see a lock - there's no tutorial guide telling you to try putting the two together, but do you really need one? And then you see a door with three locks - well I'm not going to spell it out. There are some arbitrary "videogame-y" interactions that you can only really discover by experimenting and observing - stars point to keys, except when they point to locks; hearts become seeds, except when they don't until later - but they aren't really very hard.
This is not to say there are no difficult discoveries, but these are of a very different kind. Starseed Pilgrim's true secrets are the ones hidden in plain view. Basic rules about how plants grow and interact which are discovered in the first few minutes of play end up taking on surprising significance. You have all the tools you need to progress right from the start, but you will need to master them. When you uncover a challenge and realise what you must do to progress, it's easy to go into denial. The lonely pilgrim despairs at their seemingly insurmountable task. There must be something I haven't found yet that will make this easier. There must be a power-up - wall-climbing, double-jump - that will help me here. And so you go searching for secrets where there aren't any, hoping for a way out, trying to avoid doing what you know you must. But there are no short-cuts. You just need to get better at the game.
And that's the secret of Starseed Pilgrim: you can get better at it. It's not about uncovering obtuse facts; it's about mastering a deep system, creatively using its quirks to your advantage, getting better at it until you're able to overcome anything that's thrown at you. Red seeds bloom into a flower if they fall into darkness - initially this seems like a disadvantage because it can crush valuable hearts and enable the darkness to spread more quickly, but eventually you find yourself using it to deliberately to queue up interactions for later. Yellow branches are forced to grow upwards if they can't extend left or right - at first this is usually an accidental waste, but later you will ride them up on purpose. Dripping slime mires you, making movement more difficult, but even this you will find constructive uses for in time - the first time you're pleased to see it rather than disappointed is a beautiful moment. But even if you were told all the rules straight out - which seed best defends against blight, how each world works slightly differently to the others - there would still be much value for you in learning to use them.
So I hope I've managed to dance this dance adequately. I've held back from telling everything I know, but perhaps I've let slip enough to illustrate what the game is like, and to demonstrate that it wouldn't hurt you to be told everything. The pilgrim's magic is strong.
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