advice on how to write about indie games

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Instead of "this game is niche"
try saying "i like this game because..."

Look, "niche" is not a property of a game. It's a recess in a wall to put decoration in. (Some games do have niches in them.) I guess you're using it in some metaphorical way to mean that the group of people playing the game is small enough to fit into a niche? This is not very interesting, and it is not even a fact about the game. You're telling us about the game because you like it! What do you like about it? That's way more interesting.

You're not as weird as you think you are. I'm sorry, but you're actually not. You're holding onto this idea of yourself being such an atypical person and your tastes being so niche as a way to feel a bit special. And by god you are special. You are so special. You are this beautiful unique incredible configuration of stardust and we love you. You're great. But you're not unusual. If you like a thing, there's going to be a ton of other people who would like it, for the same reasons you do. Maybe they haven't heard of it yet. Maybe you can tell them.

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Instead of "this game is underrated"
Try saying "i think this game is great"

I get it: you think the rating is too low. The injustice of it!

But when you say this to someone, you're first of all telling them "THE RATING IS LOW". That's what they're gonna hear. Yeah sure you're also saying "and I disagree" but look: communication is hard. You can get ideas across more reliably if you stick to one at a time. Start with the main one. Here, that's what you think of the game. Someone else out there thinks something different? Man, you're not obliged to speak for them.

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Instead of "too bad this game didn't sell"
try saying "check out this cool game"

We're not at the end of the story!

If someone's trying to get rich through investment fraud, maybe all they care about is all-or-nothing instant hits. But everywhere else, a slow burn still makes a difference. And good work doesn't stop being good just because time has passed.

All my games still sell. They kept selling through the years I was too ill to work. They spike when I release something new or when there's a nice article about me. It's not a lot, but it makes a difference for us. Heck, I hadn't released a game in ages and then suddenly a podcast series started up about my work and people are exploring games from up to 15 years ago. It happens.

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Instead of "this has only X many wishlists / reviews / numbers"
try saying "here's something i really like about this game!"

These kinds of numbers are for sad people in suits who don't trust their own sense of what is good. You know what's good.

Personally, when I see this kind of comment about my games I tend to stress out a little. "Oh no, the numbers!" I think that's the most likely outcome if you post something like this: the person who made it feels bad and nobody else cares. Probably that wasn't your intention! (Don't worry, I don't stress for long - I know that juicy long tail is coming for me.)

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Instead of "looks bad"
try saying "wow there’s something about it that catches my attention but i don’t feel like i know what’s going on yet, can someone explain what the deal is?"

Why has this person shown up in this thread to post this meaningless trash about something they claim not to even care about? What's going through their brain?

I'll tell you: it's because they are curious. They wouldn't have posted if they weren't actually interested. They're trying to articulate their interest but can't find the words. Surprising but true.
If you catch yourself doing this, feel free to use my wording above.
If you see someone else doing this, you can respond 100% as if they had asked this question and it’ll be a positive exchange.

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Instead of "this game is fundamentally flawed"
try saying "this game is worthy of deep study"

If you're writing on the internet about something new or indie, your post might constitute a substantial fraction of the available literature on the topic. It's not a drop in the ocean. There's a good chance that this will even be the first someone has heard about it. Maybe you think you're only writing to a very specific audience, but now it's one of the top search results. You're ahead of the curve.

Many years back, someone wrote a thoughtful essay about a high-level aspect of one of my games that they felt wasn’t working as intended. They weren't even wrong! Unfortunately, they used this kind of language. In the context they were writing to, they assumed that everyone already knew about the game, and already knew that it was interesting and deep, and that's why it was worth writing about. To an academic, “fundamentally flawed” means “there are some long-term challenges that might require changes to the fundamentals to improve on”. To a layperson it just sounds really very bad: it means "broken in a way that can’t be fixed, ever". And so it came about that years later - long after I’d addressed the issue in question - I kept seeing this post resurfacing. Someone would ask on a random forum thread “i heard of this game, is it worth checking out?” and get a reply “nah apparently it’s fundamentally flawed”. Dude. Pretty sure that cost me some sales. Would have been easy to word it in a way that avoided this negative.

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Instead of "if only this game was made with a higher budget"
try saying "check out this game"

How the fuck do you think we'll get a higher budget bro.
You're posting about it because you're into it: say so.

One time a big name account posted about one of my games. They could have just said something nice, their followers would buy it on their recommendation, it could have made a real difference. But they chose to dunk on it, in a way that encouraged their followers to do the same. I was relatively unknown at the time, so for a while way more people had heard this person's negative opinions about it than anything good. It can really stick - this was well over a decade ago and i literally saw one of their fans repeating the exact same thing this week. Guys.

Look I get it: if someone's doing cool work you want to see what they could accomplish with more resources. So get them there. Support them. Focus on the things you like about what they're already doing and you'll get to see more.

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Instead of "mobile when" (or android when, switch when, etc.)
try buying the game

This is a special case of the previous point. Sure, making art is a soulful devotional practice etc., but anyone who's doing it in a sustained commercial way at any level also spends some time thinking about it as a business. When it comes to ports, it's all business. We have some numbers to estimate sales, we have some costs, we decide when it's worth it. If we lose money on ports we can't make the next thing. Get those numbers up.

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Instead of "outsider artist"
try saying "member of the [place/website] scene"

An outsider artist has no ties to an established scene. If you heard about someone through games media, they're not an outsider. Talk about the connections they have: knowing which more established figures a creator is linked with will help people to understand where their work comes from.

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Instead of "game designer's game designer"
try saying "up-and-coming designer" or "respected and influential designer"

See, this always feels like a backhanded compliment. Sure your games are "good", but in a particular way that nobody wants to pay for.

Nah. Think about it, what's more likely?

• There's a weird category of art which can only appeal to practitioners of that artform, and certain unfortunate individuals are cursed to only ever produce work of that type.
• People working in a medium are likely to hear about someone new doing good work before they break through to the general public.

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Instead of "whoaaa were they ON DRUGS"
try saying "whoaaa"

So tired of this. So offensive to look at someone's creative work and say "I bet you needed some chemical assistance to think of that". Man, some people are taking drugs, some people aren't, it's not a big deal, don't be such a cop. Some have substance abuse problems and making up a story that you can't do art sober probably doesn't help them.

You can make art.

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Instead of "this big-budget game sucks"
try writing about an indie game instead

If you don’t like a thing, don’t waste energy talking about it.

You convinced yourself you need to "be part of the conversation" but you're just adding noise. Nobody cares. Stop chasing clicks. If you'd instead written something positive about something you liked that the reader hadn’t heard of and might like too, in a small way you’d have made the world a better place.

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868-BACK: quit

quick note: I used to document quite a bit of my game dev process here on this blog. I started doing videos instead in the pandemic (patreon, youtube) because I was finding that drained less energy from me than writing a post. I haven't done either very much recently because I felt so much of what I wanted to talk about would just make more sense once the game was out so you'd know what I was referring to. Now it's out! I'll hopefully be doing some of those posts. I'm not sure yet what the balance of videos to writing will be, but this one's writing!

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868-HACK is structured as a series of servers you hack one after another, with increasing difficulty as you go. Quite a few people never even saw the difficulty increase because you had to win a couple of rounds in a row to get there. When I did an expansion for it a few years later (PLAN.B) I wanted to put the difficulty modifiers up front - both so that everyone would see them, and because those of us who'd been playing a bit started to find the game a bit too easy without them. But sometimes a stack of them could just be unfair though so I wanted a way to skip the really bad combinations, and came up with the .QUIT prog. This is just a basic ability you can pick up and use like any other, and what it does is instantly win the round. Actually amazing. This would be blatantly S-tier if not for the opportunity cost: you don't want to take the free win if you could use that siphon to get more points instead.

.QUIT is one of my favourite progs because it's something that computers do but games don't. Coming to the sequel I really wanted to push as far as I could in that direction; try everything I could think of that felt like a "computer" ability and would fit naturally here and not in a typical fantasy game. So .QUIT and .UNDO were at the top of my list for returning progs. (Puzzle games should generally allow undo, strategy games don't because it creates a very boring play pattern around any random or hidden element; putting a cost on it that isn't undone solved that well enough for 868-HACK, but unfortunately wasn't enough to make it work in BACK.) .QUIT fit quite nicely into BACK overall, but the new scrip system made it fairly easy to minimise the opportunity cost.

One of my early ideas for a bonus powerup in 868-BACK was called Local area network!, which I) protected a server from being hacked unless you'd hacked one of its neighbours the day before, and II) forced you to hack one of its neighbors the next day. I really liked having a "map-only" powerup, making a server more difficult to hack not because the levels and enemies were any harder but simply because it was inconvenient to get and out of. I really liked the spatial element this gave to the server map: these little sequences where you had to move step-by-step across it rather than just picking from it like a menu. There were many problems with this. Does nothing on the last day. You could get stuck and lose the game with no options if you weren't careful - and that tended to feel unfair rather than like you'd excitingly hacked yourself into a corner. Didn't interact well with the "reveal powerups by gathering data in adjacent servers" mechanic. So eventually it went away.

Thinking about limitations that could be applied to QUIT to make it slightly less dominant - what about an effect on the server map? I thought of folding in Isolated workstation!: if you quit a server you don't get to explore the ones next to it. Jake suggested folding in Local area network! instead: if you quit a server you have to go to one next to it tomorrow. This was really good! We kept Isolated as the map-only powerup (its device restriction was added much later at Leon's suggestion to prevent it doing less the more of the map is explored). When Linkcubes were added I let it go along those links as well. It seemed like the problem was solved.

Since the game's been released and a lot more people have been playing it, a few rare bugs showed up involving QUIT. This is going to happen - different people have different skills and approaches, so they'll try something in a different situation - or else just the dice get rolled a lot more times so an arrangement comes up that you never saw before. I'd added certain types of server that couldn't be accessed unless specific conditions were met - the megacorp x6s and the shops. In particular this restriction on the shops came very late in development (to stop new players from having a disappointing experience of going to a shop where they can't afford to buy anything). So a few people had been able to quit with only a shop in range but then weren't able to get into the shop! When I dug in to fix this I realised that QUIT was getting quite complicated. We'd already had a few players being confused about when they could or couldn't quit, and this was making it more confusing by adding situations where your ability to quit depended on the status of servers you haven't even explored yet. So rather than add all those complications I gutted it and made the whole thing much simpler: you can always quit, and tomorrow you can go wherever is nearest that you can get into. If you're surrounded by locked shops and corporate headquarters, instead of being sad and stuck you just get to go slightly further. It should play pretty similarly in most cases, but be clearer to understand, less prone to bugs, and maybe even occasionally exploitable in clever ways.

patch is up now!

868-BACK: the sponsors

After I crowdfunded 868-BACK, a couple of people got in touch to see if there was a way they could give a bit of extra financial support. We figured out that the right way to structure that was as a sponsorship. These are people whose work I admire and respect and I'm very happy to shine some light back at them.

Slice and Dice is a wonderful game that takes the combat system of a party-based RPG, infuses it with chaos by leaving the action choices up to a roll of the dice, and builds a whole magnificent structure around a series of these battles with escalating blessings and curses modifying the rules. It's author tann is rather reclusive, but seems like a very lovely person from the interactions we've had. The game has a lot in common with my games - tann has cited Cinco Paus as an inspiration - so I unreservedly recommend that anyone who likes my work check it out.

Puzzmo is a project with a lot of people involved and a lot going on, but a big part of it is the work of Zach Gage. I've known Zach for a long time, and he's had an influence on my work - in fact the core inspiration for Cinco Paus came from a conversation with him. He's a firm believer that the goals of creating interesting artistic games and reaching a broad audience don't need to be incompatible, and Puzzmo is a very serious attempt at bringing those together.

I'm very grateful for their contributions.

868-BACK: the crew

So first up, the game is out: get it on steam or itch.io.

I just wanted to talk a bit about who made the game! I'm going to go through in more-or-less chronological order of when people joined the project.

Obviously there's me. I started in mid-2024 and worked by myself for a few months before even showing it to anyone else, and I've done SO MUCH.

Jake and Leon were the first people I wanted to show it to. They had both playtested some of my games years ago, and Leon did some writing for 868-HACK (the "with that data you stole..." lines on the victory screen). For several months it was just us three playing - I'd expected to invite more testers in sooner, but they were already finding as much as I could keep up with. They've both contributed a ton of suggestions for all parts of the game - not just the rules and mechanics but writing and aesthetics - and the final design owes a ton to both of them.

Tara (YAKFOX) joined the project somewhere in late-2024. She then started a music production course so it was a while before she was available to actively produce music for the game, but she was part of it, and the discussions we had about the music helped define where the game was going. (And then the music turned out great!)

Then we did the crowdfunding! As well as contributing money, I offered a "name a server" reward and people contributed a variety of names - some cute, some funny, some on-theme, some really weird. This might seem like a little thing but as soon as those names were in there, the world felt more lived-in. Like magic! And a few of those names ended up inspiring strands of the design, folding back in to become very significant elements of the game.

Eventually I felt it really was time to expand the pool of testers a bit more, and Justin (manbearcar) posted an impressive Cinco Paus high score so I invited him in. Again I'd really expected to need more, but just one more person playing it was a valuable flood of information. (He's made a ton of cool games too and recently released Horsey Game.)

Then Finji came on board! Their whole QA and marketing teams contributed a lot. They've done a wonderful job of tuning into the game and making suggestions that will make it easier for people to get into it without breaking what it fundamentally is. They also recognised that I'd bitten off quite a lot with this game, and we set about figuring out what would be helpful to get it over the finish line, so it came about that a few other artists joined in towards the end.

AJ is one of my favourite artists, and his glitchy pixel scenes have been an inspiration for what I want to do in my own visual art. So when we talked about getting in someone else to do some graphics for the scenes that I was struggling with, he was at the top of my list. And he was up for it! He's done some fantastic art for the game - including a scene you will no doubt see quite often.

I asked Adam (from Finji) to also do one of the scenes - see if you can spot which is his. He also suggested adjustments to my font in a way that improved readability without losing the style I was going for, and he brought on Sven Ruthner and together they worked on the title logo, scaling up my font and adding glitchy detail.

Finally, we were missing sound effects. These usually show up quite late in my games, because I have to get into a quite different mindset from design and programming. But they hadn't shown up yet and we'd announced a release date, and I had my hands quite full with everything else, so Adam suggested Josie Brechner as someone to collaborate with on these. She came in and did a fantastic job, some of her sounds are so delightful in a way that you can tell she must have really had fun making them. (.row, wow!)

So that's the crew! It's my biggest game yet, and the one that's most a team effort. It's still very much "me" - I felt that my time working on the game by myself had established a strong voice for it, and when new people came on they were able to get into the flow of what was already happening and do great work that fit into it. And having other people supporting helped me to do my best. And now you all can play it!

Year Of Me

I find it pretty hard to explain when asked what my work is. What should I say?

I'll go simple and direct: "I make videogames" - but it turns out people have a huge variety of preconceptions about what that might mean. Which company do I work for? No. Have you made anything I might have heard of? No. That's so awesome, you get paid to play games? No, neither of those. Why are you such a terrible person, responsible for the brain-rotting drivel that's destroying children's lives? No. Couldn't you do something more natural? Yes and no. So you work in tech, you're rich then? No and no.

Clearly that word gives the wrong idea, I'll try: "I'm an artist". This isn't bad! People get the right overall idea; we all like art as a general concept; you don't expect me to pay for things. Until they dig a little bit further and want to know what kind of art? What medium? UHhh [frantically trying to avoid the v word] interactive digital something vi art, let's stick with art. Eventually they find out that it was games all along and are a little disgusted at my deception.

Often I go with "I work in games". I don't quite know what people take from it, but it's somehow vague enough to usually avoid these confusing discussions and we can move onto something more interesting (like the other person).

But okay, someone's found out I work in games: what kind of games? All the kinds. Any kind. Every game. Okay I didn't make every single game that exists, but it was enough of them that this isn't easy to answer. "I've worked in a variety of genres". Ugh. I have though! I'll try to gauge how literate the person asking might be - but even then, my main genre they literally named after me. What am I supposed to say?

"Oh like mobile games?" Yes. Some of my games run on mobile devices, that's not the most interesting thing about them but sure, that'll do. "That must be pretty.. ching ching! (*rubbing fingers together*)". THIS AGAIN.

Wait so if it doesn't make money, why are you doing it? Do you even have a job? (No.)

Once when I was interrogated by border police (not for the first or last time) they really wanted to know what I did and who I worked for. I gave as clear and straightforward answers as I could, and they kept asking again and again, obviously not believing me. Until one of them finally did a google search and shamefacedly told the other "let him go, everything he's said is true".

The Secret Lives of Games (formerly Eggplant, formerly the Spelunky Showlike) have started a year-long series talking about my work. So far the first introductory episode is up, and I think it's the best explanation so far of WHAT DOES MICHAEL EVEN DO. It's on the long side (two hours) but if you've ever wondered, here's an answer. I'm just going to link this next time someone asks me. Take that, border control.

I really appreciate that they're doing this - aside from it being personally about me, which is nice for sure - but from the perspective of taking games seriously as an artform. In any other medium, it's not unusual to have a show looking back across an artist's work; a Yuri Norstein retrospective or whatever; but even in games hardly anyone takes games seriously. This is something distinctly countercultural: the claim that play is not merely something a multi-million dollar industry can be built around, but something culturally important and worth talking about.

868-BACK trailer: UNIFIED

Hey hey!

I am still busily working on 868-BACK. I'm very happy with how it's coming along.

It has grown! When I was crowdfunding it at the end of last year, I described it as being 'on par with the biggest games I've made before'. Now I would describe it as definitely my biggest game yet. Nobody ever expected a big 868-HACK. It still has that tight focus; it's big in a way that honours its smallness, I can't think of much like it.

I also said 'I'm aiming for a release mid-2025'. That would be around now, wouldn't it? Well, there is still a lot to do! I would like to very clearly update that to late-2025.

This is a good thing. I am giving the game the time it needs to be what it wants to be. It's become very clear to me how important it is to my work to be able to take that time when I need to. Some of my games I've made very quickly, some have gradually come together over a few years, but in both cases it's been a matter of allowing the organic process to grow to completion. I have to not rush things.

In this case, a couple of ideas arrived that really blossom the game into something extra strange and special - the kind of "blow your mind" recontextualisation that we all love - but the technicalities of making sure they work right with every other piece has added some time. There's still some uncertainty ahead. There's a small chance it ends up being "early-2026". I'm going to try to avoid that, since A) it's been way too long since I've released a game and those of you who've supported me through this time really deserve something, and B) we'll run out of money. But, if it ends up that's just the best thing for the game, I'll do it somehow. Still, there's a lot of 2025 left!

Meanwhile, we've made a trailer!


The folk from thinkygames.com asked if I could share a trailer, and I had a think. One the one hand, probably I shouldn't take on extra work - my plate is already so full. But on the other hand I am trying to do everything the best I can, to finish and promote this game above and beyond what I've done before, to get the marketing and money side right not just the making. Well, by the time I'd spent a while pondering those two hands then I had an idea for a trailer I wanted to make so I just went for it. It ended up fitting well because it gave a focus for working on audiovisual design for one of the corporations, which we needed to do anyway.
(p.s. they also had trailers for a bunch of other games that look neat, and a big discount on Steam ongoing.)

The trailer introduces UNIFIED MEGACORP, one of the three megacorporations in the game. What makes them "mega" is that they control more than one connected server, so hacking them is a multi-step process. Unified are - well I hope the video gives you a feel for them. We'll reveal the other two along the way. It's also a first taste of the game's music, which Tara is collaborating on.

I've also put up a Steam page. You can wishlist it if you want to!

As I said above, it's not clear at this point whether the budget we have will last until the game feels definitively done. I don't want a publisher messing it up, so I'd prefer not to go there without really good reasons. I'll make it work somehow. Maybe I take a few weeks off to make a smaller game to support development of the bigger one - just six months ago that would have been impossible but my health is getting better all the time and now I do have some side-project energy, which is a really good sign. We'll see what happens! But simply, I would really appreciate it if any of you do want to support my ongoing work. I would appreciate if you buy my other games (ios link, itch.io link) - I've made a lot of them and they are still good! I would appreciate it if you support my Patreon. I would appreciate it if you just want to throw large amounts of money at me (please contact me directly).

That said, THANK YOU SO MUCH TO EVERYONE WHO HAS SUPPORTED ME TO THIS POINT. I am thriving. I have gone from being absolutely smitten with covid in 2020 and not being able to work at all, to now doing my best work so far (and with better yet to come). It means so much to me that a lot of you really still appreciate all the work I've done before, and you've helped me through such a hard time and I am - still not at full strength, but definitely - BACK.

making choices on server map - part 2

The server map is kind of a second game, where one move in the map (hacking a server) comprises an entire round of the core game. In my last post wrote about how I was trying to make the decision of "which server do I have next?" rich and interesting; while that's a big decision in relation to the core game it's a very zoomed-in perspective on the metagame. Today I'm thinking through the wider question of what the player is trying to achieve across multiple hacks.

My first thought was to simply reflect the core roguelike gameplay: each server is made up of sectors, the goal of each sector is "get to the exit", and the goal of the entire server is "get to the final exit". The goal on the map could be "get to the final server". There would be a lovely symmetry, "as above, so below". I spent a while prototyping this version.

A big problem I ran onto early on is that the whole map is way too much information — thirty-odd servers each with their own tools and defenses. I was never planning on making you choose between all of these at once, you'd be stepping through them one at a time, but it turns out to also be too much to look at and think about to plan a route through. That's okay, I just add "fog of war": you can only see where you've explored. This felt really good. You start with a very simple set of options, then gradually add a few at a time (ruling some out as you go) and by the time the screen is full of information you've already digested most of it. It gives a nice Matrix moment: if a friend sees you playing they'll be impressed by the impenetrable wall of symbols, but you "don't even see the code anymore".

Putting these two concepts together: you're trying to get to the exit but you need to explore to find it. Remember from the previous post that there's a limited number of rounds, so you're trying to get to the exit before you run out of time (and pick up as many points as you can along the way). This more-or-less worked, it's a game. But there ended up being a fairly optimal search pattern you could follow to have the maximum chance of finding the exit, and this tends to feel unsatisfactory no matter the outcome: if you find it that's unexciting because it's to be expected, and if you don't find it that's unfair because you did the best possible with the information you had. And if you're trying to get a high score, then that's determined by whether the map randomly lines up the highest scoring opportunities with the correct search pattern. If not, you'd have to keep restarting until it does (which some players are going to do to eke out an advantage no matter what but I try to avoid privileging too much).

I started experimenting with other goals. I tried having multiple options, whereby you could win the game by completing any one of them. This has several advantages over a single goal. It suggests different categories players can choose to compete in to extend the longevity of the game - completing a specific goal, or getting bonus endings by completing more than one simultaneously. As a designer I can try to balance the goals such that when you're failing one of them you're likely to be close to succeeding at another - e.g. if you've searched the map and not found the exit then at least you might know where all the megacorps' territories are, or if you've completely failed at exploring then you've likely had many opportunities to [redacted] the [redacted].

Even with these balancing factors I kept running into the situation where one mistake or unlucky roll can prevent you from achieve your goals no matter how cleverly you've played up to that point. Weirdly this felt both really bad and really good. These situations made great exciting moments that fit the mood of the game, they weren't a rough edge I wanted to smooth off. But if it went badly, then the gameplay was telling you to quit and restart, which at that point stopped fitting the mood. At 868-HACK's scale it flowed really well to crash and restart, and I would have liked it to work similarly, but with the game being a bit bigger and having a few different elements in play it just.. wasn't.

So I stepped back to think about what makes sense in the story of the game. You've returned to the life of crime you left behind, risking everything on one last hack to save everything you value the most.. you took your best chance.. it didn't work out. You got so close but you realised you couldn't make it. What do you do now? You could try anyway, going out in glory like some kind of hero. But no, you want to make them pay. You want to do as much damage as you can on your way down.

Game design is about making the thing that's coolest to do line up with the strategically optimal move. (Or most exciting, narratively appropriate, etc., you get it.) I had been thinking the goals were absolute: this is what you must do to win the game. I had thought that was narratively appropriate: this is what the hacker values more than anything, enough to bring them back. But it's more interesting to be dynamically evaluating - if you've had a bad run and now there's only one option that gives a 1/16 chance of making it.. if the goals are absolute then there's no choice, you just take that chance.. but maybe you take the option that has no chance BUT hacks them up good / gets a cool item / etc.

Brief historical diversion: when I made 86856527 (which became 868-HACK), I'd been playing a lot of roguelikes (Rogue, ADOM, Nethack, Crawl..) and I thought high scores are a waste of time, a distraction from what's cool about games: exploring a world and having adventures. I'd also been playing a lot of board and card games (Race for the Galaxy, Dominion, euros) and I thought scores are a great mechanism, a clever abstraction that can enable what's cool about games: deep subtle competition. Basically I believed that scores were a good thing for boardgames but somehow a bad thing for videogames so I was resistant to putting them in mine. It's probably fair to say that the videogames I was playing just didn't have very good scoring (despite their strengths in other areas). Fortunately I got through my resistance, and with 868-HACK found the maybe-novel idea of putting something like a board-game-style scoring mechanism into a roguelike.

(These days people even call Balatro a roguelike. Not my fault ok.)

Back to the topic: I have a game with a scoring system, and narrative goals. I've been resisting assigning scores to the goals, because they're the thing that you really value, more than mere score! But maybe I have to learn the same lesson again twelve years later, and put some numbers on them. That's what makes the formal program-mechanical perspective of the game match up to the cool story in those 1/16 risk situations — the character is thinking about whether their chance of success is worth it versus just smashing things, the computer program is evaluating whether the number is bigger than the other number, the player is thinking about whether their chance of success is worth it versus just smashing things.