In the continuing “don’t write it all in the journal” mode, I’m going to try out a document where I write separately about prototyping and responding to the different candidate variations (I should call them “definitions”?) I’m making.
“someone who is considered to be exaggerating a danger and so causing needless worry or panic.”
The game panics as you get closer to walls. Increasing screen shake and messages strobing all over the place. I really like that. I guess it would be for the body too. I think this would be pretty fun to make.
This is a funny one… a worried game that of course makes things worse the more it warns you. A pretty easy prototype that I’m happy with. Not a ton to report other than some performance concerns about my approach that… seem fine. Maybe not on mobile? Could be worth testing.
Because the definition I read specifically presents this as believe in a non-interventionist god (hi Nick Cave) I wonder if there’s some juice to just having this be a Snake with no controls that moves across the screen (logically) and then hits the wall (dies).
I’m going to prototype this one just because it’s so simple. Non-interventionist god (the player) therefore does not intervene (has no controls) and the Snake goes along its track and dies (hits the wall).
I think there’s some philosophy here around why the Snake wouldn’t be autonomous (as in Determinism) but I think the purest sense of the Snake living its life without the God puppeting it is that it would simply hit the wall and die.
The fact the apple would (I think?) appear after the Snake’s inevitable death is kind of a weird critic of their God?
Do I acknowledge the intervention bit? If the player tries to intervene do I show a message saying “don’t intervene”? Do I play an “error sound” so they understand it’s not allowed?
Well let’s prototype!
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I prototyped.
It works pretty well as an idea. I feel the match between the definition and then the playing out of the game is satisfying.
Right now I have an “controls” text that explains how to play:
Do not intervene
And the keys do nothing. But I suspect an error sound is going to make sense? BUT there’s also an oddity around being a non-interventionist god who CANNOT intervene? But I suppose maybe such a non-interventionist god would have programmed their universe not to allow intervention? It’s hard to say.
At the end right now in a fit of probably incorrect whimsy I have
Well that happened.
Which I don’t think works at all but I just wanted to try out having some text there. It does feel like ending texts can be a nice way to close out and resolve the feeling of the joke? So it may be I want to say something but probably not this.
Menu-only game. You select this item, the menu-snake eats it, and then it’s gone and you just choose something else. That is funny.
It’s kind of embarrassing to have to quote myself saying something is funny. I hope it’s actually funny. It seems like a good one to prototype because it’s so basic conceptually and takes place entirely in the menu… welll…. no actually I suppose you would want to switch to the definition screen and then come back to the menu to find the item is gone. So I’ll work on that. Now.
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Okay got the basics of this working. It’s remarkable just how much shitty/bad code I wrote to get it in there. It’s such a special case it’s clearly not worth engineering some kind of more general solution, but it’s genuinely quite horrible how many things I did to pop it in:
tick() if the delisssting option was selected.It’s kind of an object lesson in how janky and gross the underlying code can sometimes be for a beautiful and pure idea. Because I do think it works really nicely in the end. You select it, get a crisp definition of delisting, and then instead of getting a game you go back to the menu with the thing you just selected delisted. Chess’s kiss etc.?
But yeah, there’s maybe some thought to be given to maintining internal state about this rather than working through localStorage even though it’s very funny that it would stay delisted “forever” with the Cookie. If cookies are sort of dying then may as well just keep it internal, not that hard to do since I’m already passing data between the states.
Snake body demists the screen (only where it can reach though, so you might have the comedy of all the other stuff being blurred (ideally we have blur)). And that’s it. Mist builds back up maybe over time so it’s a constant battle of it being hard to see…
This just seems like it’ll be “easy” so I might as well make it to make something. The screen is “steamed up” (covered in semi-transparent tiles in an overlay over the whole thing). The snake clears the steam. The steam comes back.
…
Well went away and implemented it. It works. No cute ideas for the outro text as yet.
The idea of a total distillation of Snake even more than it already is. A presentation of the game that’s like “I get the gist”. Which could also be temporal, like you eat one apple, another appear, and then it ends saying “you get the gist”.
This almost functions as a meta-joke about the whole Snake series (and my work in general), that you engage enough to “get it” and probably move on. Gist games. Hehe.
Going to try this one now because I think it will get at a key “issue” around overall structures for showing a definition and for potentially showing a “post game” quote or text. OR I could show the definition after the game? Anyway, clearly desirable to be able to display a more “plain” text. Though even this may need to extend Snake, just without the Snake? Let’s see.
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Latère (in Sponge Bob French Accent)…
I ended up going into a bit of a hole around more general design ideas, which is what I would have expected. Except where do I write about that? Here because it was a conversation born of prototyping and the ways in which prototyping actually can force you to develop ideas that aren’t strictly part of the prototype but more far reaching? Well, let’s try that.
The gist definition was one of the ones where it felt important to show the player the definition of the word first, because I think there’s some comic timing enabled between that, a short amount of play, and then the “you get the idea” moment right at the end. So I needed a separate screen for the definition, which I’m (for now) extending to all the variations (it’s simply too awkward to call them definitions here). So each one opens with a blank screen stating the definition, then you go into the game itself.
That required the easily imaginable amount of crap around implementing a class, making mistakes, adding to the existing data in the JSON, messing that up, blah blah. But got there in the end. So this now exists.
The gist one also cries out for a blasé “well now you know” end statement and it turned out that I’d already implemented this idea in the existing code, so I was able to just use that. The game now adds an extra text on game over which I can use to say “you get the idea”, which is funny. To me.
I also did the most basic pass on the timing of Gist, which is that the level ends a couple of seconds after you eat the first apple, the idea being you’ve essentially seen the game… you move, eat an apple, get longer… may as well die. (Actually I kind of enjoy the conversation between this and the eternal Robert Yang “describing experimental ideas versus making them” strawperson thing.)
In implementing that I realized this doesn’t account for dying before eating an apple though… you could crash into a wall, die, and be told “you get the idea”. So it’s possible we need to NOT say you get the idea until death-by-timer because they DON’T get the idea? “Maybe you should try again?” (I’ll throw that in now…)
And opening up dangerous territory what if you eat the apple and we timer-kill you… but you haven’t technically experienced crashing into a wall… so… do you get the idea? Kind of because I think it’s relatively clear? How much do you get the idea because you’re meant to already know about Snake?
How far does this go… hmmm… does actually need though.
I made a pink snake but snakes are probably already nude? I’m wondering about the idea of the snake shedding its skin as a “more nude” snake? Constantly shedding its skin… kind of funny and is a sort of mechanic too, builds walls… or… well do you die if you hit a snake skin?
As per the existing candidate description above, I’m not really clear on this, but wanted to signal here that even having a pink snake is working weirdly well and… actually I’m seeing a … well I don’t know…
So right now we have: definition > game with a pink snake (ugh) > when you die it says
AT LEAST YOU DIED NUDE
Which I find really funny. It kind of harks to early text adventures somehow in its bluntness? And it actually activates the nudeness more than I thought it would. It kind of doesn’t matter than the gameplay is no different that before… the nudeness is now just something to be aware of.
It raises the question of whether this ought to just be the normal grey snake though, which is already nude. Which might conjure more of a (comic?) trajectory of
Start playing > huh? this looks the same > die > “at least you died nude” > aha! the snake was always nude!
Or whatever? Anyway, I’m pleased by how a little bit of language is at least offering some more potential without overwhelming the project is what I’m saying.
For now I’ll leave the snake pink solely because it’s funnier, but on principle it’s probably the wrong move.
“the practice of deliberately impeding or delaying the course of legal, legislative, or other procedures.”
Could place a wall in the direction they’re going at a certain point… or make wals around the apple in an inconvenient way (within reason…)
The basic idea works - it builds walls just ahead of you. I have them vanishing as well for now because otherwise it’ll just accumulate.
There’s a problem with placing the apple in a wall or the wall on the apple. So there’s the possibility of things being kind of shitty.
Which… I care about. So I will do more. But we’re getting there.
They aren’t allowed to stop? Or they somehow persist through death? Or the game persists as a layer on top over everything else once you start it would be funny too? Just there forever? These are all GOOD IDEAS.
Let’s try this. I’m concerned about the question of what happens when the persistent snake dies? I suppose it just stays dead… so it needs to ignore the menu/restarts… or rather not ignore them but have a position on them.
Well it worked eventually once I understood about launching versus starting scenes and bringing them to the top and setting a transparent background.
The only annoyance is that if you relaunch persist then it will overwrite the old one as far as I can tell… so multiple persist scenes cannot persist with each other. Which is a sadness, but makes a certain amount of sense and so doesn’t deeply bug me right now. But it would be cooler if there could be indefinitely many of them running. But I think since there’s just one “persist” scene in existence it may not work unless I create a scene that itself manages subscenes… which… I think would get really quite fucked quite fast? Or not? I dunno, I can return to that element.
Main thing is that it’s really quite a fun one because it seems completely normal until you actually exit the scene to the menu and then suddenly the scene is still there and still playable… though I need to remember to think about what happens when you press M or R… but I guess in both cases it’s reasonable so maybe it’s fine.
Haven’t tested any of this on mobile so will have to do that at some point.
People who believe all space contains matter. So the whole world of the game it walls and you die instantly. Nice and easy? Maybe it’s a stupid one, but also who gives a shit?
Just because it’s easy to put this together I will do so. Even though Felix has been watching TV for too long.
Possible that’s the record for fastest ever build? Hilarious. Hadn’t realized the snake would die before you even press a key. Truly it is wonderful. Coming up with “What’s the matter?” at the end is… pretty funny for now.
Just regular snake. I like this one. It’s fun. And especially if I’m including dictionary definitions, e.g. “a person who insists on absolute adherence to traditional rules or structures, especially in language or style.”
I mean, I wanted at least one of these and this seems like the most obvious one. I prototyped it and included an “outro” saying “the old ways are best” to get the doubling down on the meaning. It works in its basic way.
The player would be the sadist right? How? We encourage them to be by scoring points for killing the snake, not for eating the apple. Smash them against the wall, themselves, over and over, for points. GAME OVER if you let them eat the apple?
This one seems simple enough…
Done. I think it works!? I wonder if there’s room for some more comic timing and sound with the deaths versus the apple. Particularly whether you use the apple sound for death and the death sound for apple or not… right now I have the “correct” sounds which… makes sense. But it’s plausible that flipping them makes sense… but it’s also the case that an apple sound when you hit a wall makes the collision sound like there’s nothing much happening… whereas the sadist element is that it’s meant to hurt the snake.
So… probably the way it is. Maybe I will remove the delay to game over… as it’s less obvious without the flashing… yeah that’s better.
Okay, this one seems to be in alright shape.
Snake over the top of famous locations. Good.
I’ve been merrily cropping pictures from my own photos of different cities we’ve visited. Built up 12 with the idea this would be a kind of slide-show as the background of playing Snake. Which is pretty good.
But as I was doing that I was suddenly recalling that “see Venice and die” line. And then that was complicated on looking it up because in The Talented Mr. Ripley Dickie says “see Venice and die, is that what they say? Or is it Rome?” And then later in the Googling a very old letter turns up suggesting it’s actually “See Naples and die”, or more specifically “vedi Napoli e poi muori”.
So now I don’t know. I’ll do the slideshow for right now, but a picture of Naples with the Latin or English at the end would be kind of spikier?
…
But then I “realized” that the smooth move is “both”. So that we have multiple “trips” you can take - Rome, Copenhagen, Caserta, etc. - and each time you die it’s “See Rome (or whichever place) and Die”. Best of both worlds
I think I like it.
A possibly more clear version of alist? Twist the tiles and deal with the visual result? The tiles could “do the twist” while you play? Layer upon layer of bad jokes? Don’t hate it… come on baby, let’s do the twist?
I want to quickly bang this one together because I think it will be very easy? Just rotate stuff. I think also rotate stuff specifically when the snake turns? Or that’s my first approximation. Let’s try it out.
Well it worked juuuust fine. I like it. It looks weird. Not a lot more to say. Could look at getting more complex at the meaning of twist… into the idea of spirals or something say, but for right now what it is strikes me as a-ok. I’m enjoying how the different Snake body bits seem to rotate at… oh I see why. Yeah that’s pretty funny actually. It’s probably worth just looking at a constant rotation or like rhythmic “do the twist” thing rather than tying it to the snake direction?
Anyway, it’s pretty good.
Typing out ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY
Spent a bunch of time on this, actually across two days, but I have to admit defeat because I’m stuck on word wrap. Not much to say. It’s nice looking? I think it works?
Fuck you, wordwrap, I’m coming for you.