this was so good... what a real one

Failing to Fail: The Spiderweb Software Way YouTube video by GDC Festival of Gaming

This is still one of the best videos of all time for any creative youtu.be/stxVBJem3Rs?...

Had a very nice interview with the crew at Electric Airship! Had a blast yapping about games and making art and the cookie cutter jam. Give it a watch!

Just gonna reach out again to see if anyone needs an extra hand for Unreal support/Netcode/lobby/character action and controls/fighting games.
My cost of living is pretty low and so my rates are reasonable.

CDCD DROOL #KKpng

I dropped a full playhtrough of LOVE ETERNAL on my VOD channel. It's an extremely weird surreal horror precision platformer. My proof is that this is ab UNALTERED SCREENSHOT from the game.
youtu.be/jnbuHgPbfzY

this would be great and yeah very little about this online!

i've done a couple dozen interviews for love eternal - some have been great! - but very few have gotten into the nitty gritty of what tools i use, what my design methodology is, how i create sound effects, how i playtest, etc. which is the sort of thing i personally want to hear from other devs!

i wish there were more interviews with game developers by and for other devs that focused on process! it feels like very low hanging fruit...

i also designed it with the intent to create properly mastered songs, so both parties can record lossless versions of their own input and mix them in a DAW afterwards. you can even send a "signal tone" from the app that's applied to both recordings so you can use it as a timestamp to line them up

surprisingly this is not something there's an good solution for already! most of the existing jam apps are focused around playing traditional instruments to a metronome, but when you don't have to worry about keeping music in time because it's loose and textural, the whole thing becomes much simpler

been working on a small app that lets two musicians make ambient jams over the internet

i have never made a game with slopes in my 10+ years of making games but recently i have been considering it...

have you played magical drop 3? i like how scrappy that one is

genre with the problem of best ideas already made... tetris and puyo puyo are like perfect games

i keep wanting to make one but i can never actually think of a novel gimmick...

the farmer, red hat, light blue top, purple sleeves, white pants, dark blue boots, is reach out for a large pear in the middle of the screen. on the other side of the pear is a small purple creature with green legs and blue feet, spiky white hair, yellow nose, tongue out(?).

farmer, loading screen, sinclair ql (1987) qxl.win/farmer.htm

i understand the answer is probably a mixture of it depending on the game and personal taste, but if there's guidelines people find helpful i'd love to hear them

or should all overlaps and collision checks happen in one system that simply tags every colliding entity with a collided component that each individual system can respond to?

for instance, in the game i'm working on right now the player can fire arrows and then pick them up. should the arrow system do an AABB check to see if the player is overlapping? should it directly modify the player's quiver count or attach a message component for the player system to act on?

does anyone have any good resources or advice for writing idiomatic ECS? i'm finding it trick to decide when to break things into a system, or which system to have handle interactions between entities

Suburbs

I finished Love Eternal tonight. What an eerie, hilarious, disturbing, beautiful and very challenging game. Strongly recommend it if you can handle precision platforming. It has such a wild and well-written story.

i knew love eternal was something special when i started it but last night i hit the FUNNY parts and it skyrocketed into one of my all time faves. holy shit.

but yeah this website in particular feels like it has a wretched breed of moralizing reply guy determined to misconstrue what you said

no you're one of the friends i'll go talk to instead haha!!

i don't post as much as i used to because i draft a thought in five seconds and then spend five minutes casting protective wards against bad faith interpretations and eventually decide i'll just talk about it with my friends instead

Why The Dream Logic of Love Eternal Doesn't Need to Explain Itself _In 2017, professor Ian Bogost_ _proudly declared in_ The Atlantic _that games don't need stories. "That’s a problem to be ignored rather than solved. Games’ obsession with story obscures more ambitious goals anyway," he wrote. Bogost's general point was that stories are what you build on top of a medium's true material foundations, and games are actually best at disassembling ordinary objects and systems and reassembling them in surprising new ways._ _"There was a really big trend in the 2000s to have your story expressed explicitly through the mechanics," LA-based game designer Toby Alden says. 'The joke I always make is a platformer where it’s like, “I’m_ grappling _with the loss of my wife."_ _Right around the same time Bogost penned his broadside, brothers Toby and Ben Alden began updating a pet project called_ Love _, a hyper-difficult "masocore" game that almost no one finished and, to Bogost's point, was devoid of any narrative. But even for a physics-minded designer like Alden, the allure of telling some kind of story, even if the game itself doesn't demand it, was simply too great. But rather than deliver the story through the player's actions themselves,_Love Eternal, _the newly-released game simply leans into the abstraction._ _You are a Maya, a girl who's family has disappeared during dinner, and you're dropped into a perlious world in clear disrepair. You father has become some kind of wraith and a childhood friend has become something else entirely. It's all eerie but also deliberately indecipherable. In this conversation, Toby and I talk about the influence of ambient music like Aphex Twin, the perils of working with your brother, and how to make games that feel like playing music._ ## How Do You Design a Level That Feels Like Playing a Theremin? **JAMIN WARREN:**_I first found out about your work from Jenna Caravello, who recommended we connect. I’d reached out to her because I was interested in what was happening with animators in Los Angeles given their relationship to games. How did you make your way into game-making?_ **TOBY:** Almost as long as I can remember, it’s been something I’ve wanted to do. Around high school, I played _Cave Story_ for the first time and became aware that making a game was something one person could do. As soon as that was on my radar, I began taking stabs at it—making mods for _Cave Story_ , trying to make Flash games. I started a lot of projects and didn’t finish any until a little after college. But the desire was there from a young age. **WARREN:**_You’ve mentioned making music and wanting sound to fill the room. Tell me about the relationship between your music practice and your games._ **TOBY:** I’ve made music for a long time—it developed parallel to game making, with a similar trajectory of false starts until around college. A little after that, I started DJing, which I’ve done for almost a decade. Those three form the brunt of my artistic output: DJing, making music, making games. Music and games are very complementary—obviously because games contain music. But there’s almost a parallel between playing a game and playing an instrument, where it produces sound that fills a room. I think a lot about what one of my games would be like if you were in the room but weren’t the one playing—you just heard it. Would it be abrasive? Or would it be more soothing, ambient background noise? Which is what I usually lean towards. **WARREN:**_What kind of music were you DJing? Were there particular artists that pulled you into music early on?_ **TOBY:** A lot of what I was inspired by early on was sample-based music—DJ Shadow, Burial, IDM like Aphex Twin, and Kettel. A lot of rap production, like _36 Chambers_. Sample-based stuff especially had a big influence because it fit the way I thought about sounds—through experimenting, sampling, and re-sampling. And ambient music. I’ve always listened to a lot of it, and that’s a big part of what I DJ now—stuff that leans toward ambient, dub, ambient techno, down-tempo. **WARREN:**_You didn’t do the music for Love Eternal yourself (Emily Glass did.) Even if you’re not the person making the music, the decision to contract somebody who fits a particular vision speaks to taste. How did you connect with Emily? Did you start with a score in mind?_ **TOBY:** She was my first choice because she was the most talented person I knew who made music, and she had the emotional depth and richness of sound I thought would fit really well. Being in the position of directing a project requires this balance of egotism and humility—the things you know you can do well, you want to be confident in. But you really need to know what you’re not good at and then trust the people you assign those roles to. There wasn’t a lot of back and forth—small adjustments to fit technical specifications, but for the most part, I could let them do what I knew they were good at. I wanted the music to be ambient in the classical Brian Eno sense—where if you pay attention, a lot of nuance comes out, but if you don’t, it recedes into the background. I said something along those lines in my original pitch to Emily, and the first thing I got back I was like, “Yep. That’s exactly it.” ## Do Games Need to Explain Their Own Mechanics? **WARREN:**_For the story—you’ve said it wasn’t planned in a particular way. I typically don’t think of platformers as games where story isn’t really important anyway. Were there moments where what the game required mechanically was at odds with what you wanted to express narratively?_ **TOBY:** No, there wasn’t. There was a really big trend in the 2000s where it was very chic to have your story expressed explicitly through the mechanics—or have the mechanics cleverly comment on your story. The joke I always make is a platformer where it’s like, “I’m grappling with the loss of my wife.” But I think one of the strengths of video games is that people are willing to accept a level of abstraction. They don’t actually find it jarring to do a bunch of arbitrary platforming and then have a story beat. The gravity mechanic—where you can flip gravity—it’s never explained. There’s no in-game reason why you can do that. But I’ve never had anyone ask me why she can do that. I think video games are allowed to operate with this dream-like logic, and you give up some storytelling power if you ignore that. It was very freeing to write the story in a more abstract way that didn’t explain everything. There’s no moment in the game where Maya looks to the camera and says, “What’s going on? Why am I in this castle?” **WARREN:**_The way the game functions is at this subconscious state of working through individual levels. When I would think about things too much, it made it difficult. It felt more like playing a theremin than playing a piano—like playing a fretless bass rather than a harp. Can you tell me about what the feel of the levels should be like?_ **TOBY:** A lot of it comes down to intuition and experimentation. There’s a lot of just opening the level editor, smearing some spikes and geometry around, hopping into the game, seeing what it feels like. And then maybe you have one particular moment where it’s like, “Oh, that was really satisfying.” Maybe I can do that a second time in a slightly different way, or structure the whole level around it. That happens more often than sitting down with a fully formed idea. Despite what YouTube essays would have you believe, there aren’t really rules I follow to produce a brilliant level. It’s a lot more experimenting, playing, and seeing what feels fun or interesting.

Toby Alden traces a line from to ambient DJing to Love Eternal, a gravity-flipping platformer where dream logic and intuition guide every level.

Derelict Star is OUT NOW!

Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/3641010/...
Itch: gate.itch.io/derelict-star

Love Eternal is incredible. it does so much more than I was expecting.