This is a little experiment I wanted to do for a while: everyone is welcome to make a move against me, and I will respond with a move (fast reply times are not guaranteed). Please, do try to make your best move possible, but without using any tools, be that chess bots or anything else.
This of this as an r/place type of experience, but much more limited and chess themed. Good luck!
Since the release of Burning Knight I’ve been plagued by a curse, and the name of that curse is knowledge. Since I’ve crossed "the line" of knowing too much, I’ve been cursed by the need to have the perfect tools to make games, and that has resulted in 1.5 tiny jam games in over 4 years. For context, I’ve released 20 similar sized games in 2018. It’s not like more games means better, but I have not really been working on anything for 4 years now. I’m struggling to beat myself up enough to use the simpler solutions, that don’t require me to invent the wheel from scratch, but so far I’ve not found any success.
There is something about making games, that I tickles my inner feelings so much. It has been THE thing I enjoy doing the most, I would eat and sleep thinking about more content for Burning Knight.
I’m in love with the process of populating a world, adding more lore, characters, etc. I’ve been planning out how to integrate an actual story into my game for once. But no.
Some time ago I first admitted to myself, that I can’t find the inner inspiration in me to sit down and write another game. Be it tiny. Whatever. I just can’t. I’ve been jumping from engine to engine, from framework to framework, from language to language. Nothing clicks. I don’t feel it. I know, that in some places its a question of discipline, but when it is a hobby, I feel like the spark is very important. And to add insult to injury, I’ve really set my mind on the fact, that I REALLY need to make a 3D game.
I attempted a few engine write ups, on the screenshot above is the latest one, that has gotten somewhat far, but if you consider that it’s MonoGame that does all the heavy lifting of loading and rendering the vertex data, it’s not a big achievement. Yes, I’ve been learning some stuff about quaternions, etc, but it’s still not much. And then I get the urge to rewrite everything in C++ and Vulkan… You see, where this is going.
I’m insanely nostalgic for the times of the past game development. All the wonderful people, that I’ve met in the PICO-8 community, all the folks who I only know because of the Burning Knight devlogs (I’m so sad, that these are lost to time, I’m trying to teach myself not to delete old content). The folks from notsosolo, wonderful Failpostive who we worked on together on Curse of the Arrow, and still keep in touch…
In my head I know, that it will never be like that ever again. But I can’t accept it just yet.
I want to come back. I want to make games. I want to enjoy the process again. I want to create.
But I don’t know what to change.
Egor.
This post has been written much different from my usual process, but I’ve felt like I need to write this down. This has been brewing for years now, and the fact is, that it is very hard for me to sit down and actually write a post here. It has to clear some mark in my head. But I’m starting to realise, that this is not the point of this place. I hope, that you understand my frustration. If you have any words of advice, please, let me hear them.
And yet here is the end of the year again. Let’s avoid the usual intro and get straight into it, because a lot of things happened.
I’ve always have been fascinated by the realm of physical tinkering, be that something from pure radio electronics or micro controllers. I’ve been always insanely inspired by stuff Adafruit used to make, but they very often finish of their builds with 3d printed enclosures, and owning a 3d printer for some reason didn’t really seem like a thing I could do in the near future. So I just lusted at them at times, but that’s about it. I never really took the time to even read up on them, because it felt so out of my area of competence.
But something, that I would could not have imagined just a year ago, is that right now I would have two of them sitting near my desk.
Through out the years, I’ve came to the conclusion, that healthy limits very often end up improving the creativity of the person, that those limits are placed on. I could bring up countless examples both from my own life and from the human history, but since this is a development blog, today I wanted to talk about self imposed limitations as a way to make game development more fun and creativite.
We will be forever limited by something, and it can range from our parents when we are children, to the amount of matter in the universe, even tho it seems like an infinite amount, if you played Universal Paperclips, you know that it is not that much.
As humans, our brains are incredible at finding loopholes and clever ways around the rules, and you don’t have to go out of your way to find quite a few examples of that, big and small. And those solutions usually are pretty surprising and fun, much more interesting than the thing, that the rule implied you should not do directly.
And such is the case with game development. In the era of NES, you where limited very heavily by the toolset you had to use, memory you had available, even the palette and sprite count. As our hardware advanced, we, as developers, started to feel those hardware limitations less and less. Now you can code in C# instead of C or assembly, and (in mot cases) forget about the physical RAM, you can render complex 3d models without making most computers even trying to look busy processing it, you can have your game weigh tens and hundreds of gigabytes, where as just 30 years ago you had to fit your build on a 40kb cartridge.
And that might sound like a positive change, and it is undoubtedly so, but it is not as black and white as hardware manufacturers would want you to believe.
We can skip over the "lazy developers don’t have to optimize their unity games bla bla bla" bit, and talk about why does every single AAA game try and look hyperrealistic?
As with everything, game design has a lot of different philosophies, people have different views on all sorts of little things. And recently, I grew more and more disappointed with the baffling game design choices in most of mainstream games. And people play and enjoy those games (mostly) without questioning anything. Yes, there are things like lootboxes and pay to win that gets a lot of attention recently, but we don’t have to dig deep to find even more systematic issues.
Can’t really blame the players for playing objectively badly designed games and enjoying them, I would give a lot for not seeing the cracks in game structure, inconsistencies and missed opportunities. But as developers, we can put a tiny bit more effort into designing game systems (honestly, it applies to a ton of fields, like ui/ux design, writing, etc).
So here is a very simple principle for designing your things!
Mourning, my friends, or whatever time it is for you right now.
It’s the end of the year once again, can you believe it? And looking back at the older posts, this is the 5th year I’m writing a recap for on this blog, sheesh!
Every time I come back here, I feel like this time hasn’t moved what so ever, and everything remains the same, only the dust settles down more and more. I have to admit, I hate sitting down and actually writing these "long" posts, but I’m glad every time I’ve pushed one out. This year I tried out blogging in a smaller way, thanks to my travels and Telegram, and it was a fun adventure. Being able to share a thing in 1-5 minutes is really nice and I was looking forward to it every time. But I do not want to bury this site, as this is somewhat the "more serious" part of my life, I guess. And also, the "less seen" part of my life, by the folks in my life.
But enough rambling around, let’s talk about this year’s worth of progress.
I’ve been trying to create a mix of Lua and JavaScript for the past 5+ years. The resulting waste of time is called lit, and it is still not nowhere close enough in terms of stability to be used for anything but "hello worlds".
I burned out on it a ton. At this point, I don’t think I will ever continue working on it. I was dreaming of a day, when I will write about it here. Well, this day has arrived, but it’s not a praise to the language, but instead a tale of another language, born out of frustration with lit development.
Quite a lengthy title, but it kinda matches the time gap between now and the last non-year-recap post, huh? It’s been 2 years? My gosh. Let’s quickly talk a bit about what’s been happening.
As you can see, I wasn’t exactly doing nothing, even tho my coding has slowed down quite a bit…
Hello, this time it’s really been a while. This place lies in ruins ever since the last years recap. And it just goes to show, how busy and unpredictable this year has been for me. So let’s take a step back for once from all of this mess, and try and look at it from a distance.