Planescape: Torment is extremely replayable. I’ve been playing it every few years since I got a copy in I think like the early 2000s. It may be that this has something to do with having gotten to play it a little bit in the 90s but not having gotten to play the whole thing. There was a lot of anticipation there.

But I don’t think it’s just that. It’s incredibly responsive to choice, and it’s one of the first games I can recall with things like faction reputations and alignments. There’s a lot there to dig through, and even once you have, it’s always cool to wander around Sigil. It feels very alive.

The other one I end up replaying over and over is Shadowrun for SNES. That’s not so much infinitely repayable though as just a really great game that I’m happy to run through.

Birdo is even trans!

I’d love to see someone figure out how to up the player limit or link games. Baldur’s Gate would be such a great medium for a D&D roleplay server if it could be set up to handle it.

The way to fix it is for developers not to sell out. When your small studio’s game blows up, you’re left with a choice. Do you care about art and making quality games, or do you care about making money and appeasing corporations in exchange for empty promises?

Are you going to leave you work in the hands of its creators, or are you going to hand it off to someone whose entire path in life is centered around squeezing as much money as possible out of every product with no concern for its quality or integrity?

The Sega game was pretty cool. You could be a dinosaur!

I’m not sure I’d call buying up and burning other companies like furniture in a fireplace ‘sustainable’.

No, no, no. This is all wrong. USB has a spin of 1/2.

Unfortunately, a lot of people blindly believe in systems and authorities. It doesn’t matter how many times they’re shown that companies give zero fucks and will light everything on fire at a whim, they think they’re rational actors who will do what’s responsible for their product, their customers, and their employees.

Clearly, that assumption isn’t remotely true, but they’d rather roll their eyes at anyone who doesn’t take it on faith than risk having their world view altered.

I’m going for very specific look of stylized visuals that’ll play well into my animation experience with Flash. I’ve got the shader for it pretty much nailed, I’m just working on my actual like body concept stuff and I’m not fully sold on the actual perspective angle I’ve been playing with. I definitely have a lot of artist and animator friends who have seen it and I’ve gotten good feedback.

But yeah, on the music side of things, I honestly think I want to try to find some folks to play with some time soon. I’m still shoring up my performance end of things, but playing some bass and/or keyboard and/or guitar with a band would probably help my ear a lot and also give me some folks that I could have a musical understanding with who could help me with the soundtrack.

I’d honestly love to release a sort of grungy album. Most of what I’ve been composing seems to lean into experimental guitar stuff, but it’s all still pretty raw.

I use Trello a bit, but not consistently. I’ll use it at the beginning of a project to kind of map things out, then come back a few times to kind of check in with where I’m at and see if there’s anything I’m not thinking of. I also have a ton of note files just laying all over my computer, my discord, and my notesnook account. I used to use Google Docs, but I don’t really want them scraping my stuff for their AI before I even get to finish it.

Honestly I just kind of operate like a blob. I expand in a bunch of different directions on a project a little bit at a time until it starts to come together. Stuff percolates and another piece will fall into place and I’ll get a burst of momentum. Eventually I’ll notice I’m banging my head against something that doesn’t work and I’ll realize I’m looking in the wrong place or I don’t have the right thing yet and I’ll work on some other component.

A lot of stuff just kind of comes to me at random times and I try to get it out before I forget it. But it also involves a lot of like sort of flow state thinking keeping track of how different pieces of a thing connect with one another.

But also like, I feel like you kind of have to be comfortable just having a bunch of files full of concepts that don’t necessarily go anywhere immediately? Like, you need to be ready to just throw some shit out there, see how it works, chop massive pieces off of it or throw it away entirely. The moment you let yourself be self-conscious about your work or worry if you’re “really going in the right direction” you’re fucked. I mean, you can have that moment I guess as long as you don’t stay in it, but it’s the drive and the confidence that gets the actual thing finished whether anybody sees it or not.

You have to do something. You can always do something else later.

Once it’s done I feel like that’s its own other game entirely. Like, I have some guerilla marketing ideas and some former contacts I can try to get on the radar of, but that’s another phase of things. I can’t worry too much about that while I’m over here in playtesting, tweaking, and adding play-informed mechanics land.

Like right now we’re just basically playing a game and I’ll stop suddenly in the middle of it and be like oh I need to add something, and I take some notes and then we keep going. A lot of the time at the end of the session I know pretty much what I need to do; whether a mechanic is too complicated or fiddly or not robust enough or needs something else to compensate for it or whatever, it becomes evident when you watch it play out.

I’m not really sure how I’d ever get anything done if I was too focused on the organization of it, to be honest. I give myself enough hats without trying to also be a hat rack.

I drive a cab and get paid very little to basically drive around and help people. Like, the job is to drive people from point A to point B, but I try to do more than that, and help people who need it along the way. I carry a lot of stuff around that I’m not really paid for and I try to go the extra mile for people.

If the projects I’m working on pan out and I manage to get to a place where I have more resources, I plan to use that as a way of making other small steps. Setting up a coop instead of chasing money, releasing a game license that allows independent producers to do their own thing. Things like that. Literally just leaving the door open for people instead of slamming it shut.

I don’t really have any intent to code software outside of games, but I’d like to empower others to be able to make the things they want to make and not just feed some big parasitic company with it.

Grow a bunch of labor bushes and make it incredibly clear that it’s not about them being owned, but about them being labor bushes.

To me the change from the current system doesn’t come by diving into the current system and trying to ask it nicely. It doesn’t come from asking permission at all. It comes from operating with zero concern or tolerance for capitalist bullshit.

Go help people who can’t afford to pay you. Make something beautiful and give it to the world in a way that gives them an opportunity to prop you up, but that also lets them enjoy it without having to be rich or emptying their wallet.

Internalize the idea that wealth is not a virtue, and poverty is not an ill. People who need help are an opportunity to help, and people who have value are in a position to use it to help, but holding onto that value and using it are mutually exclusive.

It’s not going to come from a politician or some big speaker or a revolution, it’s going to come from individual people in their own lives lives making different choices. Your choices matter.

People literally buy into the idea that they wouldn’t know how to do anything if they weren’t being told what to do. They think that value comes from above.

They think that when a company sells them raspberries, that company invented the raspberry bush. They don’t realize that the raspberries were already there. They certainly don’t realize that they themselves are another kind of bush. Or that the labor bush operates without a company to own it and sell its labor berries.

The tabletop system is intended to be modular, with subsystems that can easily be added, removed, or tuned for different genres. The initial playtest I did was in a zombie survival setting, currently we’re doing a campaign that’s got a bit more of a Shadowrunny type feel, mixing technological dystopia and magic. The idea is to put out a core book in those settings as well as a fantasy setting and a space opera setting, so people can mix and match subsystems and do whatever they like with it.

I applied programming concepts to the design of the mechanics themselves in a way that I hope makes them more intuitive and tries to maintain a steady flow of tension and release without a bunch of pausing to check stuff once you know the system.

I don’t want to give too much of the details away, but I do plan to release a system resource document along with the actual books. And it’ll be released under an anti-corporate license, so other small creators can make modules for it, but big companies will have to shell out if they want to play ball.

Once that’s ready to go I have a couple of video games planned using the same system. One of them ties heavily into themes of abuse and autonomy, the other is about time travel. I have some of the early stages of the art and some shaders and stuff done for these, and have set up a few mechanics, but they’re still kind of on the back burner. I’ve been teaching myself music theory and composition so the soundtrack doesn’t become an afterthought, and I feel like there’s still something conceptual I’m missing at the core of the visual design. I’ll get there, though.

I feel you. I’m out here trying to get by driving a cab 3 days a week and throwing myself into my work the other 4. Gotta be stubborn and resourceful.

Tryin’! I gotta put out a tabletop RPG first. Smaller market, plus I need to finish the rule set to use it in my games!

I think that depends on who’s doing it, what they’re going for, and what approach they take.

For me, I’m aiming squarely at 2d, because I think it’s a better medium for focusing on story. You’re more able to take advantage of human pattern recognition than with higher fidelity, and you literally reduce your design considerations and troubleshooting by an entire dimension.

I think the difference, though, is you have to harness the power of people’s passion for their work. If you try to set up an ‘indie’ studio and you’re basically just running on a big studio’s model with less money, you’re probably not going to flourish. Many of the examples of indies that do well that we see are those who put everything into their work, often working totally solo. They’re people who had an idea and were stubborn enough to make it happen without filtering it through somebody else’s lens or asking anyone for permission to do it.

I think in the current indie market if you’re kind of sitting around waiting for someone to point you at where to go, you’re probably going to be pretty lost. But if you’ve got a strong sense of direction? If you’re not just making the 9 billionth rogue-like platformer this year? I think it’s a prime environment to do pretty well if you have a way to stick out from the crowd.

Maybe not AAA well, but if you’re an indie publisher what do you need AAA money for? Judging by the trend of studios making a great game or two then getting big and slowly watering down their product in favor of homogenized board-driven safe plays and money grabs, large quantities of concentrated money are terrible for art without some kind of protection.

Personally, I think the best way to go about it is by making indie coops with charters that restrict selling out, merging, or going public. Maybe even have some kind of provision that splits the decision making of the coop’s members across inter-related but independent coops. Like an amoeba.

Cell division isn’t just important to maintain a healthy population, it’s important to maintain the health of individual cells. Why don’t we do the same thing with businesses?

Why should the measure of success be toxic growth that adds nothing to the economy when by resisting the impulse to sell off to the literal economic cancer ruining our planet and our own well-being, we can out-compete them en masse with superior products?

What would happen if all these studios Microsoft is liquifying had said no when some corpo met them at a crossroads and gave them a suitcase full of gold for their souls?

What would happen if instead of selling to the highest bidder immediately after becoming successful, companies invested in their own potential and were able to grow healthily while actually caring about the product they put out and the people they employ?

That literally can happen, we just have to do it. We have to decide that the Overton window of economic behavior shouldn’t determine how we act. That it actually is a bad thing to let the giant bully of a company ruining your industry give you a few million dollars to stop existing.

Just like, don’t turn your business into a big fat juicy sheep and sell it to the wolf. Get some wool. Make some sweaters. Let’s all be cozy instead, yeah?

Honestly, if history tells us anything, this is probably actually good in the long run. We have to move into this phase where it becomes incredibly clear that corporate game studios are incapable of operating in the long term or putting out a quality product. That way the indie market or some new players can start to pick up steam.

Look at what happened in 1983. There was so much identical garbage shovelware being released by companies looking to make a buck that the game market crashed under the sheer weight of bullshit. But then what happened two years later?

We got Nintendo.

It’s bad right now. Not just in gaming, but across the board. It seems like just about every industry is feeling the impact of unchecked corporate greed all at once.

But that gives us an opportunity. We can replace them.

We can do things right, for the right reasons, and then when they come knocking at the door and ask to buy us out? We say no.

We say we know what we have. We know its value, and we don’t want to sell every good thing in the world to the worst of humanity so they can light it on fire to make a number go up.

I dunno. I pulled Septera Core out of a bargain bin shoved together with some forgettable mech game for $10, and it was pretty great.

I don’t think effort is what makes the difference. Games now are designed increasingly in ways that are less ‘risky’ in terms of corporate measures of user satisfaction than they used to be. It’s the kind of measure of satisfaction that sees a quest marker constantly showing your destination as clearly preferable to having to actually look at the world and find your way around.

I’ve run into this with friends of mine who are into modding before. When they see one mechanic that negates another mechanic, or that degrades the output quality of another mechanic, they see it as wasted code. To me, that’s the essence of the tension and release in a game. You create a state the player wants to get to, then you put shit in their way and provide them with various ways of solving your obstacles. That’s basically narrative driven gaming in a nutshell, an interaction between barriers and ways of negating those barriers.

But like, I think that may be part of what’s missing sometimes in pushing these more like real-world convenience-oriented features akin to a GPS app. If you’re making a GPS app, you want it to work perfectly, but in a game it’s kind of more fun if it’s got a little bit of jank in it. Not the actual code, obviously, but the player’s interaction with the mechanic in the game world. A straightforward trip from point A to point B isn’t much of a story.

Honestly, I think it’s just more of the kind of watering down that’s inevitable as you get too much money wrapped up in a project. Corporate infrastructures and IPOs aren’t conducive to art. Or quality in anything else, for that matter. It doesn’t just affect what decisions are made in a game’s development, either. It affects how people are educated, who gets hired, how labor is divided.

There’s definitely something to be said for the effects of nostalgia and survivorship bias on the appearance of retro gaming in a modern context, but there also have been major changes that aren’t just about the decisions of individual companies.

There definitely is a lot of crap that came out back in the day that we tend to forget, but there were also very different popular strategies for game making.

One of the most significant for me is the degradation of choice in RPGs. Many, certainly not all, of the RPGs I played as a kid and as a teenager would have elements of their story that could diverge to some degree based on your actions. The most typical results were things like a different ending or an otherwise hidden scene. Silent Hill was a good example of this. But you’d also have a lot of games where your choices immediately and totally altered the way things play out, like Planescape: Torment or Baldur’s Gate. Your choices could affect not only the ending, but a whole lot on the way. Hell, the first Fallout game served up some major unforeseen consequences for an action that on the surface seems like a pretty straightforwardly good idea.

But ever since Mass Effect I’ve noticed an emptiness in choice making, and recently I saw an article that showed me why.

If you follow the branching choices in those early games like a flow chart, the choices on it were often significant divergences that don’t ever meet back up with the original iteration of the quest. But modern design techniques try to be efficient, so you’ve got a branching point at the point of choice, then it rejoins the main quest, and then later on it branches off briefly to check what you did and react to it, before going back to the main quest as though nothing happened.

It’s such a letdown. If you only play once and never save scum it’ll seem fine, but the lack of depth becomes readily apparent so quickly. It’s not like nobody’s still doing big branches too, but you can tell when they default to this and it feels so empty.

I’ve enjoyed Baldur’s Gate 3, but one of the things I notice, especially in act 3, is how slapped together some of these branching choices are. Also, as cute as the die rolling mechanic is, the constant clear and random success/failure state of all branching choices just leads to endless save scumming. The game doesn’t handle it like a divergence in one way or the other, it straight up tells you you failed.

In D&D the die rolls are fun and tense, but they don’t become this totally separate gambling subgame. Sometimes it’s important to get a bad die roll, and sometimes the result in terms of fun is way better than getting a good die roll. I never got that impression from BG3. It felt like a bad die roll meant missing content rather than getting different content, and I think that’s largely because of the literal framing of the die rolling UI and the associated sounds. A more neutral UI where you don’t know the DC of what you’re rolling for and it doesn’t scream at you that your roll wasn’t good enough might let people RP out the failure a little better. Comedy doesn’t hurt either, and is a great tool for DMs seeking to alleviate some of the pain of a bad roll.

Anyway, point being, I think there are some problems with modern game design philosophy that stem from seeking efficiency and greater visual fidelity and audio complexity over engaging game design. Shitty graphics and limited processing power mean you have to make decisions to bring the player into the world and get them to forget that their character’s head is like 8 pixels or whatever. So they have to exploit humanity’s adeptness at pattern recognition, but they also have to make what they’ve got count. They’re not overloading it with bloat and random branches just for the hell of it. A branching story was a branching story because they really wanted it to be.

I’m probably like 50% talking out of my ass, but I feel like if we had Tim Cain here with us he’d agree with me.

Though indie games do seem perfectly capable of avoiding this corporate optimization shit.

But in a word: no.

You are not.