#i'm watching a video on how roguelikes are constructed

[anaalnathrakhs]

i don’t know what it is with me and video games but no matter how fun or interesting a game sounds, i almost never boot it up and even when i do i play like thirty minutes and then give up.

like i guess it’s because i’m a internet-addicted little gremlin and the second i open an browser i have a System to get me five different kinds of doomscrolling on hand at once, so unlike irl hobbies that i can do away from the computer or in tandem with my doomscrolling of choice today, i need to have my cozy usual setup just a tiiiny bit out of reach but avoid using it to focus on my game.

i don’t usually have that problem with games on my phone or handheld consoles back when i had one of those, but also i’m careful to pick games that aren’t disturbed by me watching a video at the same time, like wordless brain puzzles or pokemon hunting yknow, if the game starts a story segment or ambiance is important i play that on its own, away from distractions.

even when i play flash games on the computer while watching a video, i feel like i switch back and forth still pretty often. and even when i play a “proper” game with friends and focus on it for a couple hours, i can tell it wears me down and at the end all i can think about it the skin-crawling need to go listen to music really loud and scroll social media for two hours, even though that’s also because of the socialization aspect.

but switching back and forth between a solo game and my usual setup isn’t really an option cuz my computer struggles with it depending on the game, and also even if i did find something on my phone that could fill that role, most computer games are still more involved than mobile games that i can play while doing something else. i wouldn’t want to take away from the experience of a game bc my stupid brain needs to also be doing sudoku and listening to 2000′s pop at the same time. because honestly i kinda already do that when i watch movies and series. which i feel somewhat conflicted about. but that might mean there’s just yknow, no way to get over it, at least in my current circumstances.

[chirpchirplol]

snake secondary and video games

I play a lot of video games and I haaaaaate when a game wants me to draw out maps or write down stuff on paper. like, I'm playing a game, the reason I am playing a game is that I don't want to write down notes, if I wanted to take notes I'd go back to school. I also don't like missable content or games that want you to find one optimized solution with strict timing. I don't have the patience for that so I usually just go on gamefaqs and follow the guide, which takes some of the fun away. weirdly I do like speedruns, but mostly watching people exploit glitches and break shit. one speedrunner got a regular-ass copy of super mario world to turn into flappy bird which is the coolest shit ever.

my favorite genres are roguelikes and puzzle games, and one of my favorite puzzle games is Baba Is You. if you're not familiar with it, the gimmick is that the rules of the game are physical objects that you can push around or change. you're penned in by walls because there's a rule that WALL IS STOP. but push that STOP out of the way and you can now walk through those walls.

one of the reasons I like Baba Is You is that you can approach it in multiple ways. it's very much a Systems Game and it appeals to people who like to figure out the underlying system behind the rules. every level is specifically designed to teach you something about an interaction with the rules, which often behave in ways that aren't your first intuition. they're really tightly constructed, the developer has talked about how he didn't want levels to feel chaotic or aimless

but there is A LOT of flexibility in how you do that. you can sit down and think about all the implications of the rules and assumptions you might have that are wrong, which absolutely gives you a good foundation for future puzzles. or you can just try various things, see what happens, see how those things could be useful to you. which absolutely solves levels, and the game has infinite undo so it isn't even annoying.

or maybe you don't want to focus on the rules first. you can look at the level itself and ask yourself "how am I going to win? where do I need to be, what do I need to be, what does the board have to look like, why are these specific things here?" and work out a whole plan of attack, start to finish, and then when you actually do the solution it's just pressing keys. or you can just plunge in and figure that out in stages as you go, "ok what am I doing now, what moves are available to me." both of these work. usually you'll do both to some extent

or you can also find a way to totally bust the level until it's your playground. the designer really went to lengths to make it hard for people to find solutions other than the intended one, and he's patched a lot of cases where players did. but he didn't get them all, and the feeling of finding a new one is so cool.

the moral of the story is idk why I even doubted my secondary, I legitimately think you could just put a baba is you level in front of someone and you'd find out their secondary within 15 minutes