my-autism-adhd-blog · 6 hours ago
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Exploring the connection between being autistic and loving animals
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The Autistic Teacher
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inezrable · 2 days ago
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Going up to the God Of Autism like "Can you remove this special interest? Get me out please"
And It says "Lol nope you read this weird book 5 years ago and now 2 of the characters have been imprinted into your brain and you can't remove the brain tattoos."
And I'm like "Gosh dang it." And I put on sunglasses and keep drawing snakes in my notebooks. "Welp. Guess I'm stuck here forever."
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lumsel · 2 days ago
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Basement Syndrome
Why do first levels in roguelikes suck so bad?
Consider it. You're playing your favourite roguelike, starting up a new run, but before you get to the fun part you have to slog through that part. You know, the boring slog at the start of every playthrough that you gotta suffer through before you hit the fun part. The Mines in Spelunky, the Desert in Nuclear Throne, the Basement in Binding of Isaac, if they've all got one thing in common it's that you just can't wait to get out of them. What gives? This is Basement Syndrome: the tendency in roguelikes for the start of the run to just broadly suck ass.
There's two big reasons Basement Syndrome is so pervasive in the genre:
The first is Difficulty. The first level in a roguelike is generally designed to be a new player's introduction to the game. It has to be! It's the first thing you're confronted with when you hit play. So this first level bears the burden of introducing the player to the game's mechanics and expectations in a controlled environment. The designer is understandably reluctant to throw new players in the deep end, so this first level will usually be mechanically less complex so you can come to grips with how everything works before the game starts switching things up on you.
Add on to that how a lot of roguelikes take a kind of arcade approach to progression. You measured your success based on how far you progressed in a run. You'd get good enough to beat level one, but then you get stonewalled by level two. Then when you're good enough to beat level two, you get stonewalled by level three, and so on, until you hone your skills enough to beat the whole damn game. Each level is a new spike in difficulty that you have to conquer to beat the game, and you measure that progress to mastery by your runs reaching further and further into the game
This is pretty standard stuff, it's a difficulty curve, everyone does this. But, of course, in a roguelike... you gotta replay that super simple easiest first level every time you die! This means the first area has to juggle a dual responsibility as a new player's introduction to the game, and the start of every elite player's run. That's not an easy balance to strike-- and most games don't strike it!
The second is Variance. Modern roguelikes use the player's build as a source of variance from run-to-run. As you play through a run, your character will accumulate new items that give them unique attributes which come to define their playstyle in some way. This has become a ubiquitous part of the genre, and it makes sense! It's a great way of keeping the game fresh and interesting as you replay it again and again, by changing the way in which you engage with the same problems the game tosses at you depending on the tools you've been given.
The problem, though, is that if the bonuses that define your build are something that accumulates over the course of the run... then at the start of the run, when you've got the least bonuses, that's where the variance is at its lowest. The first area in a roguelike takes place before your build has taken shape -- if every run begins in the same place and then branches out into something interesting, but the start of the run is happening before that branching has occurred. Which means that the feature that makes roguelikes as replayable as they are -- the variance -- is straight up not present through the first level or longer. It's the same shit every time!
So, alright. Basement Syndrome is basically two problems walking in lockstep. And the bad news is that these can be pretty tough problems to solve. But the good news is, you can stand on the shoulders of giants here, cause these are a known problems. Roguelike devs the world over have concocted solutions for one or both of these. Let's take a look at some of those.
Solution 1 (Difficulty): Just Fuckin Skip That Shit
If the first level sucks so bad, why not just not play it? This is the problem Spelunky set out to answer when it invented the Tunnel Man. Once you've showed true mastery of the first level, you can accumulate resources that allow you to buy skips past those early levels that let you get stuck right in to the good stuff.
This one gets kind of held back by most of the games that implement it implicitly punishing you for using it. Spelunky treats the ironman run as the "true" way to beat the game and you'll be down on items if you skip to the end anyway, and Nuclear Throne has the oasis shortcut but because of how that one scales difficulty you'll be behind on weapons and score for the rest of the run. Maybe Enter the Gungeon was better about this but I did not like that game so I never found out lol. A shame, too, because I really think there's promise here. Just skip the boring bit! It's fine!
Solution 2 (Difficulty): Metadifficulty
Many Roguelikes escalate difficulty by ramping up the challenge with each successive level in a run. But what if there was another way? What if, once you got good enough at level three... level one got harder instead? Enter metadifficulty. This is systems like ascensions in Slay the Spire and Heat in Hades, where beating runs grants you access to new tiers of difficulty that add complications to the entire thing, allowing the devs to scale game difficulty in such a way that the run can START hard and not just GET hard after an indeterminate time.
This can be done wrong, like if you amp up the damage without increasing the complexity of the start, you've potentially made the game more tedious but not more interesting. But it's not too hard to add some modifiers that change up behaviours enough to add interesting wrinkles to the early game. Even something so simple as a time limit can really complicate how you view that first level, pushing things enough to add engagement to even the start of the game.
Solution 3 (Difficulty): Alternate Start
Pretty straightforward one here. Just swap out that shitty first level for an actually good first level. The Repentance expansion of Binding of Isaac lets you switch over to Downpour after playing the first floor of the Basement, and in return you get a free reroll on every item room in the alt path. You could also see Hades II's surface route as a variant of this as well.
I think this is a really promising solution on the difficulty side; it's all the benefits of Just Fuckin Skip That Shit without the sorta cheaty feeling it brings. There are potential issues with actually incentivising the alternate start, though. Why play the harder (but more interesting) start level when you could play the easier (but more boring) start and not have to risk anything? Sometimes you gotta come up with tricky ways to force players into enjoying themselves when they won't do it themselves.
I'd like to see this one explored more. Both the abovementioned games implement alternate starts as part of a whole entire alternate game route, and yeah, not every roguelike is gonna have the resources for that. It'd be neat to see some roguelikes that have this sort of thing but really just for the first level. Who knows? It could work better than you think.
Solution 1 (Variance): Start Bonuses
So if early game variance is such a problem, why not just... add variance to the early game? Every run, at the start of the run, why not give the player some huge big bonus that could help define their run? That'd at least make the start more interesting, right?
It's a good idea that immediately runs into an issue, which is that couldn't you just restart the run over and over until you get the start bonus you want? Cause if players are doing that, that actually totally defeats the purpose -- the run variance you so carefully cultivated is now obliterated by degenerate player strategies! Every run starts the same way again! Fortunately Slay the Spire already figured out how to handle that in a pretty elegant way, which is that the cool start bonuses are only granted if you reached the first boss. This means you can't just hold R until you get a good start, you're forced to at least commit a little to every run if you wanna keep seeing those cool bonuses. Smart!
Solution 2 (Variance): Frontloaded Upgrades
So, run variance in a roguelike is the result of a number of accumulated bonuses, all of which work together to define your run. This is all well and good, but... does it need to work this way? What if the first few upgrades in your run are more consequential than the others, causing your build to rapidly take shape right at the beginning and the rest of the run becomes tuning?
This stroke of genius is exactly how Hades II handles it! You've got five primary slots for upgrades that affect your active abilities and your method of MP gain, and you can only have one upgrade in each slot. These slots rapidly fill up at the start of the run, and the upgrades that hit these slots are far more consequential than most of the passive upgrades that don't touch a slot, so the shape your run will take is rapidly defined nearer to the start of the run and the rest of the run is just tuning (you'll notice Hades 1 attempted a similar system here, but that game beefed on run variance in general so it didn't really land.)
In theory this is vulnerable to the same reroll problem that start bonuses are subject to, with players just resetting after the first 2 upgrades instead of the very start of the run, but both Hades games do their own work to train the player out of getting restart happy by making you forfeit all metaprogression resources if you quit out of a run. You have to either finish the run or die to make it count, and killing yourself can be surprisingly tedious in those games, so... fuck it, why not tough it out. It's surprising how well a little bit of careful incentive engineering can get a person to change play patterns. At least, it worked on me, anyway...
Anyway, that's the rundown. Basement Syndrome is still a pretty pervasive issue in roguelikes -- even the ones I've mentioned above often still have the issue, just to a lesser degree. But still, it's a solvable problem! Lemme know if you think I missed anything, and thanks for reading!
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clowningcrows · 3 days ago
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cant fucking believe my audhd is playing tug of war w my brain and two separate hyperfixations rn and it’s literally just toxic yaoi ass pathetic ass murder husbands vs. toxic yuri horny ass yearning ass witch ex wives
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starjammiez · 1 day ago
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garfield x vocaloid au i’m working on
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Aaaaaaaaaa look at that face i love him so much <33
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carrionhearted · 2 months ago
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Sorry for infodumping about my special interest out of nowhere, you said a keyword and it activated my unskippable dialogue
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itsaspectrumcomic · 6 months ago
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Anyone need an affirming Laios?
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dovemoulins · 1 year ago
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finch fancam❤
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autie-j · 1 month ago
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guppygiggles · 4 months ago
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Not less, just different!
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octal-codes · 1 year ago
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Shout out to autistics who:
Don't know much about their special interests
Likes food commonly disliked by other autistics
Dislikes food commonly liked by other autistics
Enjoy social settings
Use sign language as their primary form of communication
Use diapers or have troubles with toileting
Like childish things or age regress
Are unable to work
Are unable to figure out their gender
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wanderingcritter · 6 months ago
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god gives his most niche fandoms to his most autistic warriors
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accidentalslayer · 1 year ago
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gonuclear · 2 years ago
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