Whilst I did compete in Ludum Dare and finished an entry my mood has dipped somewhat this week.
Read
I read a book on game design called A Theory of Fun by Raph Koster. I found the main argument, that fun is had when you are learning something, compelling although I may be biased in what sorts of things I look for in games. While the book did have colourful cartoons every other page I found them to be disjointed from the text on the opposite page.
It was quite a dated book having been released over 20 years ago. It did mean that his examples of evolution of game design went back to the very first games like Space Invaders and Pac Man. The second half of the book got into thoughts about games as art and the worth in making them which was less interesting.
It made sense when I discovered near the end of the book that it had been adapted from a presentation as it had that kind of disconnected feeling of running through bullet points. I would have preferred to have seen the presentation slides instead of unrelated cartoons.
The end of the book had extensive notes on references used and I kind of wish the main text had gone into that level of detail. Still it was useful to read through it after something like 10 years even if I did rediscover there wasn't much to it. Having said that I could probably do with thinking more about where the fun is when making a programming project that is meant to be a game.
Listened
I listened to the start of a series on Transhumanism on the Past Present Future podcast. The first part was interesting as they went into the beginnings of transhumanist thought, arguing that it really started with Darwinism and the realisation that human beings had evolved and were still evolving. A fair few early transhumanists were biologists who discussed augmenting the human body. It was interesting as this was in the early 20th century before computing really existed.
The second part was alright, it jumped around the timeline since the first war spending some time on the rise of computing and the space race. It did spend a bit too much time complaining about present day people like Elon Musk who I don't think is a good example of a transhumanist. The Extropians were mentioned and I hope they go into more detail about them.
Programmed
I had a rewarding time programming over the weekend for Ludum Dare and feel like I accomplished a lot. The theme was Old Tech and I felt it fitted quite well with ideas I had about technology trees from very primitive times. Indeed, I was enthusiastic simply to make a tech tree interface as it was a novel programming project for me.
For the rest of the game I thought it could be that you had to collect resources and build up a settlement to help you research these old techs. The technologies were very much inspired by the Civilization games with things like The Wheel, Pottery, Writing etc. Researching a tech would unlock new resources that you could collect yourself or assign people to collect for you.
I decided on something of a whim to not only have you constructing buildings for your settlement but to construct them on a map of the surrounding terrain. It was pretty easy for me to implement as I'd made terrain maps with buildings on them many times before.
Still it did mean that I was implementing a tech tree, settlement management, and building construction all from scratch in a two day period. I did a lot of good work on the first day but was exhausted at the end of it. I had hoped to spend the second day adding things like graphics and sounds but found I still had more game mechanics to implement.
Because of that I ended up with an entry with complex game logic but nothing in the way of art assets. Thankfully I did have time to implement a victory and lose condition and also added a little bit of story in the form of you falling through a portal back in time. The project was fun to make but I wouldn't say it was much of a game. Still you can play it if you want.
After the competition was over it was a case of playing and rating other people's games. I've been feeling very self conscious about people playing my entry so I haven't done a very good job of playing enough of other people's games. There has been some good stuff in what I have played though, like a game that goes backwards in technology as you complete levels, a true retro RTS game which sounds and looks like it was on an 8-bit personal computer and a gameboy game you play by directing a single finger.
One thing I did see is how impressive AI assisted entries can be. Incredible looking graphics which would require very specialised knowledge of rendering techniques. Really I'd like to interrogate these AI models into how they can make such good looking graphics.
Other
One thing that has been getting me down is that I lost my Twitter(X) account. Last Friday I discovered that it had been suspended, reason Inauthentic Behaviour. That appears to be a very wide category and it didn't really explain what I had done wrong. All I use Twitter for anymore is posting links to my blog. I guess that could be disapproved of as I'm not engaging with the platform itself. It's disconcerting that something like that can just happen and I tried appealing to no avail.
I had hoped I would have felt more accomplished for having taken part in Ludum Dare but I've just been feeling bad about my entry not being a proper game.
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