something in the distance
A deterministic exploration game. There are 4 gems and 1 exit. To leave collect all 4 gems then walk through the exit.
Rooms are connected deterministically, but not in the usual way. A room may have different exits determined by how you enter it. In order to reach the exit you'll need to figure out the specific logic by which rooms are connected.
Download something in the distance
Controls: escape: quit; space: start game; cursor keys: move
The Rules:
- The file at this link will be deleted 1 month from now (4/2/23).
- All downloads are zipfiles containing a Windows executable.
- All source code and assets are included, licensed under the Anti-Capitalist Software License.
- As long as you abide by the license, you can do whatever you want with the download.
Further Reading
Somehow I ended up with a huge number of links for this section this month. It's not even like this is a round-up of my favourite things of 2022, somehow this is all stuff I read/played/listened to in December. I don't know how that happened, sorry!
A fascinating article by Aurynn Shaw on how Mastodon's federated nature enforces different forms of social media etiquette to centralised networks like twitter. And what happens when corporations like Raspberry Pi try to set themselves up on mastodon without heeding those (largely unwritten) rules.
(I've mostly moved over to mastodon from twitter now, though I would prefer to be on a smaller instance than mastodon.social, if anyone has any suggestions)
The Museum of Screens asks how do you preserve source code for 69 years?
A beautiful passage on death from an article Elizabeth Knox that has apparently now vanished into the void.
I played Sylvie Lime this month, and I liked it a lot. The story didn't do much for me, but I love how the different mechanics interact, and it led me to checking out sylvie's website. Particularly her collection of Video Games Thoughts, e.g. constrasting Juice with Jank (such a great dichotomy!), and her thoughts on metroidvanias.
Live Free or Die: Lisa Borst writing about Lisa Carver and the struggles of maintaining a multiple-decade career as a writer.
@nex3 on cohost with a short post on ML art:
"As @tef likes to say, "the purpose of a system is what it does", and so far these stochastic models mostly seem to convince people with money to give less of it to people who make art."
...and Emilie Reed with a more in-depth post tackling similar issues from a different perspective, that I think neatly links back to sylvie's thoughts on juice vs jank.
I love this homemade boardgame found in someone's attic.
Knitting for Anarchists sounds amazing, and I've now added it to the top of my list of books to read.
A small rant
When I started making games in the late 2000's, it was because it felt like videogames were on the cusp of something new, eager to explode outwards in all sorts of different directions and in the process give birth to new forms, ideas, concepts. And for a while that did kind of happen; I think there are a number of genres that were effectively born during that time. But then 2014 happened, and games culture slammed the door shut on anything experimental or new, in favour of endlessly reanimating the corpses of genres that were already tired in the 90's.
Which is not to say people stopped experimenting, only that such work was once again consigned to the margins. What I had originally sensed was the possibility for such work to exist across a continuum of margins to mainstream, to build an audience and sustain itself. It's happened before in other media, I don't see why it couldn't happen in videogames.
All of which is a long-winded prelude to: I played IMMORTALITY this month, and it somehow reminded me of what I once imagined the future of videogames would look like. Something experimental in both form and content, but able to find a large audience and budget. Something that doesn't look or play or sound like an iteration of a popular genre from the 80's. Something that feels new.
A bitter, aching tale of exploitation and hard choices on run-down planets by Thomas Ha.
Cat Power's The Greatest is one of those songs that I return to over and over again. The song itself is beautiful, but it becomes so much more powerful when you learn the context, and how hard she's having to fight just to stand on that stage on Jools Holland.
Katherine Cross with a useful breakdown of how online harrassment campaigns actually function.
Some more games I played this month that I liked a lot:
Interesting data on Britain's generational divides by Ben Ansell.
Finally, if you're interested I wrote a post on cohost covering the various things I made/did in 2022.
Okay, that is more than enough from me. I hope you're holding it together heading into 2023, and finding space for small joys and kindnesses in the midst of it all.