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! lorenschmidt.itch.io/dig

Jun 25, 2022

in case anyone missed it: the Hole Digging Game 1.0.1 is now out! it's a slow, gentle, goalless game intended to invite curiosity and reflection, featuring procedurally generated visuals + sound. as of today, there's a mac version thanks to

@sh0vemedia

423

Feb 3

i probably won't build any of this out for some time! certainly not until i ship the current project. but i like this idea a lot and i might do some prototyping at some point.

you could give instructions to a place you cared about in terms of how to get there from a major city or landmark on a commonly known route, and people who knew how to get to that location could find your favorite cliff or home town (in their own single player instances).

one aspect of this which i am excited about is that one could learn more frequently travelled major portions of the gate network, the major blood vessels of the galaxy's body, and this would be a common fabric for people playing in completely different parts of the galaxy.

as you travel, you would learn landmarks, trade cities, the colors of stones or skies. you would develop known sequences of actions.

i appreciate that this puts you in meaningful contact with surface travel instead of just defaulting to jumping between stars. exactly the same way every time. sometimes the fastest path is to fly overland, or get a ride in someone's horse drawn carriage.

..then travel from smaller regional capillaries down to a major route, one of the large veins which connect the galaxy, and then back up through increasingly more local routes to eventually empty back out into a system near Rigel.

the gates form a network. and in terms of traversal time, they are often the shortest path between two points. so i might fly through space to Altair, which is only 16 ly away. but if i were going to Rigel, i would fly to alpha cen, land at the port, fly overland to the gate..

one can arrive, via space travel, at any point. but it would take ages for longer trips. and were this the only means of travel, this would lend a certain shapelessness to the galaxy. a generated world benefits from interconnected structure, intent, at multiple scales.

on planetary surfaces and in space, there are gates of various sizes which instantaneously link distant points in the galaxy. some are large enough for a large boat or starship. some are too small to admit a human.

however, there is also a second means by which one can travel.

there is slower than light traversal within a solar system, and there is FTL travel between stars. via these two, you can travel across the galaxy in contiguous fashion.

players start in different parts of the galaxy by default. (supplemented by an opt-in ability to manually enter a seed, which will map to a location, allowing people to start in the same places.)

some thoughts on a "circulatory system" for an immense generated game, a thread.

pour one out for

and

. i’d let all the other bots slowly die over the years but left these two running on their intermittent chron jobs on my laptop, when it was open

twitter dev: starting february 9, we will no linger support free access to the twitter api

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ALT

268

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@polclarissou

Feb 3

blogged again, for my sins Artisanal Intelligence: what's the deal with AI art polclarissou.com/boudoir/posts/

Screenshot of a @drilbot_neo tweet: 'guess what. people do enjoy looking at my dada art. thats the thing. people look at my dada art and think its good. but what'

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ALT

Feb 1

i want more spaces in games which just are, which aren't an activity, a vessel for a collectible, transactional in some way.

141

Feb 1

i think what happened is it turned "cat food" into "cat cat food" into "cat cat some grass"

i want more spaces in games which just are, which aren't an activity, a vessel for a collectible, transactional in some way.

141

Jan 31

another demo

GIF

demo, with a bug

GIF

for instance, L-systems are a lot like text substitution! why not use the same system for generated plants, or tapestries. or for determining story arcs, or character routines...

my hope is that there are some interesting simple systems which are simple enough to have elegant data structures and be very human readable, but which have enough flexibility to develop some interesting emergent properties.

one potential trouble with adding anything to simple replacement is that you very quickly end up wanting flow control, variables, all manner of things... and then you end up with ... regex.

this might be suitable for something like a description of a short interaction with an NPC at a spaceport. it would not be very useful for a multi-character interaction, because (unless you descend into permutational hell) it can't delineate between matched sets of rules.

which, because of our earlier human specific substitutions, becomes "the human rests for several hours, then reads a book."

now once it's done a bit more replacing, we end up with "the human rests for several hours, then speaks",

then (and this is new) we use a /second/ table which can conditionally change rules. here it replaces a few elements of the rules with human specific ones.

this starts with a phrase and a table of rules. it looks for words in the table, and performs substitutions. here , we start with "the animal exists", and it finds that we have several options for "animal" in the table. it picks "human".

i'm playing with very simple systems for authored generated text, seeing if i can intuit my way to something which has some interesting emergent properties.

this is probably just an experiment, but i'm trying an idea for text replacement with rules that can switch on contextually.

Becoming one of those horrid trad art accounts but instead of moping over marble sculptures I'm convinced society lost its way the moment we stopped using brush-based level geometry

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i will probably post more about STGs (and other things i'm studying) in the coming weeks and months.

it was interesting to recontextualize this for myself- that in that other context, this was actually a very interesting, deeply knit integration of accessibility, and that in my context there are ways i could learn from and apply that thinking.

the answer, the missing design context, is that we don't think about study the same way now. we tend to think about first playthroughs of single player games as the canonical experience, not as a first draft toward a later improved attempt.

from a modern perspective, this feels like an unforgiving game. one might ask: why did the game blindside me? how was i supposed to know that was going to happen without memorizing it?

another interesting anectode: i've heard that in slap fight, their intent was to reduce the skill test component of STGs by making it more observation and pattern based. a player (like myself) who isn't terribly dextrous can gradually improve by study, rather than being shut out.

for instance, i've read that one of the reasons the player's vehicle is slower in tiger heli is that they wanted a tuning set where bullets were highly legible.

it's fascinating to look at the things the team at Toaplan experimented with over the years. it's always a little hard to understand the decisions people made from a different context. today's world has very different ideas about attention, learning, difficulty, and accessibility

i'm currently playing a lot of Toaplan games. i've played a lot of CAVE's STGs, but wasn't as familiar with Toaplan, the company which birthed them, and out of the dissolution of which many well loved studios formed- CAVE, Eighting, and several others.