PhiMarHal on Farcaster

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https://warpcast.com/~/channel/farcade

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Farcadians. The day has come. You are hereby invited, nay, required, to play my game. It's a good game. Trust. There's no need to know anything. Stop reading and jump in. DO IT NOW. Still, if your curiosity begets words more than games, read on. (Expect no useful information below, lest sadness engulfs your heart.)

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Our story starts in a far, far away place. A strange land tucked between the mountains, where pilgrims flock to once a year, in reverence for the promise of magic and other illusions. I talk of course of ETHDenver. One night, I find myself in the wretched hive of scum and villainy that is an altchain side event. Glass half empty people would say the music was loud and bad. Glass half full types would point out at the open bar. My own glass was fully empty. Here's why being square is cool: three shots of vodka take you way past tipsy. In my drunken stupor, I contemplate the party. My eyes fall on abandoned bags in a booth. It gnaws at me, the way people leave their valuables unattended in conferences. Literally anyone could be here. They let ME in, for deity's sake! I decide to prove my own theory by acting the part. There is a bag with an odd shape in particular. I can't figure out what it is for. So I get in the booth, and I start rummaging through it.

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There's nothing inside. Yet something appears outside the bag. Someone. A young man, perhaps with a slight look of apprehension watching this random old guy grab his stuff. Doesn't deter him from being full founder mode, bless his soul. He says hi, and as I ask him what the bag is for. He explains it's from a portable video game console. Without skipping a beat, he tells me about the game he's building on it, and would you like to try it? Of course I would.

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He sets up the game on the console, and I start playing. It's one of these games where you walk around, and your guy shoots on its own, at infinite hordes of enemies. I vaguely know the genre. I used to play a ton of video games, before I got into my head to do far less important stuff. This sort of game didn't get my interest, but that night - perhaps thanks to having killed most of my brain cells with the power of alcohol - I'm having a blast.

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Mind you, I played maybe all of 2 minutes. During which the game crashed 3 times, then the console itself gave way entirely. The dev was apologetic about it. Likely thought he fumbled his shot. If only he knew he converted me on the spot, not only to the game, but to a full genre. (No name will be named, but if you see yourself, congrats. You're 1 of 4 people in the world who can map my ugly mug to this internet persona. Cherish this secret.)

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The next day. "I've GOT to make a game like this", I think. I look up what that game genre is. There's no straight name for it, but the most famous entry is called Vampire Survivors. Now, when I say I want to make a game... I mean to make MYSELF a game. I'm kind of selfish that way. If you spend time building something that's not for yourself, that's just time you're not getting back. Unless you enjoy the process of building itself. I hear crazy people do that. I'm not crazy, no matter what my therapists say. Building a game for yourself means certain genres are more appropriate than others. Picture a spectrum. All the way to the left hand, you might see a cinematic story-based game. One way to experience it, no replayability. All the way to the right, you'd have much more focus on emergent gameplay. You want rules that make for serendipity. You want experiences that happen on the fly rather than on a script.

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Roguelikes and roguelites are great genres for this. (Vampire Survivors is arguably a subgenre within those genres.) Picking combat games in particular. You have your guy, he shoots stuff, he gets various skills to shoot them better. The interaction between these skills is open-ended. Sometimes even the developers don't know how things are going to play out. More broadly, movement is the key mechanism. Shooting, as in aiming, is a fine mechanic too. But movement comes with layers: beyond moving yourself in the space, you're also moving your relation to every other object in that space. Quite often you control the movement of your enemies, guided that they are by an artificial need to chase and murder you. The movement in these games, when done well, is best seen as a dance. Shooting has you versus one target. Movement has you versus all targets. So, why not focus solely on movement? The subgenre makes sense.

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Let's go back to my situation. Vampire Survivors is fun, sure. So why not play it? No need to make my own spin. This is where I must confess being afflicted with a curse far worse than vampirism. I feel bad playing games. Playing games too much, that is. There's only so much time in a day. There's only so much time in life, for us not blessed with vampire immortality. It's hard to justify playing a game if I'm not getting deeper learning out of it.

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