Astrea

Lefty, transgender, furry, and (sigh) podcaster

Overthinking media, model building with overly detailed paint jobs, and dabbling with game design junk.

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thecatamites
@thecatamites

maybe level design ultimately depends on a sense of difference which gamedevs never really had to explicitly recognize or theorize given the chaotic stitched together nature of their own tools. but which is more visible now in absence after like a 20+ year campaign of seamlessness - in perspective, control, physics system, mechanical meaning, visuals (continuity of background clutter), sound (various generative music systems), theme and emotional meaning etc... continuity of game developer intent itself in a system which treats them as parts

what do i mean by difference, i dunno, i guess the basic example is just stuff like "the music changes on level 2" and extrapolating from there - the feeling that the game itself is a kind of angled object and that over the course of rolling it in your hands you are discovering new sides of the object, conceptual or aesthetic or whatever else - learning what this object is and what it consists of.. imagining a lot of games that have "impeccable design" as shapes can sometimes reveal them to be flat planes (the one thing extrapolated forever) or uniform spheres (perpetual mild discoveries in a way that ultimately feel kind of undifferentiated). playing them i find myself wishing for torn surfaces or unexpected breaks in texture. moments where consciousness and material have crashed into each other and left a dent, a hole, a crash site to examine, at a point where both consciousness and material sort of feel like controlled substances banished from the magic realm of the computer


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in reply to @thecatamites's post:

i was playing super mario land 2 yesterday and having similar thoughts, mostly about how there are basically three different ways the game handles "swimming" depending on if you're in water, in sap/unidentifiable goo, or in space (which is basically swimming, but more differenter)

and how much i prefer this kind of variety weirdness in Mario to "Good" Mario games. and how much it kind of feels like a mario rom hack too, just throwing stuff at the wall because you can

the OP was partly inspired by playing mario odyssey and feeling frustrated that every little moment of thoughtful or inspired level design would just lead you toward yet another piece of branded mario bricabrac eg the theme song, the "pixel art" segments, sliding tile puzzles with mario's face etc, maybe i found it more charming when the gameboy games would spell out M-A-R-I-O in coins because they already felt sort of scrambled and off enough that this kind of brand consistency didn't yet feel like a given

yeah that tracks with my experience of odyssey. at first i enjoyed that i would do a bit of platforming to get hard-to-reach areas and that they would have like, slapped a pile of coins there. but then it started feeling insultingly theme-park like, everything is directed and touched by the hand of god (aka walt distendo), and even pushing at the seams of what's possible is just another curated path