hello, droqen here! ever since making 31 games one october i have been in love with the feeling of having a constant rhythm of game-making going. not a game jam where a game is made in a period of crunch followed by a return to normalcy, but a new normal in which releasing games, however small, is a casual act of communication - easy, uncomplicated, everyday.

it has been nearing three years since that fateful month, and after a lot of experiments and philosophizing i am finally, actually, getting back into the swing of things. i found it very easy to get caught up in the idea of making a game every day, but in practice slowing down -- just a little -- has been good for me. still, there is a sensation like gravity, always pulling downwards: this game i am making now might be released today. i am always free to take a break, to leave it to rest overnight, but there is no space for "maybe next week", "maybe next month", "maybe someday it will be ready".

these games are always about to be released from inception, and if i take a break it is a quick one, i am taking a breath to submerge myself once more in the water of what has become, what has always been, my life of game-making.

this past week i made & released three small games. i love them! please note that the earliest of them, "a simple crossing," is about to expire sometime tomorrow-ish, so you should try it now if you're going to try it. there is something memento mori which is necessary to keep me in motion, which mirrors that feeling of inevitability. these games will be born as certainly as they will die.

anyway, i'm going to talk about and link the games now.

a simple crossing

click to play

this was my first actually publicly announced/released droqever, and it was easy to design... i had a simple idea for a game mechanic and i was enjoying numbers. through making this game and receiving the feelings of those playing it, i gained some confidence that i was doing something right. i liked how this game could be 'completed' but also that there was a post-completion stage. you can get 10/10, but you can also go to 11/10 or the highest i've seen is 12/10.

big orb

click to play

i had some design goals for big orb which i believe were successful, but i'll have to see some of the comments before i pass final judgement. this one felt too big. i fell, soon enough, into a deep pattern of simply designing and adding levels, accumulating content. in the end, there are 10 towers. (proper levels.)

10 is a beautiful number. just large enough to be impossible, but small and round enough to feel within grasp. despite my earlier minor complaints, i was happy to get into a groove of producing 10 meaningfully variant levels. once you get to 10 you can get anywhere. but i stopped wanting to get anywhere more, too: the systems of big orb felt a little arbitrary and abstract to me. more on that later...

grouse mountain 2

click to play

working on grouse mountain 2, i created a lot of systems and levels that were ultimately not used at all. i'm talking "an entire 1/3 of the spritesheet and a whole other set of player animations in a distinct palette with a unique control scheme."

at some point i got in over my head. a simple crossing was simple, big orb was more complicated, and i let myself think bigger and bigger with this one. i felt the instinctive ambition to size and variety kick in, and i had to tone it back down. i want to make things that stay on tone, that communicate something still and whole. i don't know if i succeeded! grouse mountain 2 has a weird surprise... but... at least, i think, it never forgets where it came from. it has an actual setting unlike big orb, even if it is a very intuitive stream-of-consciousness setting. in grouse mountain you are always a bird, not some abstract creature playing with numbers. you are a bird, and there is something central about that.

i forgot to include the number 10 which is maybe all for the best. 10 is an arbitrary thing anyway. (i say that, but i will always return to 10. see the sprite size in all of these games.)

next week

it's Sunday right now and i thought i would take a well-deserved break. i am preparing to give a workshop on Tuesday on using Kinopio to work through and organize a huge pile of disparate thoughts, so it's probably good timing.

i am not planning ahead too much, i hope, but next week i hope to work poetry back into my game-making practice in a way that converses better with these abstract systems i seem drawn to again and again.

p.s. you can also play the original grouse mountain, it has seemingly very little to do with grouse mountain 2, but it's a nice small game that i still hold with a lot of love in my heart. thanks nokia jam!

love, droqen

p.p.s. this was wayyy too long! how does anyone write a short update about anything? maybe i ought to have just posted three game links and been done with it. well, maybe next time.