saints-path

oh, this one expired. you can't play it, but you can see what other people said about it! it's the pretty yellow and orange one. // i wrote this based on a conversation with a friend, and as well it was a message for someone else. some kind of ill-defined beacon of hope. i don't think that person picked up on it, but please consider that it might have been for you, if you had a moment of doubt or loss of faith in the past couple weeks :')

seeing-like-an-industry

submitted to the gmtk game jam (you can see its submission page here if you like but you probably won't be able to popularity-bandwagon me, rip). derailed a different droqever project that still has not recovered, but perhaps i should get back to at some point? but there are so many droqevers! anyway, you can play this one. there is a spoilertastic cohost post by @jseakle here https://cohost.org/jseakle/post/7340868-breaking-seeing-like, as well a video captured by username404. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybAuRos3Cvo

fires-burning

what is there to say about this one? the fires might still be burning.

a-thing-of-beauty

saving the best(?) for last(?), i made a lot of small innovations in this one. of course... hmm... every one of these contains its own innovations and experiments, but i think this has a lot more writing and the structure serves the writing well, and the writing serves the structure well. as well, coming hot off of fires-burning, i sought to develop a more intentionally expressive control scheme like we-met-at-the-summit had. this week of droqevers has been quite constrained and level-designy this way.

i'm working on a new one that is extremely loose and playful and flexible, and i hope it turns out well.

ok, that's everything! thank you for checking out my small droqevers. see you next time.

love, droqen

there is an architecture book called "A Pattern Language." this book contains 253 patterns ranging roughly from largest to smallest and roughly in order of when to consider each pattern in the process. you can't design a windowsill without a house to put it in, so the pattern for a windowsill would come after the pattern for a house. roughly.

so. the two hundred and fifty third pattern, the very last one, is called "Things From Your Life."

lately, i've been thinking a lot about expression, about memory, kind of jealously considering the amount of personal human experience that goes into writing a story or a poem. (the grass is always greener on the other side.) how can games be as expressive? how can they be as expressive for me? so i tried making some personal games, and i have to say, some of that has been very successful and satisfying. see this game, a polaroid of space.

but other times it is much easier to make little toy systems, videogamey videogames where mostly you push a little object and stuff happens and you figure out how to push little objects better, how to make stuff happen better, how to make different stuff happen. and it was bothering me, integrating these two practices. surely i ought to be able to make games where the little objects are meaningful to me, and not just one or two of them, but all of them? it presented a problem.

...

i was taking a shower and thinking to myself and i remembered this pattern in this architecture book and how when i skimmed the book long ago i noticed that Things From Your Life was the very last pattern. there's something that one of the authors of A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander, said in another book of his, about the artist's expression. suffice to say he was not really a fan.

it was a diagram that went something like "artist puts feeling in the work: not interesting // the work gives me feeling: necessary".

i think i am developing a better understanding of how and when to put feeling in the games i'm working on. it doesn't belong at the front. actually, this is more of a practical concern: it just does not WORK WELL when i put it at the front. it's much easier to start making a game about an abstract videogame structure than it is to start making a game about a human feeling, unless the game is very small and very short. even then, it is necessary to have a structure, an idea for the context that will surround the feeling.

Things From Your Life is the very last pattern. that doesn't mean it is the least important. if it was not important we wouldn't even speak of it. but a videogame that says something... i must admit that i like it best when i uncover that feeling right down in its core. when i cut the machine and finally discover that it bleeds.

there are a great number of videogames that do not bleed for me, ever. these come as great disappointments to me every time. i want to put Things From [My] Life in my videogames because i don't want to make things that would take up my time and leave me with nothing but a thin sense of self-satisfaction, were i a player.

but, they are found at the end of the book. the end of the process.

". . . lastly, when you have taken care of everything, and you start living in the places you have made, you may wonder what kinds of things to pin up on the walls."

things from your life.

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.