droqen
@droqen

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

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

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

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.


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in reply to @droqen's post:

hi! this seems an appropriate place to continue the conversation from twitter. don't know if this kind of reply, or one of those rechost ones is best. I don't know if cohost is good for longform conversation, or a good replacement for forums, but at least it doesn't have character limit, and keeps threads in better order... linking the tweeter conversation for clarity https://twitter.com/droqen/status/1807592874298556750

when you mention that big commitment mindset, I totally agree that you don't need to resist it, I just meant that that mindset might play a role in the insurmountability you feel confronted with heaps, but other people don't feel overwhelmed because they don't feel pressured by commitment, but you can relieve yourself of the insurmountability without resisting the commitment, and I think it's good to have that commitment, I also like to set aside a time to give my full attention to any art that I think is interesting, I just don't feel overwhelmed by heaps because I compartmentalize them differently... but I do think it's kinda distasteful to not have any commitment mindset at all, like when people leave music or a show in the background, because that's only half getting the art. That commitment does mean I get through fewer pieces of art in total, but in the end it's alright to not get through a complete big heap, or to not get to some pieces at all, and just be fancyful with what we do choose to engage with, because we have finite time, but giving them full attention means it's higher quality time. I do try to give higher priority to the pieces that look like they're more interesting, so my quality time is best spent.

about the ideas you mention about haiku games and the role small games have, the role scale plays in art seems pretty difficult to discern, I don't know in which specific sense you mean small games are better, but at least it's easy to say that bigger isn't better, but it does seem pretty unavoidable that bigger always has the possibility of being better, simply because there's more canvas in which to refine and relate more ideas... which is similar to a point mentioned in one of the prior letter to the "fear" one you wrote, the "miraculous coincidences" one, that mentioned that some mediums, latte art was the example, don't have enough complexity to express much. In that sense it seems trivial to point out that a piece of art that's too small won't be able to do much, and a bigger one can do more and better, although maybe the observation that avoids that conclusion is that past a certain amount of complexity, you're at the "limit of human perception", and so there's in practice the "same amount" in a small piece as in a big one.

Scale also seems to be a relative notion though. If you take music for example, there's the time it takes, music is regularly interpreted at different speeds, but what if you half or double the time all sounds take... is that a smaller, or bigger piece? in some sense it's the same piece, but the perception of it is different. There's a sense in which the size of the piece can be made to be an important part of what the piece actually communicates, and that's seems like an important aspect to consider when making small (or big!) games.

In games, maybe difficulty can play that role of increasing size without changing the game, a person that finds a game very easy gets through it fast, one that finds it hard takes a long time, for the same game, so that confuses the sense in which a game can be small... large is taken to mean "many levels where you have a huge journey", but a single screen game can take many hours for a lot of people if it's extremely hard, so the subjective time to solve it is huge, and one with hundreds of levels can be "small" because it's very easy and obvious and people breeze through it. In that way size can also be audience dependent, because some audiences can call something "too long" while others call it "too short", and that may be related to how well they can hold their attention for a long time and follow the things the art is doing. In music being long, with long slow segments, can mean someone can't hold their attention and gets bored, but it can be "short" for someone who can focus very intently on it, and follow what it does.

I'm not that familiar with haikus specifically, and it seems you also want to capture aspects that come specifically from haiku, aside from smallness, though I don't really know whether those aspects are so universal and deliberate for haikus (some part probably comes from eastern philosophy, zen, though I also don't know if that's so universal for haiku), or derived from being a very small form. In music there's some examples of very small forms that are doing something refined and specific within a small space, and I find interesting to consider the role of scale, like Kurtag's Jatekok (interestingly, Jatekok means Games), which are many very small pieces capturing and shortly developing small gestures
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4oaXUdU6kE&list=OLAK5uy_m2X0np8O_BvwyX1dlj1G02hXi4845uwak

Also Anton Webern was a musician that exclusively made very small pieces, but each of which was very very refined. Maybe there's a sense in which that refinement reflects a kind of bigness,  because it's a lot of work crammed into a very small space, like his orchestra pieces last around 30 seconds to 2 minutes, and use the whole orchestra doing many different things
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reqqQ-kBJQ0

and in the opposite side of the spectrum of "maybe small can be big", Morton Feldman's work are super long pieces, but use very few notes and develop a single gesture through many variations, so there's a sense in which it has small scale stretched across long time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41tt7MXSMYg

I also want to clarify with regards to the beating heart thing applying to all art, that it also applies to all art at any time, that is to say, the sense in which you can't experience something for the first time again that you meant, with the social aspect you meant, is true in that it will be different later, but untrue in that it will be just as alive at any point in time. Maybe the specific sponge saturation that you cared about is harder to reach simply because people tend to be more hype around newer things and accumulate there, but reliving something is in every sense experiencing it for the first time, because it changes in many ways, that can pour life into that social heart.

That way in which Dark Souls was really mysterious to you, because you weren't used to its genre tropes, is a way in which Dark Souls is directed to a certain audience, and will be most enticing to that audience. Also since you now became used to those tropes, you stopped being that particular kind of audience... but experiencing it "for the first time" as that audience can be just as good, and lead to noticing different things, and engaging with a different social set.

gah, hopefully this wasn't too long or rambly... it's an interesting subject! and a big part doing artistic work

there’s something to the small ephemeral game release format that is a “hack” for my brain, to let me materially acknowledge that i am not making the next Dark Souls, to keep my self from being burdened by such irresistible aspirations. i really don’t know whether there is a sufficient enough place in the world for small indie games, but they can’t just be “idiosyncratic AAA games,” and im trying to discover the contours of what might comprise a recognizable thing of value to me — and to others!

i think that small games, and ephemeral-release games, are things that occupy both domains… they hold meaning for me, and im operating publicly in order to discover what, if anything, they mean to others, through action and actually experiencing them. there’s so much theorizing i could do but ive begun to do less in favour of trying things and seeing: what is the effect?

i think… these small pieces are very stripped of their context, especially the Jatekok, the name feels so meaningful, intentionally chosen. perhaps they were meant to feel like something to the player, and here i am only listening to them, compiled… i like them, of course. i love piano, haha.

anyway, i feel very odd releasing things on the internet because im not satisfied with the venues that exist, they don’t seem particularly welcoming for the kinds of games that i make — and so i find myself stuck with the problem of carving out my own venue, because im no good at fitting in ;P

"Jesus’ blood never failed me yet" is cool! it reminds me of Gorecki's third symphony, which does a similar thing, building up intensity with a very simple theme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqLXliq-WP0
I find it hard to think of "I am so sad, so very very sad" except as a joke though... it works well as a joke, but I wonder how many things can be done in just one chord and still be recognizable things

Yeah after you've explained that you're interested in the effects of ephemerality and also that it helps you work better I get it! I'll still be sad if I miss a thing you make that looks cool, but I understand what you're trying to do. I'm not sure why you think there might be insufficient space in the world for them, or in what sense current venues aren't welcoming, but it'll be interesting to see the effects of the space you're carving out. Maybe you'll find out there was more space for them than you thought? At least to me it seems there is.

I guess the jatekok are slightly stripped of context as listening pieces, the wikipedia article for them
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A1t%C3%A9kok
has Kurtag's foreword which might help understand how they're conceived, and they call them pedagogical pieces, so at least in part they're to help someone who's getting acquainted with playing piano

grouse 2 expired as i was writing the comment; i love how instant the sprite disappearing in the grass is. first time being swept was a fun surprise, i didn't expect it. "huh? whats that thing popping from the top of the screen" because the first few screens have plenty of grass, then suddenly, swept!! then i pushed how fast i could go w/o getting swept. discovered that i can rapidly fly to dodge the owl, which let me go left, but nothing there to discover.. also got in the gate to the right.

ah, i thought about putting the countdown next to the comment box too but never figured it out! i’m very sorry that my desire for a minimalist UI ended up stealing your words away from you. nice to see you here though :)

thank you for sharing your experience! im very glad you liked the disappearing in the grass ^^