Post a Comment On: Digitally Staving Off Boredom

Now Playing: Boneworks, Age of Wonders: Planetfall, and Phoenix Point.

I didn't bother writing my blog entry for last week because it seems I had little to report.   Though I did purchase Boneworks and attempt to play it a bit, I mostly played Age of Wonders: Planetfall much as I did in the previous two entries.
[Image] The world of Boneworks takes place in a virtual world gone awry, where zombie-like "nullbodies" are the least of your enemies.  Manually directing dense weights to their heads until they stop moving is just one of a plethora of physics sandbox challenges that await. I say that I "attempted" to play Boneworks because my "VR legs" were not quite good enough to handle all of that motion intensity.  After about 20 minutes of playing Boneworks, I would have to stop and wait for about an hour for mild nausea to wear off.

But what is Boneworks?  Well, it is the product of some VR developers who took a long time to create some really novel and deep VR mechanics.
Things like:
A physics engine so detailed your VR avatar has working joints and muscles: the titular boneworks. Picking things up causes their weight to be carried by your virtual limbs, slowing reaction times realistically. Most of the objects in the game have gripping points that make holding them more like holding things in real life. Guns feature recoil which is then communicated accurately to your virtual limbs.  The larger ones need to be held with both hands or the recoil prevents them from being effectively utilized. Lots of interesting tricks that elaboration upon would be spoilers.  Like finding a gun that fires balloons on strings that attach to anything the projectile hits, eventually causing enough upward momentum for the affected physical body to become airborne. There are some very elaborate, cool stuff in Boneworks that make it something I want to come back to, despite the "advanced VR user" nausea.

Despite what a diorama in the early portion of the game seems to suggest, there is no shame in being a "teleport movement" caveman.  However, Boneworks definitely needs full locomotion, and so provides no such option.  It is possible I could adapt in time, but I am not in a real hurry to put myself through a cyclical VR nausea regimen in order to find out.
So it was back to the Age of Wonders: Planetfall game.  I completed the Kir'Ko campaign and started in on the Dvar campaign.  Honestly, I think I have wore my enthusiasm for the game down considerably, and am ready to move on.  That tight 4X loop lasted longer for me than most games would, but I feel there is little new to learn by continuing to play.

Instead, much of my downtime last week went to reading Phoebe and her Unicorn.  Much earlier, I had enjoyed reading Dana Simpson's Ozy and Millie series (and even bought some self-published comic books back when she called herself D.C. Simpson).  So I decided to see if I would enjoy this series as well. 
[Image] It was fun, if perhaps a bit blunted, as newspaper comics afraid of offending mainstream America tend to be.  The title says it is all: there's Phoebe, and she is friends with a unicorn.  Unicorns are insufferably amazing, and magical, so high junks ensue.  It's at least as a solid of a comic premise as a man with a fat cat.  There was also a surprising amount of repeat filler comics, often subtle refinements of ones that had come before.  Before I knew it, I was out, although there are a few stand-alone comic adventures.

That was last week.  This week, I mostly ended up watching other people play games.  Things like MiniLAW, Trover Saves The Universe, Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality, and Phoenix Point.  (Watching other people play VR games for hours is also a pretty good way to get mildly motion sick.)

The latter, Phoenix Point, did get a bit of gameplay out of me.  It was created by Snapshot Games, which was founded by Julian Gollop, the designer of the original UFO: Enemy Unknown series.  So it should be little wonder that it is essentially an evolution of the kinds of games that he has been making, even integrating a few sound effects from Laser Squad.  The man is among the greatest forerunners of producing squad-based tactical games, though let us not downplay the fine work they did in Chaos Reborn, which is to Chaos: The Battle of Wizards what Phoenix Point is to Laser Squad.
As for my opinion of Phoenix Point, the jury is still out.

In many ways, Phoenix Point is a considerably more flexible game than the Firaxis X-COM reboot.  Each of your squaddies gets four action points, and movement only partially expends them, leading to much more flexibility in movement.  It seems that they can unlock a lot more powerful abilities.  (For example, an early ability of the Assault class is a "dash" that lets them trade "will points" for free movement.)  The enemies evolve organically, fielding more of the same mutations if they have proven to be effective, essentially forcing the player to change their tactics.  Things like this lead to a looser, more open-ended game mechanic.

But the consequence of that flexibility is that everything is a bit less structured than they were in X-COM.  Even when extolling the virtues of the creative freedom granted to the player, it is hard to assert that less refined game mechanics are a preferable alternative because the decisions of Sid "Games Are A Series Of Interesting Choices" Meier's version of squad-based combat is designed to be more clear-cut, significant choices.  Plus, it has to be said: fighting against deliberately stacked odds is kind of frustrating, and even more frustrating when the mechanics are further off the rails.

Perhaps I should seek more relaxing games as I have been feeling, if anything, overly agitated as of late.  Caffeine and working during my time off can have that effect on a person.

Development.

In some ways, my indie game development endeavors have never gone better.  In others, it has never been worse.  I continue to hold myself to at least 4 Pomodoros each day off on average, but I have largely been flummoxed by my own perfectionism getting in the way of deciding what I want to do.
[Image] Back to Oryx Design Labs' Ultimate Roguelike Tileset again, for now. At least, I assume it is perfectionism.  It feels like writer's block, and I have been up against it for a very, very long time.  It happens whenever it is time to add new, innovative game mechanics.  I would add the tried and true instead, like everyone else, but to generate deep and novel games is pretty much my entire motivation.

Having put that in black and white just now, I guess it is not all that surprising that progress has been slow going.   Deep games take extra time to make.  Novel games take extra time to make.  Deep and novel games should take a lot of extra time to make.  I guess that I will just keep at it.

But it has been many years now.  I can see things I have written almost three years ago that have me pretty much in the same place I am now, "I am drawing an absolute blank about what I wanted to make.  I wracked my brains at length about what the end goal is, but I guess that there never was one."  At least I could be said to be getting better at the tools, as I did not have pixel-perfect graphics back then.

My aspiration this year is to get a minimum viable product out to iterate upon.  Though I have done a few 7DRL that have complete play loops, I have yet to succeed at something a bit more serious, because those play loops are that much more difficult to define.  I am deadlocked by my need for innovation, and it just doesn't seem to be clearing up.