Moved website to my server entirely. I've been meaning to do this for years and even after having the God tool available it took me 5 months to find the will to do it. Oh well, better late than never. My goal with this is simple but multi-faceted. I can do any feature I want on the website itself, but those will actually only come after I finish the Anchor app, which will have this website running on my engine instead of HTML/CSS. This will allow me to have full control over everything, which will in turn allow me to do the ideas I have for mixing games and stories.
I think it's a good time in general though to have your own tools and spaces and to not rely on anyone else. It kind of feels like the public internet is... different? I don't know how to describe it actually, but I feel less compelled to be active anywhere online where other people can interact with me. I just feel like airing my thoughts to no one in particular and have no one in particular reply.
Strategically speaking this also makes sense. Now that you can do anything with Claude, the only benefit most social media sites provide is the ability for people to discover you, but it's debasing to be jestermaxxing to thousands of people to whom you are just a part of their "feed." I am not food, I am a human being. And as a human being, the warmth of one soul is worth more than the eyes of ten thousand followers. It's better to have one person super interested in what you have to offer than many who are lukewarm about you. Ah, I'm in a romantic mood I guess...
Anyway, with that principle in mind, having a place that you control fully feels necessary. I have lots of ideas for how I'm going to maximally use and expand this place towards that goal, and it will all happen in time. Until then I just have to keep trying to make more game.
I got Hantavirus at the Japanese handjob parlor.
I haven't had sex in over two months and I will continue this period of chastity and monkhood until the Hantavirus threat is over. However, I will not buy non-perishable foodstuffs to last me for eternity in case the world ends. Last time I was early to COVID and on top of getting doom-edged in 2 week increments during January and February, I ended up having to eat rice and lentils every day until the end of the year when it became clear it was a nothingburger.
Man, I just had the most upsetting dream I've had in a while. I was at this huge school. Like, huge. I think the architecture was inspired by that video of the huge Chinese school I saw on X the other day. This one:
It was a new place too. Usually in my dreams I'm in places I know I've been before but with modified layout/architecture, but this one I had never been to. I don't know if that means anything. Anyway, I'm in this place, and eventually I get to my class. It's this massive cooking class, like 1000 people, a big room full of cooking stations, imagine a stadium, but smaller because it's only for 1000 people, but there's ground level and lots of cooking stations there, but they extend upwards at an angle to the sides too, so there's a lot of people everywhere.
So I'm doing my tasks, I'm learning, I'm getting really invested. The teacher is Gordon Ramsay for obvious reasons. The fact that I'm getting invested is a direct mirror of real life, because in real life I am getting into cooking and learning how to make good-tasting and healthy food and enjoying it. So that's happening, but then comes an exam. Gordon explains the exam, then his helper hands everyone a tablet. The helper is wearing a suit, doesn't look fully human, like kind of a robot? I guess he most resembles Chat from Northernlion's Tomodachi Life playthrough.
I look at the questions, there are 20 of them, and they all look pretty easy, but their order is bugging out on my tablet. Like question 13 is appearing first, some questions appear in some places and then move elsewhere, and so on. This is a mirror of real life too, as one of the issues with my blot website was the posts were showing up missing or in the wrong order all the time, and I had to fix several bugs related to this when we were moving the website to my own server. Anyway, I ask Gordon about this issue and he answers but I don't remember his reply. It doesn't matter, though, because I just move on and do the exam, answering all questions correctly, except for question 19, which I wasn't sure about, so I don't answer it.
After I'm done I continue with my other tasks. I'm so invested in the tasks that even as Gordon hands me back my graded exam I'm barely paying attention. After a few minutes I look at it to see my score, which I expect to be 20/20, but thinking back it can't be that because I didn't answer one question, so I should expect it to be 19/20. But then I look and it's... 1/20? What the hell? I look at it and the first question that appears is question 19, the one I didn't answer. But then the other questions didn't even load, so they weren't graded. I can literally see the loading circle, the next questions trying to load but they can't. So this is clearly a bug. But Gordon is speaking, he's saying how the exam had one question that was a trap to weed out the cheaters, and if you didn't answer that question, it's clear you were a cheater. I'm guessing that was question 19.
I try showing Chat the issue with my tablet, Chat is understanding but doesn't seem like he'll help me, so I call over Gordon, who barely looks at it and is immediately dismissive. I try to explain that during the exam my questions were ordered incorrectly so maybe that's why the grading bugged out too. He's having none of it. I'm insistent, but I can see what comes next. You know that face Gordon makes when he knows he's right but he's also perplexed that someone is fighting back and disagreeing with him? Like a surprised-mocking-superiority face, that's his fucking face right now. And then he goes off on me. I don't remember what he says exactly, probably many sentences involving me being an idiot sandwich or a fucking donkey, but at the end of it he says, "Weren't you making tons of excuses right as the exam started too? You're a fucking loser, just give up."
And this really made me mad. Like, this spiked my cortisol to tremendous levels. He was just fucking lying. I wasn't making excuses, I asked him a single question about the exact bug we were talking about! I actually got so fucking mad here that I paused the dream. I can do that, I can pause my dreams. I think at some point when I was younger I often had a particularly bad nightmare and to stop the bad thing from happening I'd pause it, and my brain learned you can just do that. Doing this doesn't make me aware that I'm dreaming. So I'm there, dream paused, fuming, looking at Gordon's fucking mocking face as he's just straight up lying about me. I am so fucking mad, this is so fucking stupid, and then I wake up.
Now, what could this dream mean? Well, it's not quite the classic "there's an exam and I didn't study for it" school dream, but it's close. It is interesting though that it takes the form of injustice, right? The feeling I woke up with is the same feeling I felt when I got banned for an entire summer when I was 13 from my usual CS 1.6 server due to "hacking" even though I was quite clearly not hacking at all and the admin was just mad I killed him too often. But I don't feel this feeling anymore. Like, ever. If something unjust happens to me now, my framing is pretty much always one of "I know I didn't do anything wrong, this has nothing to do with me spiritually, it's entirely about the other person's relationship with power and their learning to use it." This kind of situation has particularly never happened to me in a school setting. There wasn't a single instance of me thinking a teacher judged my work incorrectly or anything like that.
There are the real life related events, getting invested in cooking, the ordering bug from my website, but I'm not sure if those mean anything either. There's the architecture. It was definitely a new place I've never been to before. Most places in dreams, even though I've never been to them in real life, I can just tell I've been to before dozens of times, probably in previous forgotten dreams. This one was fully new. It was very white, like the Chinese school video, bright white lights everywhere, floor and walls pure white too. But I'm not sure what it could mean that it's new. There's the fact that I didn't answer question 19. When I had a question I wasn't sure about in exams, I'm pretty sure I tried answering them anyway, why would I just refuse to answer this one? Or did I fail to answer it, or answered it incorrectly? I actually don't remember now. It's possible I tried to answer it but I knew it was incorrect?
Could a situation like this happen to me in real life right now? I am very invested in my art, currently the games and books I want to make. Let's say I release a new game and someone I look up to reviews it very poorly. Uh... no, that wouldn't work, I don't really look up to anyone. There's no one whose presence makes me invested enough that anything bad they could say would feel, viscerally, like some kind of judgement. The school setting is unique here because you buy into it, you buy into the fact that there's a mentor, and you allow him to judge you. Real life is not like this, at least not related to my work. There's no one judging me, because I don't believe that anyone knows any better than me.
Ah, but this is only true for making games, actually. I'm learning how to write, how to make music, how to cook, I'm going to the gym more often... I'm learning a bunch of new things and in those settings it does make sense that I'd be worried about being judged. I'm not worried about being judged by others entirely, but mostly myself, I think. The thing I try to avoid the most when doing anything is not trying my hardest. For everything I've released so far, the one guiding line is: "did I actually try my best?" I don't want to look back on something and feel like I could have tried harder. If I release a game or a book or anything, it means that was the best I could do at the time.
And so maybe dismissive and unjust Gordon is actually the broken facet of myself that would betray this principle. To answer "did I actually try my best?" I need a trustworthy verifier. But the dream was about the verifier malfunctioning. The horror, what spiked my cortisol, was the lying, the clear unashamed lying, evidence that the teacher didn't even see my effort and thus didn't grade it properly, right? True horror is the verifier being wrong, the compass going astray, intuition failing to answer "did I actually try my best?" accurately. Yes, this makes sense. It also makes question 19 make sense, the trap question, which I don't even remember if I refused to answer or answered poorly, it represents uncertainty on whether I tried my best or not, because trying your best would for sure mean actually trying to answer it.
Hmm, yes, I like this analysis. It also makes sense why it would happen now, maybe I'm spreading myself too thin.
Moving this website off blot.im into my own server (now working temporarily at https://new.a327ex.com) and it's been a good task. It's clear to me now that I'm not enjoying the benefits of AI fully because this kind of task is what the robot was actually built to do. It feels so good to tell it to do something and it just does it over 1 hour and you come back to it and it's like 99% right, God, it truly does feel like cumming. Tasks that the robot can verify itself are the goal, honestly kind of annoyed that what I like doing isn't verifiable like this. Maybe I should explore how to make the things I make more verifiable, try sessions where I only do huge hyper-specific prompts... But it's hard because for something artistic/visual it kind of requires you to test often or for you to be very clear, and for you to be clear you really need supernatural giga foresight of hell vision. Maybe I can develop that vision better by trying the long hyper-specific prompts more often. Yes, that's probably what I should do.
For a creative, the algorithm is the greatest modern friend. I have for years been introduced to interesting ideas due to YouTube suggesting a video essay on a topic related to my current obsessions. The X algorithm is now quite good too at paying attention to what I like, and it can be shaped pretty easily by clicking the like button with some discipline. I do not use TikTok or YT shorts that much, but there they also work reasonably well. Given that what matters most is a collection of relevant references, the way to get such collections for as many relevant topics as possible is having a well-tuned algorithm that's constantly showing you interesting things. I'm currently interested in music theory, so YouTube regularly surfaces videos such as the one below to me, and that's a good thing.
The average person may be one-shot by the algorithm, but the creative must be supercharged by it!
It is perhaps worth it to expand on "meaning and commitment." Commitment refers to the ability to follow through. It's the ability to rawdog a movie, to say you're going to meet with someone at place X and time Y and do it, to set a goal for yourself and work towards it, essentially to do in a functional and reliable way, to not be a flaky human being, both to yourself and to others.
Games can make someone commit. Usually they do it because they're fun in one way or another, but also because they require activation energy. If you're scrolling, you're rarely ever doing it due to saying "I'll scroll for 1 hour," right? It's just a passive activity that happens because it requires no activation cost whatsoever, it's the easiest thing to do and it has been optimized into keeping you trapped. If a game has become such a passive activity for you, which happens after you've been playing the same game for hundreds of hours, then it fills this same spot. But for the games an indie developer makes, this is hardly ever the case, therefore our games require initial commitment. A player has to actively choose to buy it and then learn to play it and enjoy it before that activation energy is not required anymore.
And then there's long term commitment. Here there are arguments you could make on which forms of it are more or less moral. I will not get into this argument. I like to imagine game development in relation to its most supreme future, the Shaper role. In the future, one can easily imagine shapers in the higher echelons of power, individuals who are tasked with shaping the behavior of the masses so that they are guided towards better and less self-destructive behaviors. Such individuals will likely use many of the techniques being developed primarily in games now to achieve their aims, as those techniques carry across domains. And so, just like games helped, in an indirect way, the birth of AI, they might help, in yet another indirect way, the shaping of our future glorious society that is yet to come. I shall pass no judgement on such techniques as they stand.
Suffice to say, most games get the commitment portion of the equation right. There's higher selection pressure compared to short-form content and thus the games that do manage to steal people away by definition are doing a better job there.
Now for meaning. There's passive and active meaning. The former refers to the same meaning you can get from movies or books. The idea I'm now driven by, of mixing stories and games in novel ways aims at increasing passive meaning, as most of the solutions game developers have tried do not do a good job at it. There are kinds of passive meanings that games are good at that generally have to do with aesthetics, mood, tone, atmosphere, etc., if only due to an oversupply of visual artists in the industry. But largely I think passive meaning tends to be lacking.
Active meaning refers to the actions you take when playing the game. This is "play." It is what makes games distinct from other media and what they're most adept at. When I say that incrementals do not get meaning right, I mean both in the passive and active sense. In the passive sense it's obvious, but in the active one it may be less clear. Consider, what are you actually doing when playing a skill tree incremental? You're doing the main action, which is generally clicking for some resource, but it doesn't matter, because you know that you'll just improve your resource gathering speed soon enough. In the skill tree itself, it also hardly matters what you choose, because these games are balanced such that you reach natural cutoff points that constrain your options (it's how the developers ensure the experience is "good"). So in the end, in an incremental, active meaning is low because your actions don't matter.
Compare this to a battle royale. In such a game you're completely on your own and you have to survive. You have to know when to be assertive, when not to, when to follow a plan, when to break it, when to not have a plan at all, you have to know the layout, where to approach from, when to approach, when not to, and then all the mechanical skills to actually fight, and all this against other human beings who are as smart or skilled as you. This type of game is filled with meaningful actions. You are learning to become a better human being by playing such a game because it is asking you to act correctly in a self-directed manner.
Most multiplayer games are also filled with meaningful actions, as acting in a team is also pro-social skill development. Although, for multiplayer games, it is usually better for this play to be with friends/known people rather than strangers. This is where co-op games are better (i.e. playing Risk of Rain with friends) and where the matchmaking function that most of these games provide actively makes them less meaningful. You're engaging in more meaningful actions by having to actively join a server hosted by someone, and then joining that same server over and over and playing with a known community, than you are by playing with randoms all the time.
In any case, you can easily judge games based on the level of meaning in their actions. A game like SNKRX for instance, the earliest criticism I got of it before it was released was "where's the gameplay?" It's a valid criticism, the game almost plays itself. What this criticism was getting at was exactly this, where are the meaningful actions? And in those early versions they were indeed not all there. But later they came, as the ability to pick different units and have different builds came online more strongly. So even in a game like SNKRX, you're still making plenty of choices and having to learn the specifics of the system to make the right choices.
You can run this analysis pretty easily for any kind of game. Do you have meaningful actions in the VS-likes? Well, yea, but... It's definitely a lower level of it, and now the choose 1 out of 3 framing has been played and hollowed out completely so it's a lot less meaningful, right? What about the more traditional roguelites, Isaac and so on? Yea, there's a lot there, Isaac has a lot of resource trades on top of the extreme build diversity, even if the combat itself is kind of simple and mindless. What about games like Path of Exile? Lots of meaningful actions there at least regarding your builds, and for the players looking for more challenging action there's also more to learn regarding enemy patterns and so on, especially in Path of Exile 2 (apparently, I have not played it yet). I could go on, right, RTSs are pretty meaningful, the map games too, puzzle games, etc. Lots of genres get this right, some do not. So the natural criticism of i.e. VS-likes and incrementals that seems intuitive to many indie developers is actually that they fall really low on this meaningful action spectrum, I think.
So, that's what I meant by meaning and commitment earlier. Short-form content is very low meaning and very low commitment because your action is just scrolling, and the actual content you're consuming is hardly ever particularly good... Well, actually, it's often good in many ways, but it gets repetitive/ouroboros-like quite quickly due to how autistically the algo hyperfixates on it, so it reaches a point of negative value rapidly. But yea, it's just very low, and so the strategy should be to move away from that rather than towards it. This move away has to be an active choice because by default the Steam algorithm will serve what customers want, and what customers want will approach short-form content left unchecked, as the rise of VS-likes and incrementals shows.
Many have concluded that, due to AI's rise, what matters most now is taste. I agree that it matters, but what seems to matter most is having good references and being able to call on them at appropriate moments. The AI can do lots of things, but it has to be guided well, and the more it has to go from that is coherent with the current task, the better a job it will do. A collection (either physical, on the computer, or in your mind) of relevant references beats taste. You could say that only those with good taste will be able to have good collections, but I kind of disagree because the AI actually has pretty good taste a lot of the time, so it can cover where the user doesn't. Perhaps the collection is a function of a yet more general property, "vision." Having a clear vision of the project and what is to be achieved is what matters most... yes, maybe. This poses a problem, however, given that much of creative work is discovered as the artifact is built, so while the vision has to be clear, it also has to be flexible, unless you're so sure of what is to be built that it doesn't change much as it is built. Well, either way, I don't think taste is what matters most.
This beta mosquito has been flying around me for over an hour and hasn't bitten me yet. What the hell is his fucking problem? Just bite me already you loser piece of shit so I can explode you with my muscle bloodbending.
This guy is right that people don't dance because life has become a panopticon but he's wrong to blame technology. This is like the claim that "power corrupts" — it's false, it's blaming the wrong thing. Power reveals who you are, and technology is a form of power. Being powerful doesn't make you wicked, being powerful gives you the leverage to act on the wickedness (or goodness) that you already have in your heart.
The average human being is, in fact, wicked, deep in their heart, but the takeaway isn't that power shouldn't exist, it's that those who are good have a moral obligation to disempower those who are wicked.
I have correctly been called by thousands a prophet, a seer, a sage, for predicting the downfall of FTX based solely on my ability to have a refined distaste for rationalists. Some have directed similar criticism at Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, and his crew of true believers building Claude. Knowing this, I have to say that my intuition on Dario does not trigger any negative emotions. I do not feel compelled, even slightly, to stop using Claude, because I am worried about Dario's future actions. But I do feel this compulsion into avoiding ChatGPT, because I do get the same SBF feeling from Sam. It is interesting, though, because Sam is just transparently sociopathic. This would be reason to lower my guard. If he's openly sociopathic, surely he can't be that bad, right? But it does not lower. I think ultimately my intuition looks at people's actions first. Dario has not done anything I deem bad other than grant me a high-quality product, so I see no issue. For my purposes these models are very similar, so it doesn't matter in the end which one I use. But currently I do primarily use Claude and avoid Chat. Unless Anthropic prices me out I don't think this will change.
It's crazy how popular Psyllium husk is with normal people now, my usual supermarket is out constantly. I think this is actually a move by Big Gay Bottoms. First they export Grindr mechanics to Tinder and expose women forever, then they export healthier poops and more anal sex. In 5 years the intrasexual competition endgame will manifest itself as diapers for 30 year old women are sold out all the time, everywhere.
I would describe most games that grab my interest online currently as "free dopamine generators." They're games that are clearly meant to grow into lots of things happening on the screen at once in a juicy and fun way. Some common features: juicy UI that bounces way too much, themeless/abstract setting OR straight up casino themed, choose 1 out of 3, aforementioned dopamine-filled screen. There's nothing wrong with this kind of game, many of them are very fun, but it's a clear pattern.
While I haven't followed the rise of the skill tree incremental genre as closely as I did for VS-likes, the first one I played was Nodebuster right when it came out, and it was pretty fun. Many more have come out since then and some of them have made some nice additions to the idea, but it largely remains the same. This type of game is a good example of what I'm talking about.
While I could argue that competition isn't real among indie developers, we're all actually competing against short-form content. The calculation any potential game player runs is: do I want to buy and learn to play this game, or do I want to open TikTok/YT shorts and scroll? It's easy to see how the latter wins most of the time. It's also easy to see why, then, games with low initial cognitive demand will do better in the market. The incremental games fit this nicely, on top of having clear and well-defined progression and ending.
However, it's worth it to consider the meta here. If the competition is against short-form content, you can compete on the enemy's terms and try to out brainrot them, or you can go a different direction and offer things people can't get from that kind of content. This ends up being, in the most general sense: meaning and commitment. Incrementals get the commitment portion of it somewhat due to progressing and ending properly, but do not nail the meaning. So I would say that possible differentiation strategies will take what incrementals do well, but build on top of what they're missing.
There are many possible ways to approach this. Stuffed Wombat in Systems and Content delineates between both, saying that "Systems repeat. Content disappears." It's possible we may simply want to focus more on content than systems and that might work. My intuition, as a contrarian, was actually to just go the entire opposite way of what the incrementals settled on: no more themeless/abstract settings, only games with deep lore you can get autistic about; no more juicy UI that bounces like a clown, only diegetic insane UIs like in them old games, if the UI can be easily coded with a standard UI kit, it's over; no more choose 1 out of 3, only deep skill trees, insane complex ability systems, 10000 viable (actually viable) builds.
The correct line probably depends on the project. We may have games that are short, low initial cognitive demand, hand-crafted, narrative linear games that are meaningful and good and end, just like we may have games that are long, high initial cognitive demand, system-based build machines that never end. We may have games that are anything in between. But I do think the most important thing is to actually cover what short-form can't cover, which are meaning and commitment.
I am not saying this is what will be successful in the future or anything like that, I have no way of knowing. And I am biased. The idea that drives me now involves writing various books and telling deep lore stories on top of making games that take place in those worlds, aiming at producing high meaning values, so of course I would think that what I'm doing is what's actually good and framing it against what the average indie developer is doing, after all, I am so superior to them! Well, bias or not, this is what I think currently.
I don't think all my games will aim for this, the dopamine games can actually be really fun, and I'm not above making one of them if I happen to hit an interesting design, but this spectrum is something I've been thinking about often recently.
