Nikhil Murthy

@murthynikhil.bsky.social

239 Followers 326 Following

Experimental game designer currently working on Hoop Dungeon. Previous games: Syphilisation, The Quiet Sleep

Victory screen for Hoop Dungeon showing three ballers. Alice and Jeanne have each taken 0 shots and Korey has shot 3 of 6.
"I feel like the trend cycle in gaming is just getting shorter and shorter," Lee began, when asked how pitching developers should choose between pursuing a popular fad, or striking out afresh. "I remember when survival crafting was a big thing, and then it was, you know, deckbuilding roguelikes, right? I've had maybe 250 roguelike deckbuilders in the last 12 months. I don't know how to choose. Would you? Like, they're all Balatros with different cards. I don't know how to choose one. "And that's a roguelike deckbuilder problem," he went on. "I'm sorry if anybody here is making a roguelike deckbuilder. But that genre is is too narrow for you to differentiate far enough from anything else, right? Genre is a misnomer. Roguelike isn't a genre. Roguelike can be anything. It can be an FPS or a deckbuilder, anything. If you tell me, you have a roguelike game, I have no idea what you're making."
Gif of a pass animation freezing with a story overlay.
Image of Cain's dunk on Duren with Duren labeled NBA2K, Cain labeled Hoop Dungeon and the ball labeled Good Gameplay
Three photos, one of two men in suits, the second with two women in suits and the third a wedding photo of a man and a woman
Colorful painting of two people in white robes meeting with a kick. Twin Sunset - Andras Koncz
During June, I wrote the short novel that accompanies the game. This novella was not part of the original design. I only thought of it in April: realizing that the manual would be very large, I decided that I might as well go all out and write a novel to e.xplain the rules. My original intention was that the novel would explain the entire game and that no other documents would accompany it. It took me one day to prepare an outline that addressed all aspects of the game. I then wrote a chapter a day, two days a week. It was a most enjoyable writing task.
A variety of other systems have been used for playtesting. Most rely on gathering large groups of "real people" and assessing their reactions to the game. I have little respect for such systems. Although they are scientific, objective, and democratic, they seldom yield useful design information, for consumers make lousy critics. Their suggestions too often are inane and impractical. They don't know enough about computers or games to give practical criticism. Such methods may work with detergent and shaving cream, but I doubt that any great movie, book, or song was created through market research of this kind. I will concede that such methods can prove to be a useful way to guide the mass production of cheap games by designers of limited talents, but this book is not written for them.
CHOOSE A GOAL AND A TOPIC This vitally important step seems obvious, yet is ignored time and time again by game designers who set out with no clear intent. In my conversations with designers, I have often noticed indifference to the need for clear goals. Game designers sometimes admit trying to produce a "fun" game or an "exciting" game, but that is usually the extent of their thinking about goals. A game must have a clearly defined goal, and it must be expressed in terms of the effect it will have on the player. It is not enough to declare that a game will be enjoyable, fun, exciting, or good; the goal must establish the fantasies that the game will support and the types of emotions it will engender in its audience. Since many games are in some way educational, the goal in these cases should establish what the player will learn. It is entirely appropriate for the game designer to ask how the game will enlighten its audience. The importance of a goal does not become obvious until later in the design cycle. The crucial problems in game development with microcomputers are always problems of trade-offs. Everything that the game designer wants to do costs memory, and microcomputer memory is always in short supply. Thus, the designer must make trade-offs. Some game features can be included; some must be rejected. At two o'clock in the morning, when you face the awful decision of rejecting one of two highly desirable features, the only criterion for making this painful choice is the goal you have established for the game. If your goals are clear, your decision will be painful but obvious. If they are murky, you may well make the wrong choice, and whatever you choose, you will never know if your decision was correct. How does one select a proper goal? There is no objective answer to this question. The selection of a goal is undeniably the most subjective process in the art of computer game design. This is your opportunity to express yourself; choose a goal in which you…
Menu screen for Hoop Dungeon showing a baller named Korey.
Thus a game that stores huge quantities of static data is not making best use of the strengths of the computer. A game that emphasizes processing and treats information dynamically is more in tune with the machine. Relegate all static information to a rules book; paper and ink are still a better technology than personal computers for storing static information. Information that lies around and that must be dusted off before using has no place inside the microcomputer. As you look over your program listing, inspect each byte and ask yourself, "Am I getting my money's worth from this byte? Is it working hard for me, doing useful things frequently? Or is this a lazy byte that sits idle for hours and is used only rarely?" Fill your program with active bytes that do things, not with lazy bytes. Lazy bytes are often associated with dirty rules. (They like to hang out together in sleazy pool halls.) Dirty rules are special cases that occur rarely. The bytes associated with them are seldom used, lazy bytes.
An obvious example of such a social lubricant game utilizes a large plastic gameboard about four feet square marked with colored spots. During each player's turn, a random process determines which of four appendages (arms or legs) is to be placed on which spot on the board. As the players contort to fulfill the requirements, they inevitably make physical contact with each other in innocent and foolishly humorous ways. This game, a true icebreaker, promotes social lubrication. - Chris Crawford, the Art of Computer Game Design
“Queen Victoria, who, like Macaulay, has been accused of a Philistine taste in artistic matters, had a great admiration for him.”
Disracli's satirical version, in Tancris, of the conversation of these muddled aspirants is delightfel Tancred, Marquis of Montacute, young, rich, handsome, devi, and devout, is inclined to fall in love with Lady Constance Rawleigh, and calls on her at her mother's house. After making herself very agreeable Lady Constance took v? a book which was at hand, and said, "Do you know this?" And Tancred, opening a volume which he had never seen, and turning to its title-page, found it was The Revelations of Chaos, a startling work just published, and of which a rumour had reached him. "No," he replied, "I have not seen it." "I will lend it you if you like: it is one of those books onc must read. It explains everything, and is written in a very agreeable style."
Picture of the book The Victorians AND THEIR Reading by AMY CRUSE
I was not mistaken. It was hatred; I was hated, detested, and despised, not by my next-door neighbor or a close cousin, but by an entire race. I was up against something irrational. The psychoanalysts say that there is nothing more traumatizing for a young child than contact with the rational. I personally would say that for a man armed solely with reason, there is nothing more neurotic than contact with the irrational.
What does this mean? Quite simply this: when an Antillean with a degree in philosophy says he is not sitting for the agrégation because of his color, my response is that philosophy never saved anybody. When another desperately tries to prove to me that the black man is as intelligent as any white man, my response is that neither did intelligence save anybody, for if equality among men is proclaimed in the name of intelligence and philosophy, it is also true that these concepts have been used to justify the extermination of man.
So? So in all serenity my answer is that there are too many idiots on this earth. And now that I've said it, I have to prove it. - Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
ted, contined to a few v manufacturers, such as Agostinho da Costa and Augusto Carn de Sousa Martins. Working in tinplate, the "teacher" of war chines, spindles and wood stoves was Luciano Moura. But wh we consider large-scale toys, particularly those that were made paper pulp; we find the two great industries of the beginning of th century: A. Potier and Bryn-kedo. Despite the Portuguese industry of toys was very primitive, in the threshold of the craft, there were people seriously dedicated to this production and defended it as an essential tool for the education of children in school, such as A. Potier, distinguished engi-neer, who, in 1915, wrote in his catalogue: "It is through the toy that children should begin their education and, therefore, the toy should be chosen regarding especially the potentialities that can pedagogically offer. A toy that is poorly done or incomplete in its details represents a false notion of reality, because it is through it that children firstly became aware of what surrounds them and, in these circumstances, the toy should be set aside because it is teaching them in a wrong way."
Folding game board titled Pontape Ao Goal
Cartoon of Hitler behind Goring with the legend Weakness Behind Cruelty
Man wearing an Unknown Pleasures T-shirt being denied entry into a club.
When the game addresses the player directly through verbal responses or symbols integrated into the world, this approach is pragmatic, not avant-garde. It is not a curiosity but a convention for this medium. As participatory media that must communicate gameplay-relevant information to the player, digital games do not have an imaginary fourth wall that can be broken. For this reason, the presence of system information must be considered a medium-specific and necessary functional and aesthetic practice.
Painting of various birds in Jahangir's menagerie, including a dodo.
Preface This book is neither cricket reminiscences nor autobiog-raphy. It poses the question What do they know of cricket who only cricket know? To answer involves ideas as well as facts. The autobiographical framework shows the ideas more or less in the sequence that they developed in relation to the events, the facts and the personalities which prompted them. If the ideas originated in the West Indies it was only in England and in English life and history that I was able to track them down and test them. To establish his own identity, Caliban, after three centuries, must himself pioneer into regions Caesar never knew. C.L.R. JAMES London
He was already, with his use of his limousine as an office and conference room, making use of every available minute; there were no more minutes to be found unless he drove himself beyond the limit of his physical and mental and emotional strength - and the "almost nervous breakdown" of December 1934 had shown how close he was crowding that limit. It was lack of time more than any other single reason that accounted for an astonishing fact about many New York park projects: they were banal.
As I said earlier Conrad did not originate the image of Africa which we find in his book. It was and is the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination and Conrad merely brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it. For reasons which can certainly use close psychological inquiry the West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa. If Europe, advancing in civilization, could cast a backward glance periodically at Africa trapped in primordial barbarity it could say with faith and feeling: There go I but for the grace of God. Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray -- a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate. Consequently Africa is something to be avoided just as the picture has to be hidden away to safeguard the man's jeopardous integrity. Keep away from Africa, or else! Mr. Kurtz of Heart of Darkness should have heeded that warning and the prowling horror in his heart would have kept its place, chained to its lair. But he foolishly exposed himself to the wild irresistible allure of the jungle and lo! the darkness found him out.
The Great Hedge of India by Roy Moxham
An unusual feature of the French tax was that people had to buy a prescribed minimum weekly amount of salt. Failure to do this was an offence. This system of enforcement made collection of the tax considerably easier. The actual collection a the gabelle was usually farmed out to the highest bidder. The owners of the rights would then make every effort to maximise their profits. No allowance was made for calamities, sch as crop failure. To support the system, the state installed is own inspectors, who were backed up by detachments of the military. Heavy fines were imposed on those who smuggled or otherwise tried to evade the tax. Those who did not, or could not, pay were whipped and imprisoned. In 1680 the penalties were increased. 'Simple contraband' was punished br being sent to the galleys, and 'armed concraband' by death. It is believed that one-third of all French galley slaves had been convicted of salt offences.
White ants will attack large and vigorous looking tres, causing them to dry up and decay; the hot winds often blast a number of them, making an unsightly gap where none existed a short time before; parasital creepers, if not watched, will envelope and blight a length of the hedge, leaving us no remedy but complete eradication of the bank. trees attached ere we can destroy the pests; locusts will, as in 1872-73, settle in the hedge, and, if they do no worse, check its growth; and finally, we have the natural decay of the trees to encounter, keeping us continually planting and transplanting without cessation or inter-mission. In 1872-73 we had one more scourge in the shape of an Assistant Revenue Surveyor in the Bah Pinahat Tahsil of the Agra division, who, before I could communicate with his superior, had cut gaps in the Bah and Tathiabad beats in four places at his will and plea-sure, destroying wantonly what it has cost us, of all grades, years of labour to rear and bring to perfection.
Ceramic depicting a very inflated Viscount da Faria
A physical copy of the book When Daddy Was A Little Boy by Alexander Raskin
the repression that we exert for [the colonists'] benefit makes them each day more detestable; to the same degree that they protect them, our troops increase the danger they are in, making the presence of the army all the more indispensible. This year, the war will cost, if we continue with it, more than 300 billion francs, which equals the total Algerian revenue. We are reaching the point where the system destroys itself. The colonies are costing more than they bring in.