Stuffed Wombat

@stuffedwomb.at

3565 Followers 2191 Following

Next game being worked on. Mosa Lina. PRODUCER 2021. qomp. 10mg. Gutwhale. ord. Handulum. A lot of other games. he/him. Check out my website: https://stuffedwomb.at/

Continue doing what, though? Working on next game, hanging with friends and colleagues, dating, chores, family-life and working on staying clean and sober is leaving me with no time and mindspace at all to do small experiments, to get back into the process of playing at game design that is so crucial in finding nuggets of obsession that I can then excitedly polish up and show to the world. I’m not shitting out enough small experiments. I am standing on unfertilised ground.
I was talking with a friend about „hard art“, about following your inner urges in your work and then trying to make a living off of that, and she said that this could be seen as two discrete steps: first you follow your heart, experiment wildly and find something that is very close to you but that, statistically speaking, nobody cares about and then, for the second step, you have to transpose this fragile core into a more robust vehicle that is able to reach a broader palate.
It is not easy to find access to the modes of creative work I slipped in and out of as a younger person. I have been trying to make peace with the fact that things might never be the same, that the intense feeling of belonging and cohesion that came with extended period of intentional work (especially on PRODUCER and Mosa Lina), might never come back, that the price to pay for it is, literally, too high.
screenshot of interview Q: If you had to rate it, what would you give it? Cogswell: I don't know what you're talking about.
7 || YES, Erik—it’s exactly like that movie…
Sonic, lookin smug, saying: "I want gambling emulators with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and i'm not kidding"
a man gives up digging a tunnel halfway. another man excitedly keeps digging and is about to break into a cave containing the plane that represents survivorship bias.
a first person game. you walk up to a legde, look around and jump down into a town, narrowly missing a walkway and falling. On impact, the screen turns black and the Logo appears: FALLSTRUKTUR Out Now
a large blue butterfly, resting on my arm
audacity interface showing my recording volume to be set to 0.32
steam storepage, mosa lina is overwhelmingly positive againfor a few days
a short phrase is spawned again and again in slightly different sizes
trailer, showing physics driven puzzle platforming, level editing and annuncing the game to release on the Switch on May 28th
two text mesages sent by me 1: ahhh idk every system that works eventually destroys itself through complacency 2: yeah i'm "working" while we chat hahah
So, what’s next? I’ve semi-committed internally to trying to release one game per month again. I don’t feel like pushing myself to achieve this. Instead, I hope to simplify whatever idea I have until it becomes very easy to execute. I don’t intend to spend a lot of energy on simplifying. If nothing works out by the end of the month: whatever. After finishing this post, I will work a little bit more on the current idea. This time, I don’t want to talk about the work at all. Looking at one thing too intensely seems to encourage the inward-turning that I am currently trying to avoid.
And then: Finally. Finally. Finally. I have managed to play a couple of games again. It was nice. Games are nice. Wew. It’s really been a long while since I’d played so many games in such a short time. Games.
chat message saing: its like: ziiiip CLINK boing
This was a new process for me. The gameplay, the self generated bullet-hell, was created in a very deliberate process of iteration over multiple weeks. It would be fun to go through all my notes and track those iterations, but not now. Now I need some distance, because the second part of the game, the long and dense text that scrolls in the background, was created in a few heady days of intense focus.
TIME REMOVER, surrounded by a hypnotic pattern
screenshot of github User interface, displaying a list: 24_12_27_believing_in_the_idea.md Update 24_12_27_believing_in_the_idea.md Dec 27, 2024 25_01_04_california_sober.md Update 25_01_04_california_sober.md Jan 4, 2025 25_01_10_how_i_prototype.md Update 25_01_10_how_i_prototype.md Jan 10, 2025 25_01_17_concept_close_up.md Update 25_01_17_concept_close_up.md Jan 18, 2025 25_01_24_problems_with_patterns.md Create 25_01_24_problems_with_patterns.md Jan 24, 2025 CNAME Create CNAME Dec 25, 2018 _config.yml Update _config.yml Dec 25, 2018 about_disco_elysium.md Update about_disco_elysium.md May 8, 2022 about_dishonored.md Update about_dishonored.md May 8, 2022 about_limbo_inside.md Create about_limbo_inside.md May 8, 2022 about_qomp.md Update about_qomp.md Jan 29, 2021 about_rainworld.md
There is something hypnotic about staring at your screen, playing around with a movement mechanic while developing it. Looking for edge cases, getting a feel for the movement speed, fine-tuning visual feedback: all of this involves playing the game without really playing it, looking and feeling more than trying to progress. Sometimes I skip the game part completely and just build input visualisation software that spits out endless variations of a pattern. Some sort of puppet-theatre-proc-gen. I then look at it for a few minutes, zoning out, watching the colors and shapes fly by.
Okay, let’s talk about the concept I mentioned last week. It basically boils down to this: You create your own obstacles I always struggled with system-design, but the idea of a self-generating gameplay loop is really compelling to me. It touches on something I’ve been wrestling with for a while: We play video games because we want to. So why do we have all these scores and objectives and markers of progression? Why can’t we just enjoy playing?
The important thing about all of this is that I keep throwing away my work and rebuilding it from scratch, very quickly and very regularly. It’s way more fun to write code than it is to read code. If a prototype would require multiple weeks of coding to set up, then I simplify my design or just don’t do it. I want to retain my flexibility, my ability to shift directions and try out strange ideas, as much as possible.
A friend told me about being “California Sober” (no alcohol, no hard drugs), which is a really funny term, but let’s be real: I’m not sober anymore. This is the first blogpost that’s one day late. Not because I was too fucked up to write, but because I did not want to publicly talk about this. To be honest, I still don’t.
The game is so focused on it’s immediate reactivity that in the Jindosh mansion it accidentally becomes explicit about it’s existance as a videogame. You pull a lever and the walls move, configuring themselves into a new position in reaction to your input. This is just how videogames look through the eyes of a level designer. You enter a room and the cutscene begins. You open a door and the enemies spawn, you pull a lever and the world changes. The Jindosh mansion just makes this diegetic and explicit.
As hoped, all the failed attempts of the last months, finding themselves with unexpected neighbous, have merged into new opportunities for attempts. Attempts. This is important. Right now, everything in my head is very clear. I have a structure that meshes really well with the themes of the text-only game. I can see the moment-to-moment gameplay of the bullet-trail game and I have a vision of it’s larger arc. I know how the design course needs to be structured and I have found a really interestening twist on the homework.
blog again 15.11.24 blog again 22.11.24 there’s work to do 29.11.24 release realisation 06.12.24 work life 13.12.24 one tiny idea 20.12.24 work, to be interrupted back
narrative grapth. Start leads to Revachol, where you can do many things. Time passes from each thing. If Day 1 is over, new stuff gets added to revachol. If Day 3 is over, the Coast line is unlocked. In the coastline there is an action that can only be done if the hardy boys quest has been completed. it leads to Ruby & the fight, which leads to a smaller version of revachol, which leads to the island sequence and the final scene.
(I’ve also become really interested in pre- and suffixes. I feel like really getting a good grasp of how more complicated words are constructed will help me a lot in creating alien worlds that still feel familiar. Like: Systemmacy. Or: Mathomancer. Or: Unvoy. Lots of fun stuff here.)
"you played 57 games" steam median: 4
narrative structure & it's output, showing an example of how bags work: a zone, containing blocks is accessed a few times, each time displaying a different, randomly chosen, text
narrative framework, consisting of arrows and boxes, that produce output where you get angry after trying to open a door 2 times, allowing you to try to kick it down!
Apparently, during dinner, the elk had drunk a lot of beer, fallen down the stairs, and died.
he died of syphilis, which he said he got from dirty sheets when out of town
In 663, on account of corruption, he was removed from his post and exiled. In 666, after Emperor Gaozong had declared a general pardon, except for long-term exiles, Li Yifu died in anger.
narrative framework consisting of boxes and arrows, all in grayscale, the text output is display on the right side
narrative game, hovering over an active skillcheck displays the calculation used to arrive at the difficulty of the skillcheck
text-based game. clicking on a choice with "30% difficulty" triggers a little animation where numbers scroll by quickly, before either succeeding or failing
narrative structue & it's output. you can try to push, pull or knock on a door, without effect. the cool thing is that choosing an option adds the choice you made to the history of the text, while also printing the feedback AND immediatly giving you a choice again
blocks on a grid, forming a narrative structure. the example shows, that the game always knows what will come next. either a choice or another block of text!
flowchart depicting logic. check overlap -> render either -> continue -> check overlap or -> choose -> made choice -> check overlap
a table in a little nook, microphone, laptop on it, plant on a windowsill, gamer chair in front of it
blocks on a grid, forming a narrative structure
black text scrolling quickly over a white background, describing a very clean appartement. the player chooses what to inspect. everything is kind of clean and sterile.
youtube video of a kid giving me advice titled "just exist bro"
A bunch of notebooks and paper stacks on a table
mosa lina 37% off 3.14€
Creative work has something in common with therapy, maybe it's a kind of therapy. If you want to keep making new things and pushing boundaries, you have to really look inside yourself and witness what's there. It takes personal growth. Or it gives personal growth maybe? It's all mixed in together, it's just part of being a person. You look at the things that you're cringing away from, the triggers you avoid, and at some point you just have to gird up and go after them.
Videogames are structured interactions with a computer Interactions are made of actions and reactions Mechanics are immediate interactions Systems are collections of interacting mechanics Structure is how interactions relate to one another Content disappears Systems repeat Game design is making choices about interactions
black & white movie, 2 men listening to a woman who says: "you spend one day working and a whole month bragging"
In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing can occur in an atomic fact the possibility of that atomic fact must already be prejudged in the thing.
Games are art made from interactions. Video games are art made from interactions with a computer. Computers run on logic. Interactions with a computer run on logic. Mechanics are immediate interactions. Systems are a collection of interacting mechanics. Game design is making choices about interactions.