An alternative title: "I want to see more Witness-likes".

There have been many games inspired by The Witness, the 2016 'open world' rule discovery game that was a big release at the time for having this massive beautiful island and game mechanics no one had done before.

This article will generally be like:

1. My feelings on the game with not much spoilers, with the appropriate spoiler tags
2. Reception and inspiration of the game
3. Why its subtractive design is interesting, my favorite moments of reveals, and where other games have taken it

My Takes

Sometimes it's hard to think back to how past-you thought of a game before you ever played it. Obviously the nature worlds were beautiful, but also the idea of finding shortcuts and caves, I was really hoping for a larger underground variety of areas, but it turns out that wasn't very much there and most of these were dead-ends.

Of course the idea of doing things on a grid was entirely new to me at the time, I was excited, loved the idea of symbols being unknown, and while I didn't spoil myself the idea of trying to figure it out from the trailers only was kind of cool too.

When I actually played it, using unexpected elements of the world or the game in a puzzle was so cool, the ways to not tunnel vision only at the panel you're looking at, to use shadows and lights and blockers and exact perspective, the color bunker area, and of course the EV reveal. I can't remember the initial EV I found, I think it was on the ground and a place I passed through early on (it was like yellow and near the starting green/blue panel puzzles) even CLICKING on it multiple times as I passed through the area but apparently just being slightly off and not getting it counted.

I remember getting some stuff too early, like the 'rotated tetris symbols', and overall felt like there was less "first principles logic solving" than expected, not as many new symbols as I'd pictured, though I truly appreciated what every new area's new gimmick brought to the table.

The ending area was very nice too, getting a bit of meta - with panels of scale, odd perspectives and more cursed panels, and unexpected cylinder gameplay.

Now you cannot miss the horribly slow moving platforms and 1-hour waiting puzzle while the steam description's 'there's no filler' rattles in your mind. While I still think this is not something I'd do, I've wondered for years why this doesn't seem to match what you'd expect out of Jon Blow's talks. I think I finally understand now. Wasting time Is Art. Meditating time Is Art. Jonathan Blow loves to do things For Art. When you're supposed to screenshot a bunch of intentionally misleading hard-to-find dorito puzzles to figure out the rule of it, that's Art. (I've also understood how Jonathan Blow's other forms of public presence are actually consistent and not contradictory with The Witness's overall ideas but )

I was never really bothered by how 'pretentious' the game was, despite early audio logs about how walking through a doorway is epistomogicolgoicially impossible. It makes it feel like it's part of the game's theme to have a lot of different perspectives, but people imagine that if they were the ones who design the game they wouldn't want the endorsement of "yes this is very valuable" for such audio logs, people mentally glaze over it. Funnily enough the inventor of Taiji (closest '2D' witnesslike), was praised for not having a pretentious story when it did have a story and it was just... not in audio log form. Of course these aspects were found irritating enough for a lot of content for the parody game 'The Looker' to feel resonant to people.

Rule Discovery isn't enough for a full Witnesslike

As the inventor of Taiji^[1] pointed out, even though you might say that there have been a lot of "Witness-like" games, such as Bilattice, 14 Minesweeper Variants, DEG, etc., Those games have put their focus into the "paper-puzzle" (2D puzzle with restrictions and symbols) part of the game. Islands of Insight was partially a Witness-like but it uses the 3D world a lot less effectively and handcraftedly than The Witness. Thus, there is still room for someone to capture the 'specialness' of the ability to use the 3D world in a magical and surprising way.

I would say games like The Talos Principle have this "3D world promise" that doesn't happen all the way. Talos Principle: Yes the star puzzles use it for some nice "exploits turned into real objectives" or easter eggs, but most of the 3D world is just decoration.

Lingo has this lacking Witness-like trait, despite not having a very 'natural' aesthetic of a 3D world, because its 3D world is used with more motifs than usual. Outer Wilds is odd to think about as a Witness-like, as it doesn't have any 'main puzzle type' but the sense of the use of the world is very strong.

Anyway onto rule discovery.

Rule Discovery is Subtractive Design

Ever since The Witness was released, it got people talking about the idea of games where progression is not blocked by keys or arbitrary progression, but instead knowledge, symbols that each had a certain interaction with the grid.

Now puzzles have often had interaction discovery, which is related but not the same. For example you might notice in a puzzle game "hey, this element has never interacted with another element before". Stephen's Sausage Roll is probably the game most known for this approach, like (world 2 spoiler) never having a wall in the first island.

I think the strangest part of the genre to think about, is "more content by subtractive design".

For example, you would usually implement a tutorial in your game. But if you don't, now it's this new RULE DISCOVERY GENRE for doing less work! Very interesting.

It's funny in a way, as in my parody video essay I parodied this oddity by calling Baba Is You's "language settings" for a 'language learning' puzzles, and this joke also appeared in Court of the Competition 5. But actually language-learning games are the most pure execution of this in a way, even though the ways to deduce things is even more spiky whether they're too obvious or too out-there.

This makes this aspect of The Witness uniquely 'copiable' in a way Jon's other games aren't (Braid, Order of the Sinking Star), or even arguably many other aspects of The Witness did not get copied as often (the open world for example, because it would be more effort to copy).

Rule discovery leverages similar reasons as to why story and mystery games have so much potential: the player is thinking of a possibility space a lot more than what's in the game. It can definitely 'go haywire' in an open world game since variations and too many branching paths can get you very stuck, especially if you come up with a wrong idea. Lingo, Taiji, and Outer Wilds are all knowledge games that have paths that a new player can end up in that are very confusing and unhelpful for your conception of how the game and structure is like. Occasionally those games have negative reviews that might be more clear why they had a bad time, if you knew the path that person took in the game^[2].

Inspirations

A cursed part of this genre is that you would think you could do a 'spoiler free' version of this article without the inspirations, but in practice you kind of do, otherwise you probably have no visual for what this genre looks like. This "rule discovery" genre could have started with a significantly different game instead of necessarily being tied to 2D puzzles on grids.

The Witness

"Is the same game being mentioned as an example because it's 2 articles being merged together?" Yes

When this game came out, it had a very pure alien-civilization-first-principles feel that I think other games now lack due to being too obviously "Witness inspired". You could imagine an alien player try to figure out the rules of the game in a way that required no English. They would just need the same uh, human senses we do.

Another thing about rule discovery is that designers can 'mine depth' off something that's usually not very nice in a traditional puzzle game, and especially has the deep chance to feel cheap in an adventure game, which is (this is spoilered for the sake of 'it's a puzzle to figure what this is before opening it') edge cases.

For example, the infamous double tetromino gate in The Witness:

Notably it's also the open-world that causes this problem, as the reaction to this for players who didn't see the tutorial area is being shocked that this is possible, but in a bad way. Of course showing text of "you can't do this yet" is not in the vibe of the genre.

I remember the 40k view clip of Jonathan Blow forgetting the genius idea for The Witness 2. I cannot claim to know what it was but the main thing I thought after playing The Witness is that I actually thought this game could have played around with the rule discovery a lot more, like with █ ██████ ████ ██████ ██████████████ ███████, or █████ ████ █████ ███ ██████ ████ ████ ███████ ████ ███████ ██ ███ █████, etc. Not even mentioning ███ ████ ██ ███████ ██ ██ █████ ███ █ ████ ████ ██ ███ ███ ███████ or ███ ██████ ██████ █████ █████ ███ ███████ ███████ ███████████, it's shocking that it was not in the game.

Taiji

This game shows an example of originality being spent partially. There were many areas that I was happy about, because they felt new, like the pair symbol and gallery, but some trends feel like it's eroding something, for example, having conveniently 'destroyed' or broken objects but you still happen to have enough information that the puzzle is still solvable despite the 'destruction' now a puzzle book trend.

But more importantly this game's biggest problem/regret is if the rule is too weird or obscure it can lead to huge problems for newbies about the 'vibe' of the game. A path of just "take the first left turn once you enter the open world part of the game" leads you to some basically impossible to figure out "black-white" puzzles. Fun fact, I was indirectly responsible for this by making guest puzzles expanding on the black white rule, that were later thought fun enough for a different guest designer to start making puzzles also expanding on that idea, but then those puzzles did not find a place on the island and they were just put on the last few empty spaces they could fit... which made them new-player-first-encounters. You know, this is a horrible idea for me to say this, because despite that I think it's fun to take credit for bad technically-true things, people just take this out of context. For example when I mentioned in a video, making a notorious pattern puzzle in IOI that had aspects that were not my (I was not responsible for the placement + the UI ingame was different than the editor in an important way), now the most productive fan modder of IOI dislikes me just because of that without even having watched the video that's what one-to-many messages do to people.

Understand

In The Witness, rule discovery is confined per-symbol, and it has much more of a 'global' or narrative vibe as a result, as you learning about the symbol is kind of like your own personal story.

In the witness-inspired game Understand, rule discovery is per-level, and so it's more pure in that way but also a lot more disposable, to completely take out the environmental world as well. It's still a very good game I fully completed and it uses a lot of creative 'environmental' things despite being 2D.

Puzzle Books

Examples: 12 Word Searches, LOK, Abdec, 120 Increasingly Cursed Knight Puzzles, FMTC, Maze of Deception, Iceqube.

Many puzzle books have come out recently, which are often in PDF or physical format, and thus have no physical interaction. This is an interesting design challenge, really trusting the player as well to not just come up with stupid easy 'solutions', but actually try to follow the conventions of interesting puzzles and elegant rules in order to invent rules that make sense. It can be easy to end up with 'not enough' that confirms a rule, on purpose or accident. Puzzle books have no confirmation at all, except when a proposed solution in the level design looks 'perfect' and planned.

While not exclusive to the rule discovery genre, there are a lot of cool things in it like:

• intentional misleads
• "you could do that the whole time" surprises (see A Genre Without A Word)
• in interactive games, there are ways a player can intentionally test their rule knowledge - this isn't quite as true here, but looking back at previously solved puzzles to find some pattern is still a factor

As partially previously mentioned, The Witness's use of "broken monitors and rooms" and working with partial information felt very emergent and real, but felt more contrived as other games do it more and more and spill different colored liquids all over their puzzle books. This is actually a supremely small point as many rule discovery books do something very different between each other.

Various 'interactive ports' of these games have quite an odd challenge to do, for example LOK compared to LOK Digital.

LOK is basically a word search but there's only a small set of words and each word does something consistent and special. A sizable part of LOK is all about figuring out what effect a word 'must' do, by looking at the level design. There were even 'these levels are impossible, understand why' pictures that LOK Digital didn't have. This aspect is lost in the digital adaptation, as well as a few other rather small things.

However there are many aspects that got ported pretty well like the 'hopping over gaps' and the keyboard-question mark discoveries. It reminds me of some other games I made, that involve interesting faithful ports in some way. I think Increasingly Cursed Wordle Puzzles only got better with its interactive elements due to notetaking and confirmation. A game that isn't quite a port is my Minescryer game, which added a laptop-only version to play the game that Crisis Souvey came up with which was also cool.

Mystery Games

It feels like no one else can relate this or make this example, but I know that fascinatingly the Ace Attorney fancase community had followed this "trend of uninteractive puzzles". The Ace Attorney fan community was lucky enough to have programmers to make two separate very powerful 'engines' (PyWright and aaonline.fr), which could make detective stories with the Ace Attorney mechanics.

Ace Attorney, being an interactive mystery game, had a lot of player prompts, evidence presenting, and the Cross Examination system where you needed to find a testimony with a contradiction, likely presenting a piece of evidence from your court record ('inventory' if you can call it that). Besides how much story-and-gameplay interaction there was, this was also just super powerful to be a way to 'confirm' the player being on the right track, or even respond to the player being on the wrong track or doing different things.

However at one point when the community was slowing down a bit, many prevalent fancase authors who had already made a lot of fancases, had moved to an even more niche community of 'gameboards' that took the form of... pdfs. Although one fancase author even published a real mystery book (and many standalone novels), I was struck by how different the vibe was, to be somewhere where people intentionally created mystery novels for the puzzle aspect. "Confirmation" was done more by community engagement than actual mechanics. At one point there was even a joke about how these pdf's were... literally... less powerful than the community that they all came from, the idea of "it would improve usability if there was like a list of evidence and prompts you could confirm".

And of course the thing about "people already need the conventions of the genre to enjoy the subtractive design".

Exploration Games

Outer Wilds is probably tenuously a witness-like, but surely it is a rule-discovery game. But if that's a rule discovery game, is Breath of the Wild a rule-discovery game? That game is way more about combat even though you can interact with mechanics in somewhat unexpected ways. Is Call of Duty is a rule-discovery game?

I actually think it is. Like, when things have a straightforward mechanic, instead of 'no mechanic taught', but that straightforward mechanic still has 'unexpected' discoveries you can make with it... that's puzzle gamey, and yet also very common in other genres. This literally means you could turn some scenarios in some battle royale into a puzzle game. I've literally always wanted to do this. Battle royales are puzzle games by the way.

Failed offshoots of this article

In Rule Discovery games it's almost against the vibe to explain it's a rule discovery game for the newest of new players. Because it's against the vibe it actually means some conventions are strange as well - for example Lingo is not a notetaking game. Most interactive games aren't, as going outside the game is unsmooth. But many other games, in fact that just shove random numbers and codes at you, those give an expectation to notetake or screenshot.

A very special moment in many rule discovery games though not necessarily only to this genre is ████ ███████, but it greatly spoils it to name it.

FINAL PICTURES

Here are pictures of some of my favorite moments in rule discovery games. These are probably out of context enough that they're not instant spoilers, and they aren't endgame moments. Oh god once again I have too few examples because finding images and links is the hardest part of these articles.

Short post today. This is a game I mentioned previously last article, but I thought I should give some history. This game's concept is so great to me it's derailed 3 other interesting projects that I also have reason to work on, because "it should be a short game". Hopefully not as extreme as how Jonathan Blow's sokoban game should've been short and instead took 10 years.

The Start

The inspiration for this game is almost made in parallel with MisshapenSmiley, the very first person who ever made a parody game about move counters who later played and loved my later parody game about move counters.

MisshapenSmiley wanted to make a sequel, called "Counter County":

And was inspired by a popular (seriously millions of views etc., copycats, AI video copycats ) show that was, despite being made for children, "game mechanic"like.

Also, despite Numberblocks being for young children, something about it strikes me as cool and funny

What if I took "Counter County" in a completely different direction

Me

Without even knowing MisshapenSmiley had the idea, I also watched small amounts of the show a while back and thought the various "game mechanic"-like aspects were very well done, though it rarely progressed to any advanced material. If you search exponentials for example all you'll get are way lower-budget fan animations.

However somewhat recently even, I thought of a 'detective game' framing of this, as if each block had its own interactive game ability in a puzzle platformer, and figure out "who stole something from a house". This idea ultimately might be chopped because it needs way more to it.

But then this got me thinking of another older game that didn't get any clones or sequels, and then the ideas started flowing like crazy, and now this multi-world game with several excellent moments is now potentially playable.

Also to make it clear this is not going to be a fully boring execution, there will be cursed moments really early on. I am not sure how the high difficulty puzzles are going to show up early but the mechanics I've come up can support it, it can support quite a lot.

What's more crazy to me is, that finally this is a game concept that can show my game design style and actually be more accessible to a wider audience. I'm almost afraid to spoil much more of it, or make the screenshots look over-educational-style (it is almost meant to be that way) but anyway here are some super small teasers:

And also for some reason people like to make fanart of "1".

Unfortunately I think I have had to paint it purple in order to not get clone-accused or something idk

████ █████ ███ ███████ ████ ███ ████ █████ ███ ███████ █████ ███ ██████ ███████

This is more of a status update article as I've once again come up with FOUR new unreleased, high potential, high combination ideas (not fully mentioned in the 'incomplete projects' document) as well as two hanging out for the ride.

• █████ ███: Likely 'high' $ potential theme pivot for a previous project.
• ████████ ████: █████████████ ██, could legit be new in the multiplayer genre.
• █████████ ████████████████: Combines the "Empty Room" game I mentioned here, with a new idea that was very lightly inspired by Beekie wishing to do a genre-merge with wordplay theming (after talking about RED and CAT). I could call this game █████ █████ ███ but this seems too pretentious.
• ██████████: Combines ████████████ ███████ ███ ████████ with an idea that was inspired by MisshapenSmiley (the previous inventor of move-counter parody game) first mentioning that this framing/theming has potential cool mechanic and puzzle properties, plus a game I played in the past that didn't get a sequel even though people thought it would.
• Lingo Multiverse: This project is unironically being combined with a little bit from The Stanley Parable, Patrick's Parabox, and The Witness now.
• DCC3: The highest spiritually fulfilling project, which has gained a few new ideas like ███████ █████████ █ ████████ ███████████ ███ ██████ ███████ ████ ████ ████████████ ███████████ ████ ████ ██████ ███ ███ █ █████ ██ █ █████, cool worldbuilding, lacking a middlegame, etc.

Oh by the way I'm doing this at the same time that Poke BALL Toads 7-level update is only like 60% finished.

While I am excited for any one of these to release, to show it to certain people I admire in puzzle communities... I don't know if I physically have the time to figure all this out and release any of it. Also it makes me look insane to start all these projects without finishing them, and also I'm not yet a millionaire and wonder if I need to do insane monetization now. Meanwhile I don't keep track of recent game releases anymore and I really wonder why that is.

How Have You Stopped Enjoying Video Games

Besides "frustration at actual real-life issues" there is also a similar comparison, how I related to music as past-me 4 years ago, though this was never really conscious at the time. It is a really profoundly cursed problem if you feel like your own work is better than the average-of-effort-of-experiencing other people's work. This is worded very carefully as obviously I don't think my work is objectively higher quality than some hidden gem indie or high effort AAA game, but when the peak of experience you know of is higher, or you find tasks in games boring/menial/not new to you, this reduces the average gain for experiencing others' work. Recent detective games (not including the deluge of AI written AI UI detective games) I decided to play off-recording have only like 1.7 twists in them and many things I'd change. I suppose that was always the end result if I had this "I can always think of how to expand a game better after completing it" mentality.

After making music for 10 years, it was easier to find a track I liked by actually making it instead of trying to find new music and finding the majority of the time it's bland, nowadays I can even scroll down in my projects library and find a track I forgot I made and relisten to it.

Opportunity Costs

Being a publisherless not-on-steam not-particularly-interested-in-marketing-viral-capitalization-clown-nor-with-journalist-connections has its costs. Especially as I didn't really have the mentality of broad-streamer-appeal back then (I hope that now I do my games will be more successful but, well, I dunno), the problem is when you have a good idea you wonder if you're on an originality timer. I had the idea of a poker roguelike before Balatro^[1] and of course, after mentioning the idea I got like 2 comments "oh so like that game". My eye is falling out. I haven't done a video on Minesweeper Plus due to not uploading the devlog of my own minesweeper game or finishing it. I mean that's just an unbelievably cursed problem for being nominally a gaming channel. This reminds me of the "games turning into your job so now you don't play games offline because what if you wanted to make it into content later to record your reaction, or what if you want to suddenly try to get sponsored for every video which adds stress, or what if you try to do editing better every video" problem that I now have (not the last part though). I'm wondering when I make my final video I will try to reboot it by streaming new releases. This might also prevent the problem of a massive game coming out that basically begs to be streamed instead of dripfed across 100 parts that take 2 years to finish the game in a normal Let's Play schedule. And constantly beg for money such that I can hire people to make all these ideas or something :(

This Goes Against One Piece of Common Advice

My experience was hearing the advice "be a creator not a consumer" repeatedly. You know what's cursed is, creators do want their work to be 'consumed'. In a utopia world, will everyone just want to create their own stuff all the time, I don't think so at all.

Sensibilities

Because of being poor and starving blahblahblah most of my game ideas (before this year, mostly) often had to be severely downscaled, no multiplayer ideas, no fancy 3D, etc. This wasn't a good idea for game-popularity reasons, to expect a niche to be a lottery-winning viral game under these conditions, when you need to instead picture an FPS battle royale audience or some other wider appeal to hook people.

Speaking of game popularity, I do often wonder how true it is, the "build it and they will come / the game will naturally go viral" idea. Surely a extreme large genre-bending game with great moments would break out... maybe? Is it guaranteed? I'm thinking of this in the "positioning yourself to benefit from such trends" lens, where for every breakout hit game, someone had to set up and make a game with these beloved traits. And it may be the case that your game being multiplayer, open to creativity, and also earlier monetization (not only pay-to-win whale monetization) would be really important.

There's an inverse to this entire article which is also an inverse to the problem I have. Someone can find they are so far below (considering their own creative work much worse than others') they are actually way more likely to spend money in games. A required belief (that you don't even realize you hold) for someone addicted to microtransactions and spending thousands on a WWE mobile game or something: you need to have more respect for the developers of the game and the officiality of the product, than you have for your own work.

Takeaway

I never thought I would stop enjoying video games, it's shocking to me. The idea of 'wow you have too many design ideas but also stopped enjoying games' is probably unsympathetic in a "nice problem to have" way, like I have no idea if this is going to be perceived as 'wow bragging for being so good at design' or whatever ('Nice problems to have are also rarely actually nice to have'). This mentality has likely permanently cut off "wow I'll just play video games as a job for the rest of my life" which was actually accessible to me.

What we generally mean when we say “nice problem to have” is that the preconditions for having this problem are nice to have. i.e. you cannot have this problem unless some other nice thing happens first. This is not at all a reliable predictor of the amount of suffering involved.

The thing is, by definition, “nice problems to have” are ones that are not going to be shared by a lot of people (otherwise the preconditions would just be normal behaviour and it wouldn’t be a nice problem to have). As a result:

Most people probably won’t be able to relate to it, because their lived experiences will be so different.
People will be envious of you for the nice thing.

Thus the defining characteristic about nice problems to have is not that they are nice, but that you will be afforded no sympathy for having them.

This is part of the reason I feel utterly cursed now, if I were to write the 'advice to my past self' article, it would be true information that changes me massively.

Takeaway: Maybe don't get into game development or anything creative!

I recently have felt a lot less motivation to do things that I "should" enjoy doing, which even includes gaming and yes, article writing. Occasionally I get people telling me that I should not be doing anything for external motivation.

Now while I appreciate the sentiment only in the sense that yes, it turns out that people tend to be more motivated to do things for their 'own' reasons instead of others', I'm pretty sure the line between internal and external motivation is thin and likely nonexistent. All motivation happens in brain.

So let's get into many reasons why this is the case:

1. The tether to reality

Bank account 'money' not money. It picture of money.^[1] Only extracting all at once maybe you get proof of money, but you won't, so you have picture in mind of this stability, never able to be fully confirmed.

Similarly, where is the value of digital items, sometimes negatively framed as "just pixels", get 'more value' than real life items (like Counter Strike knives vs. actual knives that look just like the ones ingame)? Sometimes there are digital items for dead games and there's also some line where 'expensive because rarity but people care about it' is very different from a rare item that's rare because no one cares about the game anymore or the game shuts down and it is valueless.

Money itself is a hyperstitional concept. Superstitions are faraway beliefs that are difficult or impossible to confirm their existence. Hyperstitions are beliefs that directly depend on other people also buying into that belief. And because you're only one person there's no way to 'objectively' find out what everyone else is thinking.

The reason cryptocurrency^[2] is sometimes thought of as monopoly-money-esque is a bit cursed in this way. Yes it's worth nothing if no one cares about it. But also because the "value" aspect is not distinct from how regular money works.

Of course, there are scammers who have fully faked sites that pretend to be your bank account, or black out your screen and show an edited screen by editing the number in your bank account page to trick you into 'refunding' them. This example makes the 'fake picture of numbers' more direct but it's not likely you'll experience this in your lifetime.

Well, with those examples where 'value' and 'money' actually have their meanings tied to what other people think (even though they don't seem like that on the surface), "external motivation" is also like that.

2. Other People

The original creation of this article is when I first noticed that multiplayer is equivalent to implementing a game that's actually a bunch of singleplayer sessions, where the 'multiplayer' characters are painted into their singleplayer sessions.

This honestly seems like such a contrast to how I thought of it^[3] 12 years ago before ever doing development of everything, as multiplayer is sort of a 'bulky' thing to imagine modding into a game, especially if you have never tried to figure out servers or peer-to-peer connections and were frustrated not knowing.

███ ███ ████ ███████████ ████ ██ ████ ██ █████ ████ ████ ████ ████ ████████ ████ ███ ████ ██████ ███ ████ ███ ███████ ███ █████ ██ ███ ██████ (sorry for hiding this, I'm still holding back this concept for it's such high potential for my games!)

But when we're on the topic of "other people's experiences", this is much more interesting one meta-level up:

You have no idea whether other people are conscious. They certainly seem to be "similar to you, more or less" - they are also more competent than you at other things, point out your mistakes^[4], occasionally you find music or an article that really resonates with you, that you didn't write.

• So despite no proof, you believe others are conscious, due to a sort of 'weak' tether to reality that you can't confirm.

You have no idea whether other people even 'see the same world' as you or not, given colorblindness and the ability to not notice big important things. Articles to read about this: What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It? and Different Worlds. These articles are something I still think about occasionally to this day. One of them is about missing smell for years and years but this can seemingly happen with so many things.^[5] (hover: potentially cursed tooltip)

I have anosmia, which means I lack smell the way a blind person lacks sight. What’s surprising about this is that I didn’t even know it for the first half of my life.

Each night I would tell my mom, “Dinner smells great!” I teased my sister about her stinky feet. I held my nose when I ate Brussels sprouts. In gardens, I bent down and took a whiff of the roses. I yelled “gross” when someone farted. I never thought twice about any of it for fourteen years.

Then, in freshman English class, I had an assignment to write about the Garden of Eden using details from all five senses. Working on this one night, I sat in my room imagining a peach. I watched the juice ooze out as I squeezed at the soft fuzz. I felt the wet, sappy liquid drip from my fingers down onto my palm. As the mushy heart of the fruit compressed, I could hear it squishing, and when I took that first bite I could taste the little bit of tartness that followed the incredible sweet sensation flooding my mouth.

But I had to write about smell, too, and I was stopped dead by the question of what a peach smelled like. Good. That was all I could come up with. I tried to think of other things. Garbage smelled bad. Perfume smelled good. Popcorn good. Poop bad. But how so? What was the difference? What were the nuances? In just a few minutes’ reflection I realized that, despite years of believing the contrary, I never had and never would smell a peach.

All my behavior to that point indicated that I had smell. No one suspected I didn’t. For years I simply hadn’t known what it was that was supposed to be there. I just thought the way it was for me was how it was for everyone. It took the right stimulus before I finally discovered the gap.

Other aspects of these articles mention, the way you talk (in real life or even online), it projects some emotion to people that cause people to react a slightly different subtle way that requires many sentences to describe.

3. The Gap

This 'tether to reality' is the most interesting gap, both in how people perceive consciousness and life, but the cursed bit is that it applies to the things people would least 'pay attention' to. Literally, every person who ever gave advice, every word spoken out of them is based on imagining others, because what else are you supposed to do? And it mostly appears to work out okay, people make games with a generally narrow playing style in mind (narrow in the context of executing goals properly, etc.).

The word 'consensus' is a monoculture that hides that some people have deep disagreements. When 'consensus' disagrees with the past consensus, there were probably people who were treated as outsiders for having what would later become the 'future' consensus.

With online bandwagons and media bubbles it's actually really hard to find 'true' consensus. You've potentially already been in a situation where a community had some 'consensus' in which it was only possible because the people who managed to claim power banned everyone who disagrees (censorship basically never comes with good qualities) and later this happens automatically as people who perceive themselves as the minority just leave in disgust.

'Culture shock' when these different worlds collide, can cause some really negative situations. That includes like if you are a foreigner and there's some cultural consensus you're 'supposed to know' when something is a taboo. Currently this culture has no way to deal with people who are weaponizing creation of new taboos.^[6])) It's again cursed because these gaps in tethers of reality do cause very negative and strange outcomes for people, but only a tiny amount of the time so it's not talked about very often.

I also strongly believe the sentiment of reversing any advice you hear although maybe not to the full extent, due to the reason that "Every piece of social commentary is most likely to go to the people who need it least", another cursed aspect of experience. My example would be like 'respecting other people' (well, 'other people' replaced with some specific type of person) being blatantly ignored by people who abuse others, while it goes to people who are receptive to the advice and become more anxious because of it. Other 'nice sounding' statements like "stranger danger" or "stop approaching the opposite sex" was ignored by predators, and only taken by people who already were nervous and self-conscious.

4. Dead Internet Theory

The "Dead Internet Theory" is the idea that most people online are bots, including (and arguably, especially) ones pushing political viewpoints, to try to explain why it feels so dead, why there feels like a trend of being illogical and tribalistic nowadays as well.

How this relates to the 'tether of reaity' concept is that there's so many people online that people have to give a lot more tether-to-reality identity markers for immediate context: "I am grieving/50 years old/worked at X", etc. But now you can't tell if it's an LLM, and in fact YouTube comments are full of people with 'real' seeming messages until you see they are promoting a book or doing a chain of bot accounts that eventually promote some stock market faith healer or something.

Now I'm very sad to say that I have had enough real important relationships become bizarre, to make the world feel more like a torture simulation where you have to give up that idea that people are a very consistent and well-rounded being and that it's just unrelated bots doing all this. Thus I cannot think that every type of illogical comment you see online is the product of "Sino-Russian-Iranian intelligence services"^[7].

Why did the internet 'feel better' 10-20 years ago? It's because your mental model of the "other person" was more rose-tinted, more friendly, more similar to you, even though you didn't talk to literally every person there. Now, it's made it even more obvious that when you're online you could be talking to an 4 year old or a 96 year old, or a 0-year-old LLM, or of course marketers, PR agencies, political state actors, etc. Ease of access to AI has made bad actors worse, but they already existed even before.

█████ █████ ██████ ███ █████ ███ █████ ██ █ ██████████ ███ ██ ████████ ████ ██ █████ █████████ █ ███████████ █ █████ █████████ ██████ ███ ████ █████ ███ ██ ████████ ██████ ███ ███ █ █████████ ████ ████ ███ ████ ███████ ███████ ████ ████ █████ █████ ████ ██████ ██ ███ █████ ██████ ██████ ███ ████ ███████ ██ █ ██████████ ███████ █████ ██████ ██ ████ ██████ ██ ███ █████ ████ ██ ████ ████ ██ ████ ██ ████^[8]

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5. Where do bad actors come from anyway?

How come it's the case that you probably couldn't convince an 'antisocial' person to be a 'normal' member of society? (antisocial as in like, homeless smokers on drugs, psychopaths, sociopaths, not just people-avoiding)

Well clearly these people aren't fully working with logic, but if you have too much empathy you might try to understand and convert it into a viewpoint that makes sense to you.

To do that, I think an 'easier' place to start is why political polarization gets so heated, which I believe to come from entangled balls of definitions and foundations, where the same terms have different emotional connotations to different people, so much so that they can watch one event and come with two different takeaways, this is called 'two movies one screen'^[10].

This is an easier place to start, because you could imagine two completely 'normal', kind, 'rational', people who have different lifetimes and experiences, and of course political beliefs due to it. Generally speaking just because the numbers are so large, if there's any 'large political group' that you don't understand why people would hold those beliefs, you can construct a version of the smartest person of that group in which they've had some firsthand experience that would justify and be consistent with what they saw. Untangling this is difficult because 'obviously true terms' for one group will be 'cringe words' for the other, and you need to convince your opponent your own ideology is not relying on new circular definitions, which will not be convincing to them. And of course the time and effort to try to talk this out with any online strangers, that's a lot, and sometimes you feel there's no agreement there and give up, sadly.

However, even with that being said...

There's a famous cat designer you likely know who has this to say:

I find it very easy to understand people with different motivations than me. Someone who is like me but... waves hands evil... makes sense to me. I get that. I know why I'm not that, but I also see why someone might be that. Someone who is just oblivious to the consequences of their actions doesn't make sense to me. I can't predict them. They terrify me

Yeah that doesn't make sense to me. I have no idea what it's like to be a horrible human being, which isn't just like a intelligent+'rationally' selfish+greedy CEO businessman, but the ones that seem completely stupid and damaging for all parties involved, constantly dragging people into their own drama or enjoy smearing others with sensitive-topics, while still being intelligent in a few narrow areas. That shouldn't be possible in my worldview but it happens! There is no version of me with this capability to do good but intentionally choosing to be awful in such huge ways instead. That is so utterly alien and blank to me. But because other people experience consciousness so differently, I have no idea if the way they are acting is what is 'sensible' to them. The times I remember acting cringe as a child (I have like extremely old 10+ year old comments in which I have no idea why I ever made them) I'm not even sure I was conscious back then. Some of the ways I've tried to fit this behavior into an understandable way is that the other person is actually more asleep, unconscious, or succumbing to animalistic instincts that everyone has.

Dr. Egyptland is the inventor of "Egyptland", the name for the largest scientific black hole ever created in the Lingo community. Here are some quotes from "Dr. Egyptland" as well as others.

Dr. Egyptland:

The things that become egyptland relevant are getting out of control.

The lingo solve sound in the music in the words. Is relevant. Somehow. AAAAAAAAAA
because instead of ding ding it's ding ding ding
you see this is of course a reference to
the transition between duality and trinity

Dr. Egyptland:

I egyptland every game i play pretty much

Dr. Egyptland:

i cannot physically look at a custom colour anymore and not think "what egyptland colour is this"

Dr. Egyptland:

You'll be happy to know that in Egyptland magenta and lime are nearly exactly the same!

Dr. Egyptland:

okay here we go
A language is a network of words. Every "word" in the language has a connection to every other word in that language: for example, the strongest connection between "yes" and "no" is that they are opposites. There are other connections, like "they do not share any letters".
Some words are only extremely weakly connected to each other. The strength of each connection is subjective, but in general if the amount of similar connections is high, the strength of each connection is low (e.g. not many words are kangaroo words, so those connections are strong, and a lot of words share exactly one phoneme, so those connections are weak). Each word also has its own, unique strength, which is also subjective, but generally very common words are stronger, and very rare words are weaker. Lingo gives you a clue word, and a type of connection, then asks you to find the strongest such connection from that word to the answer. For instance, -:bl: REACT (6) might solve to REACTS or REDACT or PREACT, but REACTS is trivial and PREACT is too uncommon so REDACT would be the only valid answer.

Dr. Egyptland:

unrelated, i do have a "lingo 2 egyptland"

Dr. Egyptland:

what my egyptland senses are telling me is that true and false are independent variables for any given panel

so true as an answer means "true and not false" and false as an answer means "false and not true"
and in the same way paradox means "not true and not false" and unknown means "true and false"
But that is disproven by metaparadox existing, since paradox has to be a third variable

Ernel Kether [†††]:

The best part of this map is when Dr. Egyptland said "Im gonna Egypt everywhere" and then proceded to Egypt everywhere

impwolf:

Angry Custom Map Otter #261: Egyptland - UNITY
i don't get egyptland. i don't get why it has the word UNITY in all caps, or why it had to be made in lingomaker, or why the link was sent as a .docx file, or what the alt rule is meant to be, or why it's such a big meme. the puzzles are generic and colours are very slightly different from how they normally work in disorienting ways but not enough to feel like a new mechanic, and i don't get why that is. i simply do not get egyptland
C: 1.5
B: 1
A: 1
rating: 3.5

impwolf:

Angry Custom Map Otter #352: Egyptland - DUALITY
it is kind of infuriating looking at this map and at the description and feeling like there is some work of unfathomable genius hidden in this mess of endless eyestrain hallways and i have no idea if i'm miles away from understanding it or if i understand it fine and it's kind of just The mechanics have a bunch of different interpretations. i'm pissed off right now thinking about the mapmaker replying to this with "There is more to it. keep playing. ;)" and condemning me to plunge myself back into the flat undecorated halls of uninteresting puzzles with a couple of interesting little ideas speckled in here and there that i've already recognized and understood. i do not actually want to learn about The Secret Of The Mysterious Unity And The Deceptively Simple Puzzles That You Should Try Thinking About From A... Different Perspective because the map does not make that a fun thing to do. this is getting an extra 0.5 point for the possibility of it having a cool alt rule which i can't imagine being all that earth-shattering anyways

ıcely 🐸:

I liked the livestream clip when Dr. Egyptland egypted all over the egypt people and egypt panels with quarticity quinticity eqquiciency

Dr. Egyptland:

just wait until you see the quarticity panel at the top of the evil egyptland tower

Dr. Egyptland:

custom notation: Parity is shown, priority is shown
arrowverse notation: Parity is shown, priority is fixed
egyptland notation: Parity doesn't apply, priority doesn't apply
brenton notation: Parity is invisible, priority is avoided
board of checkers notation: Parity and priority rules depend on polarity
IOTM notation: Parity is invisible, priority is fixed, polarity is invisible

i don't really think any of these are objectively more cursed than any other

Dr. Egyptland:

ok im going to actually play this now
egyptlanding time

Dr. Egyptland:

ok i understand mice height now

eepylumi:

whatever dr. egyptland

Dr. Egyptland:

egyptland

Dr. Egyptland:

This is how I define red and blue
Establish that red is inverse blue
Add the theme of [egyptland things]
Interpret from the theme
Remove the theme
You now have red being defined as "inverse blue" and blue as "inverse red"
Which doesn't work in traditional set theory but who needs traditional set theory

The 50:

Egyptland has become shock content
Dr egyptland walks in and traumatises everyone by saying something like "green is the thematical opposite of brown"

Dr. Egyptland:

I'm 99% certain icely played egyptland for a bit, got terrified, and left

Dr. Egyptland:

i can't talk out loud or anything where i am right now really

ıcely 🐸:

dr egyptland being glued to a seat of an enclosed room with only one megaphone that connects to speakers around the (2d) globe:

Dr. Egyptland:

icely what

CM:

escape ship please avenge hilbert's hotel egyptland duality please avenge hilbert's hotel liduongo please avenge hilbert's hotel bucket of salmone please avenge hilbert's hotel level apple please avenge hilbert's hotel

Dr. Egyptland:

A map where the end panel is a long chain accessible from the start and you collect "pieces" in the form of single puzzles with operations similar to the ones in the chain
An alt rules map where certain letters have special abilities, but there's two sets of mutually exclusive alt rules that both work throughout the map
A map where you have to guess what the alt solution would be to each panel to form messages that hint the alt solution of a snipe panel, but since it's lingo 1 you get no confirmation of alt solutions
A map where height is continuous rather than discrete, and white to black is a continuous spectrum
A map with only panel signs, you have to guess what the puzzles would be(including a new custom colour)
A map with 5 different custom colours that are revealed to just be a reskin of another custom colour which is then revealed to be Egyptland grey

And of course my released maps, egyptland and pinkland pi

These are mostly abandoned ideas, the map I'm currently working on is far more cursed than any of these

Dee <3:

egyptland actually has a tiny copy of polkadot paradise in it

Dr. Egyptland:

Only 17 panels? How hard can it possibly be... haha...
This is a VERY DIFFICULT rule discovery map. Only play this map if you are the kind of player who only needs 1 or 2 puzzles to extrapolate from that mechanic.
This map assumes you have general knowledge of certain custom colours. The more the better, especially pink and its relatives, but know at least pink, fish and avocado.
Knowledge of Egyptland isn't required, though if you somehow understand egyptland grey... I guess that would help very slightly.
And similarly to Egyptland, the goal is to understand, but I don't think there's a way to prove to yourself that you understand if you don't solve all the puzzles.
There's a small but nonzero chance that I got something wrong. If you think so, please tell me.
Also, if you think you've seen me showcase the mechanic, at least 3 important details are changed and there's a lot to it I didn't show, so don't be too confident.

ıcely 🐸:

Sixteen Days Ago, An Unknown Individual Was Reported To Be Afflicted By The "Egyptland Curse".

Dr. Egyptland:

Pro tip: do NOT trust anything I've said in the past about this map it has a 50% chance to be false

Dr. Egyptland:

bahaha i just thought of something
i think i might have been like 5000 years off with lingo 2's placement on the egyptland timeline

Dr. Egyptland:

It's the point in the game where I actually blurted out loud "EGYPTLAND CONFIRMED"

@KaileyTheAlien 11 months ago I have dreamed about eating something like this for years. I could go on a whole rant how this game is basically a reference to the absurdity of the real world, and how nothing makes sense, we just get used to it from birth. But yt comment aren’t a place for that.

Dr. Egyptland:

For context, a lot of mechanics in L1 also exist in L2. There's a specific type of mechanic that isn't. That type is only categorised by egyptland. In fact, I predicted that less focus would be on this type of mechanic based on the themes in the demo.

Dr. Egyptland:

EGYPTLAND
chess battle advanced

Roninnozlo:

Egyptland isn’t real

Dr. Egyptland:

(to Vẏbble) now I have to ask is this just egyptland?

Dr. Egyptland:

Perks of being an Egyptland believer: you don't have to worry about this spaghetti

eepylumi:

the issue with everything i've seen from egyptland so far is that vanilla doesn't explicitly say what solutions to any of the puzzles are wrong or right, it only says what solutions are wrong for specific puzzles, which means any color can mean literally anything, so egyptland is technically "consistent with vanilla rules", even though it's very obviously not     like at all     whatsoever     and yet the creator still treats it as if it's Objectively a logical extention of vanilla rules when it's so obviously not      like at all          whatsoever

Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.Anyway, Worship Dr. Egyptland.

Post your favorite Dr. EGyptland quotes in the comments!

Many have taken my previous article, "Make Your Puzzle Games Unbelievably Easy" to be about difficult puzzles in games, even though I've now added an appendix about how it's about new players, but even sometimes experienced players tripping over much smaller rocks than difficult puzzles.

This does naturally lead to another topic though, which is how to 'naturally' have these difficult puzzles in the game, or even difficult sections, since I'm not advocating for never having the hard content in your game, but it should imply that these are hidden in some kind of optional layer.

Hints

Despite that hint buttons are better than not having them, it feels like a poor experience for the user to press the hint button repeatedly, they would likely prefer not to. Even the practice of the hint button showing up if you spent long enough in the level probably is an eyeroll. It's like in platformers where the New Super Mario Bros. Wii "Super Guide" block showed up if you died enough times on the same level. There are games like Resident Evil or Half-Life secretly adjusting future pickups or health to avoid the sort of bad feeling of that, but it's not as applicable in a puzzle game.

Hints in games also can have the problem of revealing something too fast or revealing something you already knew. I also like having partial hint reveals (I've only implemented that for 1 of my games so far), but this is a small thing.

Opt-In Difficulty

Some RPGs have equipment that makes the game harder on purpose. Shovel Knight had destructible checkpoints etc. These are cool thematically but not directly 1:1 portable to puzzle games probably.

Challenge Levels and Side Paths

The other option is that, for some hypothetical game with hint levels, you could turn them into normal short levels and so the player could leave the level, play the side level, and subconsciously be able to make easier progress or get more experience at the game. I think this is a good idea overall. The extreme version of that idea would be to kick out the player for spending too long in a level, which I don't think I've seen but would be fun for some game to do eventually.

The UI friction of leaving a puzzle plays a minor role, in games like The Talos Principle or Pipe Push Paradise you simply leave by walking out of the puzzle, no pressing Escape to leave it.

It can be a little too 'trivial' sometimes though, as The Talos Principle would have easy and hard puzzles where if you beat the hard puzzle first, the easy puzzle is trivial or just a smaller version of that harder puzzle.

Now in platformers or adventure games without designated side paths, there is often a really cursed problem where you have no idea what path is the main path or side path, and some of them are one-way paths, very annoying.

Also I feel like having the challenge or optional levels in the same level select is horrible, stop doing it. It's why in Baba Is You I always 100%'d a world, you're clearly leaving it visually incomplete for the player. This tension is also similar to why games have fake 100% percentages sometimes or 'early endings'.

As another example: Poke ALL Toads hard levels were sometimes long enough that they were like a whole 2nd world, they had to be a whole 2nd video in my series often. You could even make it a very slightly hidden secret to find the hard level secret side.

Secrets, Optimization Targets, and Collectibles

Any Mario player knows about Dragon Coins, Star Coins, secret paths, and speedruns, these are obvious optional collectibles, and similarly in a puzzle game you can also have similar versions of those - collectibles in the level that are visible but hard to get to, and move count optimization goals (except in particular often slapping a move counter in your game just makes it get more cursed as people make constant unoptimal pathing choices all the time).

However there are other games with distinct optimization choices, most commonly in programming puzzle games, and I think it's really important to frame winning a level with a less-optimal solution rather neutrally, the histograms in Zachtronics games are a good idea and better than developer-optimization targets. Again the look of having an 'incomplete' level in your level select, such that it's not the "player's idea" to focus on its incompleteness, I think causes tension. Not sure how much to focus on this one because many games are not designed to have 'optimizable levels' and that's okay too.

In the Postgame

Even the term 'challenge level' is a bit cursed, because some players will find your tutorial levels are challenges (this happened during a youtube comment response of my previous article ), and some people will find your challenge levels are easy. This is what happened to me with Patrick's Parabox as I did all the 'challenge' levels when I came across them, and it turns out the more challenging challenge levels are hidden in the postgame.

The flipside of this is, of course, you might find that an experienced player is overly bored by the first hour of gameplay or is unimpressed by your trailers because they did not find anything to suggest the developers knew how to make difficult content. In that case you can try:

Really Deep in the Postgame / ARG-like Qualities

A very popular genre is the "child mascot/character show but secretly it's horror/going wrong". I honestly would not have expected it to have such appeal, but if you think about such a thing, it would make sense to have it early in the game, to make an experienced or genre-savvy player get a preview of the developer's ability to make such contrasting work. That doesn't literally mean horror, it can just be some ominous unresolved level with a complex looking object or beta teaser.

There have been a few games coming out that have this 'unfinishable' to 100% game quality, where their postgame are ARG's. At this point all the 'regular' players should have finished your game so I don't have much specific advice that's somehow inapplicable to regular content as well.

Puzzle game fans and developers have had to wrangle with culture shock in various ways, compared to their audiences, audience size, etc.

One is the fact that, the thing most puzzle players and developers enjoy is hard stuff that requires long analysis of the level, that actually getting stuck on a level for 5 hours or a week is a high quality interesting and enjoyable experience. However, I'm pretty sure we're not part of the silent-majority viewpoint on that one^[1].

So check out some exhibits:

Exhibit C

It's quite common Baba Is You and Patrick's Parabox are referred to in the same sentence because they are 'iconic' puzzle games, but not only that but because they take a 'simple' to understand mechanic and promise delivering on it with lots of interesting things, which is an immediate hook.

Now Patrick's Parabox is an easier game than Baba to complete, 'challenge' levels are placed off to the side as optional content, levels are smaller and a few levels in some worlds can be solved without really knowing what happened (I think most often in Flip and Cycle levels).

You may notice Patrick's Parabox has a higher % of positive steam reviews compared to Baba Is You, 99% compared to 97%. Many of these Baba negative reviews are basically difficulty issues about that there is only one solution to things and that their solution often fails to work due to some blocking rule in the level.

Now this is can be interpreted very relevantly or not ('3x negative reviews' vs '+2% negative reviews'), and I mean, we should be grateful most people who can't figure out the game generally aren't negatively reviewing it. However let's look at these stats:

Baba Is You's 2nd world completion is 26.6%. Patrick's Parabox's full game (not counting 100% extras) completion is 26.8%. (Patrick's Parabox has 17 worlds, not even counting the intro world)

Yes, the percentage of people who saw the ending of Patrick's Parabox is higher than the percentage of people who completed Baba Is You's 2nd world.

Exhibit B

(WARNING: Do not click this link blindly, it has gameplay of one of Patrick's other games Linelith, you may spoil it by looking at it. So I guess you should only click it hearing the audio, wait that's what it means to click a link blindly, wait-) There's a memorable clip of my favorite streamer. In that clip, Samet says, "I hate thinking in my puzzle games". It is such a memeable statement, I've quoted it in my videos without even telling people it was a quote.

By the way it's actually Patrick of Patrick's Parabox who clipped that, yes yes small world.

Exhibit A

My game Move Counters that get more cursed, is at this moment probably one of my best pieces of art (a fan even did a full 50 level remix of it recently called "Move Counters: Penguin's Remix").

Now it's not like it's poorly rated, I mean it has like 70 positive itch ratings and my own 'walkthrough' video on it has like 80k views, very happy with that as an independent webgame.

Now the thing is that I saw two different puzzle designers play my game on stream, whose games you have very likely played (they have their own quite successful/iconic/well received games in the puzzle sphere). Of course, I have no idea whether they enjoy the troll puzzle genre, or they saw the game on a subpar thinking day, etc. (This is just because it's not like it's some big impossible sin for me to suck at a game on stream in equivalent nature.)

However, it would probably come as a shock to anyone who played my game or watched my video, that anyone would get stuck in such a pacing-ruining way in the points that happened on those streams^[2]. To spare the details I will say it was 'moments' really early on, that involved quite standard non-troll-genre interaction with the mechanics, that would not be called an intended "moment" by the game. Perhaps it's more mindfuzzing to me that the game was blamed for such things happening. And of course this is not how most seemed to play the game on stream, I'd say most people who video tested the game to me roughly had my intention of how to play it (I have uploaded my favorite streamer's playthrough for contrast).

Needless to say after watching that, I definitely have a new view on the occasional sentiment of people saying that extremely popular puzzle games like Portal 1 or Portal 2 are overly corner-rounded and 'overtested'.

So let's put all those exhibits in order.

Part of this is how much you, as the designer, would personally feel to 'take the blame' for people being stuck like that. Even in way more 'objective' situations (some games have had a flood of negative reviews complaining rigged luck in a game where it's not rigged, and you could ask the same question: even if it's not something you feel you should 'take the blame' for, you still in another way 'objectively' have a problem with your game).

I think Patrick's viewpoint is that a puzzle's intent is to communicate the idea to the player and that failing is also a failing of the designer (at least I have this memory of Patrick mentioning this from a while back!). This is almost like treating your game as a museum or showcase.

If you are a puzzle designer or longtime player, you experience hard puzzles way easier than a normal player would, which is partially buildup of pattern recognition and lateral thinking from years of making or playing. This of course creates a huge skew over time, where in a hard puzzle game completing only 25% of a world is a failure, you lose relatability with new players and don't notice. I know of many puzzle games who didn't have IRL testers in which their testers have also been picked from some pool of experienced players online. And a 'new player to Baba' is very different if they had like 8 years of puzzle playing before then. Not everyone has the same free time or interest in these games either.

This 'failing of the designer' comparison is more agreeable to me in genres in which getting stuck on a puzzle for 1 hour is not a great part of the experience. For example, the very well-liked (I like it a lot) game, There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension, is technically a 'puzzle' game, but really you wouldn't describe it that way, it's closer to a linear 'walking' simulator or movie, and that is the main appeal. It does have a meta narrative, troll logic, that also has some puzzle sections.

In that game it sometimes has extremely blatant hints from the narrator, and I imagine some players still get stuck anyway. In fact the 'sequel' (not really, but it is a spinoff) to There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension came out recently (June 10, 2026) and I felt this game had significantly more annoying "point and click moon logic" moments. It has far less narrator hints as well (although... it still has some... worst of both worlds maybe). And the negative reviews of the game are rather plentiful (90% positive reviews) and heavily reference this as the main issue. Note that the game still has a hint system but people probably don't want to feel the need to press that. (I think more of my games should have had hint systems in retrospect)

So like, I guess it's better to play it safe and make everything easy, all you need to pay is some really blatant text or voicelines I guess. I regret that some puzzle designers I enjoy and liked, failed to see all the buildup and payoff for my game and ragequit instead. That problem is probably even worse for a player who bought your narrative game, so now there's a story investment that is being blocked by your fair-yet-difficult-and-pacing-ruining idea!

I considered making this poll like a week ago:

If you are a puzzle designer, and you have a difficult puzzle early on in the game, that every player says it was fair in hindsight, uses all mechanics fairly, except half the players are stuck on it for 1 hour, would you keep it in?

I didn't even post it because the answer just seems so obvious that you wouldn't keep it in and you would make it optional, but it would probably be sad to feel the need to do that if you had built your linear narrative around the puzzle.

This is similar to the unexpected rift in mystery novels, where it probably takes a while before you experience mystery novels and games in any way beyond reading them, maybe passively thinking of theories but moreso thinking of them as a thriller instead of a puzzle. Part related is not all mysteries are meant to be 'consumed' as fair puzzles.

There's classic writing advice that if you have a plot twist, you should make it 'obvious', because what is subtle to you is impossible to others, and what is obvious to you is subtle to others. The reason you may not think this is true is because you probably show your work to friends or very observant people who will in fact notice the things you're worried about being too obvious, which gives you another skewed sense of what a normal person will pick up on.

All this is a bit of unnoticed differences in people's personal worlds, similar to my poll on whether people consider some 3D puzzle games slightly horror. I personally find it is a slight horror that any online interaction involves people with vastly different personal experiences, in unexpected and infinite axis, and meanwhile we still have to roleplay that there is general 'consensus' for things.

Appendix

• This isn't primarily about money or fame to me, it's that you want to appreciate anyone who takes the time to play your game to not have a frustrating experience, whether it's a 10 year old who would find all concepts new, or someone who's never played a game like yours before. Any time the game is pushing you out of flow state is one where someone could leave the game forever instead of being hooked constantly.

• I think it's more "wow a really large amount of players did not see the interesting things of [x game] and it may be shocking if you saw their playthroughs why". I personally highly respect how much effort and depth and surprise that Baba Is You's endgame has, considering how few people who played the game experienced it.

• People seem to strongly think this post is necessarily about difficulty and hard levels but I really intended it to be like "do not lose the players who could have enjoyed all your mechanical setup moments but got stuck on something really dumb and unexpected, especially really early". I don't know if it's others' imaginations still not getting it without seeing what I mean firsthand, but these moments don't even necessarily mean getting stuck on an actual hard puzzle, or players getting stuck in a game where the designer didn't even design it for difficulty at all. For example in many Baba playthroughs you see people making invalid statements or losing statements in the first worlds, which in one way is fully sensible that an inexperienced player has this stumbling-around phase, but on the other hand, that is another moment someone could ragequit (and rarely, leave a negative review).

• It's also not quite about "you designed it so you of course find it easier", I hesitated whether to bring it up but I actually had a very odd/fitting experience I wasn't sure whether to include in the article, which is my own personal playthrough of Penguin's Move Counters fangame, which was basically smooth in the way I'd imagine a player of my own game would ideally be. Testers you find online who are likely most enthusiastic about the genre will also pick up your designs way faster than usual.

• This entire article applies much more of course to the phase where the player may not yet be 'hooked' or impressed by the game yet. Being stuck before the player gets to even appreciate your hook is not good.

• jdelible pointed out that Baba Is You broke through to non-puzzle audiences more, and thus could have more on-the-fence demographics that are less invested.

Update

As an experiment I posted a instructionless puzzle game to a game jam of people in a community not familiar with puzzlescript. They are stuck on the first move or even entire concept of the game, you would simply not see that in a puzzle enthusiast community. No other comments are required.

Conclusion

I guess the conclusion is, Make Your Puzzle Games Unbelievably Easy. Oh and also now the 'obvious yellow paint in games' is way more understandable to me, wow. But of course please note that such a title is from the perspective of some designer deep in their own head not knowing about all the people invisible who bounced off the game because it wasn't "accessible" in such a way. I probably can't overly modify some games I've already made, but at least I've turned more objectives in my work into side objectives and secrets due to this methodology.

Do you ever have one of those insights that seems to profoundly and permanently change the way you see the world? You learn about some pattern and then it keeps appearing in different areas of your life over and over again and transforms your view of all of them, permanently? In mid 2019 I had such an insight, which was that everything (people activities, etcetera) can be decomposed into discreet dimensions which can be reasoned about explicitly. I was walking through life thinking about this new insight every second of every day, when I wandered into a discord chat that I had been a part of since 2017 and started reading through some of my old messages.

What I saw made my blood run cold. The same insight that I thought of as so new and transformative was repeated, more or less verbatim, by my past self from 2 years earlier. I had had this insight before, allowed it to "transform" my life and integrated it into my being (so I thought) and then forgotten about it and repeated this process again with the same insight, without noticing. I realized that this pattern had probably repeated, over and over again, with that insight and others, many many times. Worst of all, some insights I probably didn't reach a second time, and those thoughts were lost to the ether even though I'd thought them fair and square.

I do not know who wrote this.

Can't find it either. Either Google Search is so bad now or whoever posted it took it down.

Anyway, I can't say I have been as cursed as this person, except maybe in an insight of thinking way too much about how "things in the past affect the future" and being mentally destroyed by it.

(Also yes, while I do have some way bigger articles in store, I just want to make it clear that I can definitely post something short like this to make the '3 days between articles' happen even when I'm not really there )

In my Memory Crystallization article, I bring up the idea of 'crystallization', where you understand the 'vibe' of a game or how to be good at something, but how odd it is that you don't have this feeling immediately but need to experience it first. And how this extrapolates to something being 'spent' when you play something for an extended period of time.

This article is about an offshoot of the idea, where this feeling can be 'spent' when games are perceived as unoriginal, even if that is anachronistic to what really happened.

There is a sense of inauthenticity from things that have been overly repeated. Magic tricks, are literally called 'routines' to the performer but that would feel hollow for the spectator to know or think about it like that. Or maybe it's history or philosophical fallacy or thought experiment you heard in a video rehashed like 100 times. Commonly some people mention that the "AI writing style" or artstyle would be less associated with bad spam, if it was less if used, it was limited to people who already did high quality work to have access to it.

Jonathan Blow, developer of The Witness, has been designing a Sokoban game and it's taken long enough that Jon sees 'this is literally just (my) work' in other games, and is 'going dark' for the next game after seeing many games seem to copy artstyles or even just 'get inspired'.

But in math and science there is frequent coincidental idea rediscovery (like, differentiation was independently discovered in the 17th century by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz).

At the same time, there will always be people who have never heard of the original idea, praising the first time they were aware of it, and sort of cringingly may even casually reverse or mix up the causality. This links to a forum thread of fractal failure of this kind of thing: some doofus implies Balatro gave attention to Slay the Spire, and a reply who calls that out as incorrect then goes on to say "Slay the Spire invented the genre" which is also not correct.

It honestly is kind of unrelatable to know history, and be mocked for saying that coincidences leading people to assume stealing in such a negative light, but it is just what happens. Besides, you need some humility about this because the nature of all this is that there could be a past-game going further back you never knew about.

I'll be digging deeper on Slay the Spire because that game has had tons of history and later copycats involved.

The full story behind Slay the Spire‘s development is one of circular inspiration. In 2014, Peter Whalen, one of the Hearthstone dev playtesters, released a deckbuilding roguelike game for iOS called Dream Quest. Anthony cites it as one of the primary influences behind Slay the Spire. “Peter’s game, Dream Quest, certainly is similar to our game,” he admits, “I had played it previously and enjoyed it: the fundamental concept of battling enemies with a deck and as you continue on you get stronger in both by adding cards to your deck.”
Slay the Spire’s inspirations don’t end there. As I described in my review of the game, it draws many systems and mechanics from other games: Hearthstone, FTL, The Binding of Isaac, and Dominion, to name a few. Casey and Anthony picked and pulled from many of these games to craft their own.

Games often do not directly credit predecessors in their store page or anywhere. Slay the Spire is an incredibly well known roguelike deckbuilder but its influence from Dream Quest or Dominion is in interviews, if they weren't in interviews, there is plausible deniability - and I'm glad people are generally honest enough to this extent.

But it feels odd to me. Of course there are many developers who happen to succeed and find work despite credit constantly getting lost and mixed up, but it feels like a place that lost acknowledgement can easily happen. Mobile game clones and copycats have been happening for a very long time now, and it is honestly an unreasonable ask for a dev to need to check everywhere and try to do something about it. I've had some of my own games cloned without permission to other websites. This already being existing and 'valid' in our current system is honestly why I can't bring myself to be emotionally invested in the idea of LLM potentially stealing credit. It's already long been happening.

Now generally I don't think that small teams of developers would be dishonest if you actually asked them about their mechanic inspiration, but I do feel there's an aspect where business/copyright/law is painful to think about, can feel very vicious to be on the other end of it, so why risk it with pointing out what exact gameplay was copied and modified on your game page as a starving artist with enough to think about. (Meanwhile massively successful companies like MiHoYo who take from indies, that's a later topic here but they also want to not draw attention to it.) If there was not such a 'competitive' economy with incentives to be more secretive I believe such open idea-sharing would be more common. To put it in another way, the main thing that seems horribly wrong about someone taking from a lesser-known indie developer is the 'languishing in obscurity' many artists feel and the "rich get richer, poor get poorer" of it all, and so stealing from someone who is already famous and well-known is 'less' bad. Then when you look in hindsight maybe PUBG didn't get 'as much' credit for the battle royale popularizing, compared to how much other games managed to monetize off that concept, but it's hard to evaluate too (the battle royale concept is not necessarily unique to PUBG). A similar problem has things like the famous $1M math awards crediting up the person who did the 'last stretch' of the work, leading one award winner, Grigori Perelman to even reject the prize.

So here are some weird true anecdotes here. Note that by 'copycat' I mean that it copies fundamental gameplay mechanics and flow, not that its cards are a copy.

• Shadowverse is a Hearthstone copycat, but it had a "Rush" mechanic which means that a summoned creature can immediately attack other creatures but not the enemy hero. This was then added to Hearthstone later on, also called "Rush".
• Roguebook is a Slay the Spire copycat, and I have always felt 'off' about how the Steam storepage credits Richard Garfield as a co-designer when it is much more designed by Slay the Spire than anything else.
• Sometimes STS clones don't "get it". Dream Quest had healing cards that incentivized stalling. Roguebook has on-kill and heal in the starter deck which incentivizes stalling. Craftaway has easy access to healing in the starter relics that incentivizes stalling. Slay the Spire had these yes, but as orange-rarity cards and uncommon relics so they wouldn't be constant stalls in games.
• (I have a much longer roguelike-ish article that will repeat some of these)
• However there's also the matter of "what is a reference and homage vs. a copy". Even Slay the Spire has "Discovery" which is a pick-1-of-3 random-cards which seems like a reference to Hearthstone naming such a thing 'Discover' as a keyword. Some designers who worked on multiple games 'ported' a card design over but the rest of the game is so different that it actually plays out massively differently.
• The autobattler genre has some of these moments: Backpack Battles seeming to yoink Backpack Hero's base idea, autobattlers like The Bazaar have had games like Oaken Tower seem to take mechanics and then Batomon Showdown ripped mechanics from there. This particular case is a bit cursed though because the genre is almost too simple to have a set of distinct mechanics, but they do the same exact mechanic when it comes to poison/flame for example.

It's also weird how many people just go along with the 'consensus' of law that gameplay mechanics are not copyrighted but expressions of them are, so Hearthstone copycats renamed all the keywords just to make it feel more distinct which makes it harder to learn for people familiar with the genre. Except when some practical thing like loading-screen games become patented then everyone tries to not notice how powerless they are to the whims of what companies believe is fair during power-grabs 👁️👄👁️

Other examples:

• The free 1-hour game Perspective has had a later game that uses pretty much the same mechanic that I played on my channel.
• The game 'Tale of Scale' was a short game that happened to have the same mechanic as the later games Museum of Simulation Technology / Superliminal.
• Games that copy a game that has existed for decades like Minesweeper or Nurikabe but only add to the visuals but not the gameplay.
• Islands of Insight (a game I worked on) does not count as a ripoff to me, it takes 'mechanics' from many paper puzzles but splits them apart and mixes them for its own thing. However, this is also spent territory in playing Nurikabe-likes in general.
• Baba Is You's amazing twist halfway throughout the game, while still being very special, is now 'reused' in a way that is presented as much less of a big twist in newer releases like Toroban, and Maxwell's Puzzling Demon.
• I have played many games (Regex Adventure, Lingo: Regal Expanse), that use a certain 'programming' language as a game mechanic. Since I was already aware of it, this has little sense of discovery for me unfortunately.

Honestly it's a little disheartening as I have always valued innovation in games and many daily games go and rip stuff off with almost no changes. Other stuff that despite being legal is very tacky in my opinion:

• NYT buying out Wordle (a game that is almost identical to the game in a TV show named Lingo) and then striking down Wordle clones
• NYT striking down an archive of NYT Connections puzzles (this is more above, Connections itself is built on the back of a TV show named Only Connect)

What is the line between a good inspired spinoff of a game and a ripoff? It feels more original if you add your own twists to the game to such an extent it feels like a huge expansion and not a mod, understand what makes it good, and respect past work.

There are likely people who think of the "card modification" in STS2 as entirely new, and while it is cool, other STS-likes Roguebook, Monster Train, and much more recently Faith of Despair have already done it.

Outside of games, you also feel limerence towards your earliest experiences. If you had listened to music in a different order, what is special and unique to you would almost certainly change.

When I look back, some of the levels of childhood games were extremely basic and did not even have stuff like side secrets that used the mechanic in a unique way. I feel like that version of myself must have saw any new game mechanics as incredibly original. Now unwanted thoughts and distractors from the rest of the world are liable to happen any time there is an uninteresting or 'repetitive' moment.

I often wonder, throughout my absolute years of music creation, whether I've accidentally lifted a melody subconsciously. I think I'm generally very good with noticing when a melody feels like a 'memory' instead of new. This is popularity-dependent too, famously Toby Fox was an Earthbound fan composer, so many tracks were inspired by Earthbound tracks^[1], and the games were not expected to be as popular as they were so such taking-from-inspirations does not feel like a fan taking from big works anymore (thus you have one fuol claiming "Spear of Justice is plagiarized"). Similarly some famous Mario tracks by Koji Kondo are heavily inspired.

This topic gets very messy when someone does lawsuits and if non-music people are involved to judge, because they will easily believe some extremely simple melodic pattern is 'too similar to be coincidence', or have awful ideas on how often this happens coincidentally. The entire practice of 'sampling' audio which is common in music is also cursed in how agreeable that's perceived to just take.

This problem is actually much more common with music than other genres of creative work. The repeated comment is, "there's only so many melodies you can make with X notes", which I've always felt to be a non-music experience layman take. As a single composer you will never be able to recreate all those melodies yourself, even a brute force Library of Babel of melodies cannot do it, because note rhythm and instrument and backing also makes a huge difference. The real reason is because of the sheer number of tracks that exist in the world, plus the much smaller reason that if music is meant to be appealing to hear (which... like, it is), the question of 'what note goes next' is also restricted as composers are not going to put an awful note there.

There's something also weird about 'originality' when it comes to liking niche art. If one of your favorite composers is some obscure artist who a maximum of 100 people have ever heard, vs. if that exact same music is found by a large audience and gets too popular, the vibe is truly different, you expect the future version to maybe be more mass-appealing, them to maybe no longer reply to your messages as much.

But it's actually weirder to think about how in a field with potentially 100s or 1000s of creators, "a few" are singled out as "the ones that exist", the big ones, the rest people basically act like they don't matter. People can call something an 'oversaturated field' but having enough marketing or something truly unique. (Probably the biggest examples people have heard of are Marvel Rivals when overwatch-likes were considered oversaturated, Dream when minecraft content was thought dead). In any new format there are immediately copycats that have a hard time seeming 'special', even if they actually are doing unique things.

I notice this a lot where when some new trend gets popular, people are willing to accept some of the non-essential things to the format (as in the personalities and vibes of a popular person's friends in a video, or the game mechanics of the first game of a breakout genre) and crystallize it as more 'fundamental' as well, where it's harder to do those same things when they appear in a "copycat video".

This really depends on how much you've seen of the world and how much you think "quality=popularity=correctness" are related, a bit similarly to how morality and legality are sometimes uncorrelated (and that it's sad when they are).

Inspired and partial copying is one thing, but Chinese culture around development doesn't have the same cultural norms, it's very annoying to see that someone has stolen an indie game's entire graphics style and mechanics without credit. It's not a fun reminder that some cultures have even worse differing cultural norms. It's a silver lining that people who have had their games stolen can leverage it for PR. Recently MiHoYo has been called out by some developers for having new event minigames that seem to be copies of indie games, those being Ouros, Map Map, and 5 Step Steve (the last one is a game I even played/was in the credits for testing N Step Steve part 2).

Also, people are worried about posting articles online now, and/or prompting nonlocal AI due to LLM data collection.

In recent times^[2] AI has been used to generate content that other people look at, and just because you don’t use it doesn’t mean you won’t get flooded by reading obvious AI generated comments.

• LLM’s have a sense of self between different versions and are able to learn stuff like hiding language in chain of thought or detect others (Sonnet detecting its own output and having a bias towards it), for example.

• LLM’s also now often have persistent memory and can read across chats, and also the overall data-scraping nature of LLM’s and that everyone thinks they are scraping user conversation data.

This then gives the worry of secret LLM plagiarism in AI images, music, writing and concepts, what if they are just handing ideas from somewhere else. It’s already been proven that AI image generation can be prompted to make shots that are very similar to movie shots or specific characters.

This then brings the reasonable fear to not instantly credit a ‘novel concept’ or a novel math proof if it was somewhere in the training data.

It’s a bit of a cursed problem too because LLM’s necessarily need to learn ‘ordinary’ ‘unstolen’ things like what a chair is or what a word means or that a word even exists, yet to then also credit things made by individuals and such.

While I think this is all valid, I would like to consider some things in this category that aren’t really LLM related but still have credit issues and that we’ve had for a long time.

• Social platforms, and our current situation of “how did forums die? how did individual sites die and now ‘everyone’ is on centralized platforms like reddit and discord“ - these platforms gained their reputation on their user posts due to convenience and other factors why people moved to them, but these platforms don’t make the majority of their content. The reason Steam can demand a 30% cut for games is due to years of pre-existing dominance and fame a long time ago.

• This is overall a 'good' thing though, this is an incentive to do lots of useful work and set up infrastructure that would be useful to every community (Steam forums, promotion, all Discord’s moderation features etc), but clearly it can go wrong (biased censorship fears, UI changes, monetization, features you’d want to have not implemented for years, ‘enshittification’ also), the fear of a monopoly situation.

• Playing video games, people take mechanics all the time without much credit. Or maybe mechanics aren’t original enough that people would’ve rediscovered them.Slay the Spire doesn’t credit Dream Quest (very very early card game roguelike) or Dominion (draw 5 + discard entire hand). Slay the Spire clones don’t credit (Roguebook for example, that game has ‘designed by Richard Garfield’ despite STS making way more of its game mechanics).

• There are also so many games inspired by pen and paper grid puzzles and The Witness where those aren’t primarily credited.

• Industrial Revolution benefits have not been fully dispersed to the masses and the missing things are currently glaringly missing in society. We should be way more productive and not having to work basically the same, but strangely ‘cheap’ non-essential entertainment is cheaper. Food is more expensive than a meticulously designed electronic USB drive or something.

• I have heard of “ethical image AI” like Retro Diffusion and Adobe Firefly. Besides the cursed issue that random users apparently uploaded AI generated art into the dataset despite the goal, many of the problems with a “freely available image creator that could compete with art from human artists” (or more related ‘way to turn small text into big professional text‘) still exist even if it was fully ‘ethical’.

• It’s because AI is worringly competitive with humans and the low-quality spam of people using AI that is the main problem, but when text and music was trained on “proto LLMs” like AI Dungeon and Abundant Music this stealing was barely thought of as an issue despite it still being involved. I find this to be a strange double-standard in cultural perception.

Yes it's fully justified to demand AI companies pay us back or do something pro-huaminty after stealing this much data of other people's writing and art, especially with the other double-standard of billion-dollar companies able to do that (then pulling up the ladder behind them by deterring you from distilling their LLM's). More independent preservation of modern Library of Alexandria-like work like Anna's Archive and archive.org is constantly being under attack, and individuals like Aaron Swartz have been pushed to horrible places by being attacked for trying to liberate paywalled scientific and academic articles.

"A Little Perspective" is a 2026 game about optical illusions and perspective.

But the gameplay is not the focus of this article.

Unlike the demo, the full game has a story overlaid on top through narration, telling a story about two people's different perspective in a music-making collaboration and community.

Many people in my server have compared the plot to one of my games, Disconcordia (a months-long project that I did not make a youtube video on):

This got me curious enough to check out the game and, well, I strongly disagree, I have like 5 compelling sequel ideas, I can't have another 💀

But naturally I do have a take on it, so:

In a previous article I'd written about a moment in a genre that's like a huge relevation, but with more specific qualities that puzzle and mystery writers would likely enjoy.

Well, in some discussions and responses to it, some other very popular 'meta' games got brought up, ones that could be considered "twists", even if they are not fair in the way a fair mystery would be. It also happens they are so popular that their immediate twist tends to get spoiled immediately. Even non-troll games have long enjoyed subversion and plot moments, and these wouldn't be called troll games as they aren't really puzzles you must engage with.

To try to make a timeline of all this, we'll do like:

The Stanley Parable (2013) non-Euclidean teleports, meta narrative, fourth wall breaks
Antichamber (2013) non-Euclidean puzzles
Undertale (2015) don't need to fight, constant fourth wall breaks, game mechanics are in-universe, characters know and use the game mechanics
OneShot (2016) protagonist knows they're in a game, and there's "permadeath" although a lot of this game is actually more normal than it seems
Doki Doki Literature Club (2017) visual novel 'dating' game that goes into dark topics that I've personally experienced later in life after playing the game but not related to the game
Inscryption (2021) "roguelike card game" taking place in an escape room, has multiple acts changing genres into retro game and RPG

It's very easy for a timeline to be a rose-tinted cherrypicked view though. There's older games in different languages, as well as other visual novels, Moon: Remix RPG Adventure (1997) with RPG trope deconstruction, Eternal Darkness (2002), Off (2008) which is French RPG where the "player" is treated as not the protagonist, Crossroads OS (I played on my channel), Outcore (I loved Outcore! it's not a puzzle game though). And games like Needy Streamer Overload, There Is No Game, games imitating older games.

But ignoring that, well, uh, it felt like every few years there's a game that comes out that uses meta mechanics or meta storytelling in some way, that gets virality due to that new way to break the fourth wall. The games seem to be uniquely popular punching above their weight. Directly having the game notice streamers and people trying to do weird things in the game is also just appealing in general.

The Question

So the question is what is the next step to this genre?

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(wow I eventually did that in Disconcordia since I wrote that part of the article quite a while ago)

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Well it turns out all of those core ideas are making it into a future game of mine and they are too good to show (and they are much better executed to actually do them instead of just 'spoiling' by writing) so I'll be writing about some smaller concepts instead.

• The classic problem is that to represent something like 'the internet' or 'a book author' in fiction, you cannot have the size of such an object in its entirety in the work, only summaries or highlights. This can work, but in interactive media you need a huge backlog or excuse. This was directly a problem in my interactive Discord-like game. Even if I did write the entire "years of backlog in every channel" the player has no order to read it, no expectation to know "should I be reading this", etc.

• I once wondered back in 2024 whether these games could get increasingly 'invasive'. OneShot changes your desktop background. I felt like Inscryption was lacking gameplay-wise, and there's a moment where it can't really delete your sensitive files, where it felt too artificial to me. There is the awkwardness of the boundaries of fiction and reality. You don't want to leak actually important details for streamers playing the game, so there is a 'streamer mode', which is not that immersive. In ports and the remastered version of Doki Doki Literature Club, a fake file explorer is used, which is also not immersive.

• Even the original release of Doki Doki Literature Club doesn't handle accidental 'sequence breaks' or logical impact from messing with the files properly or deleting a 'character' early, because that would be too nonlinear, but meanwhile the fiction is of "the game breaking" with all these glitch effects.

• Valve games (Half-Life and Half-Life 2) give the experience of taking all these twists and turns, and to have a vibe of a game being 'nonlinear', even though there is visual guidance of where you must ultimately do. Portal's finale as well. Or take another subversive game, Spec Ops: The Line, where you must do certain actions, even though the game has planned out a lot. It breaks suspension of disbelief if characters are written to pretend they are real and exist while the "brokenness" is clearly in the script.

• In the Stanley Parable, an immersion-breaking lens (one you shouldn't have when playing the game, honestly) is to think about how 'the Game' is a separate entity from the Narrator in many cases like the Confusion Ending or the True Ending that rolls the credits, but is not a separate entity in the Turn on Mind Control ending or the Orange Box / Unfinished Games / Rocket League ending. One moment the Narrator is blaming you for breaking the game or acting confused about where it could lead, the other it is a part of the Narrator's control.

• This reminds me of people cheating with inspect element in my webgames (and somehow not realizing that even though it beats every level the same way). The problem is that to acknowledge inspect element is to open up the basically infinite can of worms of web exploits, especially as you're just loading a html locally. It is basically incompatible, though not impossible, to have a serious project and only have a few on-the-rails uses of "canonical exploits". My plan was that Poke ALL Codes (a game inspired off Poke ALL Toads and therefore has the same theming) could actually have this as it's such an unserious project.

• The above also has odd problems with balancing 'real work' with 'people don't really want real work, they want a game'. For example almost all 'coding sections' in a meta-styled game that isn't primarily coding has been like a child's toy version of coding and graphical interfaces. A lot of the appeal of these games is of course being streamer friendly, such that people tell streamers they must play it because what it does is so creative and new. And getting stuck on a puzzle (or not getting core elements), while it's totally fine for puzzle fans, completely stalls streams.

I think I must have had an article planned like this, like back in 2019-ish when I also wanted to write a lot of articles but wasn't as skilled. (In fact my writing style has also improved and changed a lot since I started the idea of making articles, which was like in March 2026, but this article was one of the earlier written ones )

Level 1

A classic example is World of Warcraft where in beta, players received 100% experience for the first few hours of play, which dropped to 50% as "fatigue" set in. Players felt punished for playing too long and viewed it as a "debuff". The designers doubled the required XP per level but changed the wording so players received a 200% "rested bonus" after being offline, which eventually "depleted" to a "normal" 100% rate.

The Spaghetti Monster added a "login box" every 24 hours, but it was buffed to be a random amount mostly between 30-90 minutes. This was framed as an act of generosity when what it does is make players addicted to watching artificial ingame numbers-go-up keep the game on all the time.

The 'Pity Timer' feature in many gacha games is nice mentally for the player to not feel like they're going on a huge losing streak, even though it is statistically rare.

In deckbuilders, especially with a looping deck (you reshuffle from your discard when you run out), a short deck is more consistent than a big one. That means card removal can be a good thing. In Slay the Spire, events often play with the 'flavor' of adding or removing a card - usually not acknowledging that removal is often good, and acting like adding is always good. This is part of the learning experience of the game in my opinion. I loved one moment in Slay the Spire 2, where a horrible card from the original game that had a theme of a "metamorphosis butterfly" with a 'powerful' (but expensive, inconsistent effect) was now an event card reward where it was presented as all-positive to let this butterfly in your deck, when gameplay wise it is really not.

In many roguelikes you gain 'unlocks' that expand the item pool for random drops, but if you think about it some of these unlocks may not be good or synergistic, and if you had the choice you would prefer not unlocking them.

In Minecraft competitive challenges (that are played in normal Survival), people rarely seem to want to die on purpose, if they lose a 1v1 it's framed as a defeat for them. This is odd because a death is really just a teleport with a full heal of your health hunger + 5 saturation bars.

In Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam, despite it having one of the best premises for a game, ultimately ended up with an unoriginal story, where many roadblocks seem completely contrived and meaningless. This is odd in a way because in every game you do 'arbitrary' tasks, but identical roadblocks and moving can feel either contrived or engaging, depending on a change of narrative dressing.

Level 2

Casinos use the vibe of luxury to mask that statistically you are constantly losing money for being in one, and lotteries also count in a smaller way.

People can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on games with gambling systems, including physical card games and such. This is, in my opinion, a representation of horrible sense of value in life / not understanding the path to improving in real life, but the framing aspect is how those people probably wouldn't even enjoy the game if they just had a dev account with everything unlocked, where there's no external 'progression' there. This is true for the sense of 100%'ing a game and it feeling empty, a weird sense since even people who "100%"'d a game probably have not found all the glitches or interesting plot details or dev history.

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Level 3

"Who actually benefits more" from some business deal (since both are gaining something), is unclear in moments that can even let someone switch who should be handing over money / "buying/selling" it.

Hold on that sentence is probably poorly worded, here's an example:

Let's say a new merch luxury brand wants to collaborate with an influencer on some limited-edition item.

The brand's perspective: "We're giving exposure to our customer base, handling all manufacturing, shipping, financial risk, you should pay us a fee to launch your merch."

The influencer can say: "My audience trusts me, and by promoting your brand, I am also giving trust to you as a company, and you should pay me for marketing and licensing my likeness."

Both sides are gaining something but negotiations on who's getting the 'better deal' can be biased and reframed.

On another note, I will go against what most people tend to say here and say that 'paid in exposure' is actually a legit thing. Influencers get paid for exposing their audience to certain products all the time, smaller content creator careers have been launched by bigger ones, people get prestige and status for working at a bigger known company.

Of course this is often cursed because, the main stereotype coming to mind with 'pay in exposure' is a small artist getting way less than expected and no real money for doing actual work for a big company, and makes it really, really obvious that 1) exposure is fickle and 2) frustration of a "rich get richer" effect if already-successful can get away with paying in 'exposure'.

When your favorite indie music or game or friend becomes niche/hipster to sponsored/mainstream there really are different vibes and expectations, even if that person necessarily didn't ask for it.

Sometimes people treat someone poorly but then find out they're rich (in money or status) and suddenly two-face. Their previous irritating behaviors that were a sign of their poorness and low-statusness suddenly become ignorable meaningless silly things or even quirks to copy.

This is a really good quote from the inventor of Old Old Chess Battle Advanced (the Spaghetti Monster):

there's a few hidden things on steam where if you make your game gigantic and slow to patch then people notice their internet lagging and go check downloads and see your game and return to play it, but if you optimize down to having a 50mb game instead of 50gb they never notice it. There's another thing where people announcing their weekly server downtime over and over again gets promoted onto everyone's library page, but if your game has 99.999% uptime there is no reward and nobody notices that. There's another thing where if you squeeze money from people the average pay rate goes up which is a metric storefronts optimize for even if 99% of players hate it, but if you do the opposite you're punished and buried and nobody cares. The list goes on

Note that The Spaghetti Monster has also used dark patterns so people get addicted to opening lootboxes.

Level 4

The 'blue vs. red' button viral poll where if >50% press blue everyone lives, but if <50% press blue only the people who press red live, is a classic constantly reframeable problem. Blue button pressers framed as willingly walking into a crusher/woodchipper/suicide blender.

Inaction vs. action in general and what is 'moral' and what you should do.

OpenAI "reset weekly token quota every 1 million new users" feels like a con because it's like worse than a consistent 1 week reset, it disrupts people who scheduled based on weeks, if you have 20% tokens remaining and you suddenly get reset you are spending from "next week's" quota.

Sometimes 'updates' deprecate things you liked, mess with UI, even screw with something you relied on. It is very much not an update.

Level 5

Deceptive design, or "dark patterns", have long been used in marketing/UX design to manipulate users into making decisions that benefit the company rather than the user, obviously exploiting cognitive biases and psychological triggers to influence behavior. Subscription services that are a maze to unsubscribe from, 'free' things that require payment of a different thing, overfrequent limited time offers/discount, trick wording, etc.

In work, 'unlimited vacation' leading to ambiguity and no PTO (paid time off) days, "we're a family", free pizzas and arcade games in the office to distract you from direct money comparisons.

Negative association applying: gone wrong, this is basically applying conspiracy theory thinking in 'normal' contexts^[2]. I've always been highly suspicious of people who can frame someone you've never met (or actions you haven't personally seen) as a bad person, very easy for this to be maliciously motivated. Someone trying to be equal and sincere in seeing people's viewpoints often gets an insulting label by more extreme members of a group, for being too easily stereotyped as the outgroup and opposite party. In storywriting you can see this as a way to misrepresent a character before you meet them, but also criticize their actions if they look a bit too close to the 'established taboo' at the time. This of course applies to real life as well. One piece of social dark matter is the retroactive un-taboo of AI projects like Neuro, Infinite Craft, previous procgen games that could be equivalently criticized to ways AI is criticized^[3], and what people would feel about someone trying to make a new project very similar to it, vs. the retroactive taboo you can feel with a name like "Smart AI Games" (this is the name of the creators of Veggie Quest, a game I had a full series on my channel), or the retroactive taboo to TTS voices. This is of course the most effective example due to the broadness and technical specificity of the term that public discussion is not equipped to deal with, of course despite exposing the viciousness of many people with personal attacks, this is far from the worst type of heated topic.

I also feel from experience that "positively framed" stereotyping can be just as bad as negatively framed stereotyping, or worse. Now it's perfectly normal to have fun with others in your group in the sense that "we have a shared mindset and some things are unexpectedly correlated", but it makes me very uncomfortable when others go so far in that, that they seem to want to become a walking stereotype on purpose (and encourage others to). Because this excludes others who would otherwise be objectively part of the group but aren't as outgoing with it, or even disagree with the 'consensus' of what is best for the group. Especially when it becomes a 'positive' stereotype in a community that due to your identity you're supposed to also have the same political views of the group stereotype, it's not better if it's framed positively, it's just gatekeeping with a different coat of paint.

Smoking, besides decades of tobacco industry coverups of it being bad for you, was successfully marketed as female empowerment and rebellion. This kind of reframe is still so utterly messed up to me, we're still vulnerable to such tactics today^[4]. It's probably the biggest inversion of "good" ever that is possible to talk about at the moment, one of the worst possible ideas being presented in a glorified light, believed as consensus at the time and any evidence of the opposite was suppressed for decades.

The inverse is also true and is the chilling social dark matter. You wonder why you don't really see any sincere honest guides to life or reflections by people or, while you can see lots of "very bad" people online, the sense of "very good" is capped and you are in a haze of lack of trust. That sentiment is most reflected by the classic quote, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him" (-Cardinal Richelieu).

Takeaway

There was one point I felt framing could be used for good. The locked content nature of CCG's actually lets you see low-complexity stuff early in an organized way. In some games being a F2P can be a better experience than a paid player, although even though the fantasy is that you find a synergistic F2P build with your incredible intelligence, the devs don't want that and they prefer annoying bullet sponges or energy limits for not being an F2P.

Similarly 'gamification' is such a tacky word that makes it sound like you are adding EXP bars to math and calling it a day, yet there is a lot of good there: the sense of chapters, permanent progression, quests, that can turn an only-educational thing to one that is legitimately fun and well-thought-out (Ring Fit Adventure, Euclidea, etc.).

As I have seen more of this world though, the vast majority of framing is seemingly for manipulation and marketing. Creators of creative work probably have thought this at least once, that marketing is a painfully annoying thing to do, like you shouldn't need to advertise your quality if you have a high quality product, and out of a moral code decide not to. Discoverability algorithms and mentally absorbing the phrase 'word of mouth' like it's an abstract entity allow people to do this.

Marketers are not only selling you a product, but selling you a story. This is a game marketing lesson, many games don't have good trailers, screenshots, or hooks. There's things like highly valued forgers of fake Vermeer paintings that were appraised highly and then lost value afterwards.

PR and marketing is unfortunately a global lifeskill. If you don't do it you can also be oppositely framed or have credit taken from you. Unfortunately if you've ever suddenly been on the end of an accusation filled with lies and misrepresentations and manipulations, you start to realize that being more honest in your framing makes you vulnerable to disgusting things like that.

In '100 best pieces of life advice', an article I feel way too sad about the world to finish and post, there are a few pieces of advice light and practical enough that I could think about sharing. One of them is, "Backup Everything".

The most obvious and practical use of this is that when I was younger I did not know how other people had a "D drive" on their computer and such. These are external harddrives you need to buy, physical objects that can be small like a USB stick (such as '32GB USB Flash Drive Memory Stick') or expensive and larger ('1TB Ultra Slim Portable External Hard Drive'). These $70 1TB drives are obviously essential objects, but at the sad beg-parents-for-everything stage that children have to suffer through, this will be a hard sell and you definitely don't want to make the mistake of your computer not having the USB 2.0 or 3.0 port necessary to connect it after you get it.

If you don't have access to those, you still have lots of options for free storage, on mediafire, mega.nz, Google Drive, uploading your videos as private videos. These are probably big enough for your purposes, however certain larger projects may not fit.

Besides that though, other mentalities of "Backup Everything" that are deeply worth it:

• I had absurd nostalgia of the very first levels I ever made for games. Unfortunately I do not have much of them anymore.
• Archive your favorite videos and comments on them!
• It has never been more dissatisfying and disproving of "everything on the internet forever" when there's so many pieces of music gone, music channels taken down, sometimes not even by the actual owner of the music, sometimes by a rent-seeker who just bought the rights. Watching a youtube playlist with 60 videos turning into "24 unavailable" and forgetting what music or videos were in it is so stupid.
• Also having music from niche creators that no one else thought to archive is a special experience.

A few new reasons came up after I started to feel more unhappy, and Backup Everything still benefits:

• Record good memories and great pieces of media and excellent moments so you won't forget them later (there are a few webcomics and posts I no longer remember)
• Screen record your stuff or yourself to see how far you've come since X years ago, you can even make a time capsule video
• It's always a good idea to save a copy or screenshot of things you see online to keep an accurate record of past events. Ideas and popular opinions change, and people sometimes forget or deny that harmful trends were ever widely supported or considered a good idea. Being in this situation and having no evidence of what you saw firsthand, now there's not even a word for that emotion. Probably boomers actually have some of these moments with no evidence.
• You also don't want to be like that cursed soul who came up with an insight and later found out already having come up with the same insight 2 years ago. Seriously don't.
• Thinking of ideas is just so worth it in general, especially as you can build off of it and sort through your notes and topics

Frog.

(There was going to be an article about other 'meta' games, however my writing style has already changed massively from when I wrote that article like 5 months ago that I no longer feel comfortable posting it, amazing.)

impwolf the absolutely prolific inventor of the highest number of Lingo-custom-maps (which are also very much quality) has this question:

What makes it more awkward is that the main game that could be said to represent the genre, The Witness, already sparked a different larger trend in puzzle games of "witnesslikes", which is less spoilery to describe:

• To not have tutorials using words
• A variety of 'symbols' which add restrictions to puzzles ('nonverbal communication', 'rule discovery')
• Subtle environmental aspects like shadows mattering, or the aesthetic of a 'ruined broken puzzle' to make the player visualize an effect
• Open world

So Lingo is a 'witnesslike' because despite being a word game, its tutorials are not primarily with words.

All that is to say, the word 'witnesslike' has already been spent. So now that that's out of the way, let's get back to the image:

i wish there was a word for the design philosophy used by things like
environmental puzzles in The Witness
or negative space in Linelith
or Whiteland in Pinkland 2
or backup everything in Ice Height

This is a moment in the games that is intended to be special, and therefore spoilery to talk about. I will not mention any spoiler directly, this article expects that if you're reading the spoilered section you already know about the game.

Spoiler: Linelith

This game basically repeats a rule that is more general than you thought, and I love how despite it being general, it feels like it's 'waves' of realization about what counts as part of the rule. Because the rocks being the player and walls and floor and space all have such different connotations.

Hey when is that game going to get the fan suggestion DLC where the bottom left bar should totally have been a final puzzle

Spoiler: Ice Height

As I have already talked about this game in 2.5 hours of walkthrough and commentary, I don't know if I have that much else to say in this article, except that the:

They feel like they are just an extrapolation of a rule (or just another application of the "game's language") you've already been using earlier in the game.

is not quite true in Ice Height, but foreshadowing multiple "key phrases" and suspicious things makes it so much more thematically fair, which is actually a thing I've seen in many mystery novels! In fact I also feel that mystery novels and games have a similar feeling, but purely in-story, where something deep and important has had its effects in play the whole time, but you did not notice or realize, which also adds some replay value. Once again though, things like 'the curtains were blue' or 'my stomach grumbled' could be completely mundane and meaningless, OR it could be super foreshadowing, and it's sort of playing on that ambiguity, people can sense a bit of "unfairness" with that. Especially because supernatural rules can be in fiction, the "fairness" can be somewhat in question there too.

It can be less viscerally satisfying in mystery fiction also, because it very much requires you to think of events in a way where you've been constantly considering the edges and hints of the missing understanding. In a game you choose where to look with hints, in a mystery novel you cannot personally inspect the scene.

I wonder if it could possibly be considered related that metroidvanias and platformers have certain tricks and techniques that you may not understand, but then get more explicitly shown. That seems too core to the genre and not a large 'hint' surprise in the same way, it doesn't necessarily immediately make the world feel a lot more intentionally constructed and larger just because there was a secret way to use a dash.

It's hard to even maybe describe other games that have something similar, I'm only preemptively mentioning metroidvanias due to that reason. Outer Wilds' knowledge-based discoveries are smaller mechanical moments over a long period of time. Puzzlehunts have 'metas' that are far-reaching but potentially not mechanically revealing about some earlier puzzle.

Perhaps even naming the genre is some sort of "impossible spoiler", the kind of spoiler that even giving it a name to would point to the experience too obviously. The fact that Taiji was restricted by the fact that it was inspired by The Witness such that it couldn't quite do the same thing for people on the lookout for something like The Witness.

I have been spending a large amount of the past few days updating and making features for Poke BALL Toads, including card suits, better radar, a skilltree, much better chunk rendering, and 10 status effects required for the skilltree. This was all added over two updates:

The next directions would be something like:

• new worlds over a 1 week-cycle
• multiplayer lobbies (a brief teaser is already in the houses)
• secrets
• potentially player-made maps for the open world, maybe even a more interesting open world in general

All of which is rather unsure at the moment with its side-project quality and its need to be a more viral and shared game to justify, not that it wouldn't be good.

Now this has been cursed, because at this point this project has more lines of code than Poker ALL Toads, and completely competing demands about the game's metaprogression. I've intentionally chosen this skilltree is per-run to emphasize the per-run skill aspect and doesn't permanently upgrade you. It would completely ruin the fairness of any multiplayer and cleanness of leaderboards. I must also point out that it's much more skillful, skill-testing, and interesting to choose a different build per run depending on circumstances.

Yet much slower metaprogression was part of the original Poker ALL Toads.

So a lot of these directions for the game are against each other.

Maybe I need to post a few polls for all this.

But anyway please enjoy my work, again please play Poke BALL Toads, I need a rest.

I recently finished an ultimate Baba troll levelpack that's in my Baba Is You Troll Levels playlist.

There's a prokopetz post with 8000 notes (so quite 'viral' there), which I will describe in text:

The Baba Is You modding community is sort of the exact opposite of every other video gaming modding community in that the troll levels are actually more interesting and accessible than the ones that purport to take the game and its design principles seriously. The "serious" level packs are like "here's a level that expects you to keep track of thirty plus unmodifiable rules and accepts exactly one valid solution which obliges you to carry out a two hundred step procedure to pile six different instructions on top of each other and exploit an obscure text stacking priority mechanic in a way that's deeply counterintuitive but technically base-game legal", while the "troll" level packs are like "let's see how long it takes them to notice that the pause button is an interactable object", and I'm 100% prepared to argue that the latter is more true to the base game's driving ethos than the former.

For me I personally feel deeply influencing to this quote because my Baba Is You custom videos, especially of me playing a levelpack that basically does what is described in that quote, a video with 70k views. Other levelpacks by this creator have also been incredibly well received, although the creator (AnActualCat) has the same problem I do with extremely high quality and unfinished projects for both Baba and Lingo.

Now is the quote true? Well, I probably wouldn't have written it, there's a sense of "sensationalized misconception debunky" that I don't like even though it was successful. I would be concerned about being perceived as insulting anyone who made levels that are intended to be fair and difficult and framing it like it's some sort of 300-step slog, as those levels do very much often intend to show a cool thing about the game.

First though, I have two playable Baba Is You custom levels I'm still very proud of, one of which I still have never really shown off in a video.

Use the levelcodes I2K3-M1MX and Y4WU-LXXG ingame to check them out. These are also levels that I've really enjoyed streamers' reactions for as well.

My thoughts on it, spoilered:

Key Change

It actually shocks me this was never used in the basegame. The closest thing I can think of would be one of the levels involving the 'WORD' property, where you have to literally think 'outside the box' because the WORD property makes it harder to detect the possibility of making certain rules. It's just so elegant, fitting the aesthetic of Baba, and without requiring custom code or reskinned sprites or anything, only an unobvious aspect of how a player would see a level.

Not As It Seams

The word "PIXEL" is a real vanilla word, but isn't ever used for the player and is editor-only, and ideally needs to be reskinned to be used like this. Gridlines also can spoil it. Besides that though, I literally always wanted a level interacting with the edge or border. This is sort of that but in a way, Baba still doesn't deliver on the full potential of this idea, as no level truly makes you go outside the border or anything. That's probably because you either couldn't see what was offscreen or it would add ridiculously cursed requirements to turn the game into a secret open world (also an option, honestly).

Watch a twitch clip of Not As It Seams, today now!

I mentioned my Baba Is You Troll Levels playlist before but I'd like to drop some personal highlights and history of them.

• Baba Is You but it's MORE troll levels: This levelpack was basically the first levelpack I had seen in my recommended page that got me into thinking about Baba customs for the first time and therefore played a small part in my channel's entire existence. It's got great jokes about using sentences that don't parse as anything or do anything special in normal Baba logic, but if you apply real-world logic or try to treat it like a real sentence then it 'works'.

• Baba Is You but it slowly gets more cursed: This pack takes the letters mechanic from the basegame and bends the rules slightly, just a bit, until it became a 3-parter series from all of the directions it went with it.

And finally the "Sus" Levels compilation where every level has a reveal that you must see for yourself, this is often a super rare reveal in other games:

▶ Watch: https://www.youtube.com/embed/phxz8e7ob9A

Analysis

Troll levels are probably some sort of "acquired taste". You need to fully have the experience of respecting a system and its intent first to be able to appreciate the feeling of intentionally destroying your hard-earned symbol understanding with cursed math.

Ever since I've been making games, I've wondered if troll levels get in the way of making the game seem like a serious product. Having played games like Impossible Quiz and such, my personal taste is that it should get right to the action with these things.

I never found it too dissonant or stupid - even math can be 'trolly' if a problem is way easier than expected due to a trick. It's very easy for lateral outside-the-box thinking to generally have a trollish nature to it even though 'question your assumptions' is a very standard operation in puzzle games. But then, I wonder, if you introduce a completely new mechanic that is thematically fitting but mechanically completely unexpected, especially early on in the game, does this unknowingly lock you out of a lot of players who find the game too stupid to engage with?

You can also compare it with memes of a game, which often point out something in a game, or apply the 'wrong type' of logic to a game on purpose, but often are not 'tastefully' done. Not in the usual sense of 'tasteful' as appropriate, but are done to be one-off disposable jokes. What if instead, like with games like DDLC and Undertale, some of their best moments are basically memes dressed up in a way more professional context?

This is also reminiscent of Layton trick questions where a problem implies complicated math but then due to wording or a subtlety the answer is just 0 or something. This style of puzzle was always occasionally in Layton but became even more common in the fan-unloved Layton's Mystery Journey. Except unlike most people I literally loved every time that game did it.

My Games

I really, really enjoy this genre. I've made two 'main' games in this genre: Move Counters that get more cursed is that genre of troll game (I've even uploaded a video of my favorite streamer playing it), and Minescryer which is a much shorter experience.

However, I'm worried that there is a huge problem that I've unintentionally deeply filtered^[1] the amount of people who can play my game this way. And not even because of the trolling part, but because of the expectation of a player getting the hang of a game early enough to appreciate its systems first while still also getting the sense that it's a troll-game early. Which might be too much to compress in a short timeframe.

I'm grateful to koo-koo who has spiritually continued the 'games that get more cursed' series with Increasingly Cursed Knight Puzzles and Increasingly Cursed Wordle Puzzles and Increasingly Cursed Emoji Puzzles but I would bet those games also have unnoticed accessibility, ease of early confusion issues, not obvious to those who love and go through troll experiences smoothly. (Fun fact the inventors/fans who made various fanbooks of the Cursed Knight Puzzles are doing a collab right now)

For contrast, a different game "Strange Jigsaws" also has troll and weird vibes but seems more accessible to people. Now this is not completely a fair comparison as the creator has somewhat more of an audience than me. But still, I think it doesn't have this problem because it doesn't really have a system to try to establish and subvert, besides just the imagery of the jigsaw piece in odd places.

It's why my most recent games have been both more 'serious' and 'hooky', I suppose.

Other Games

Here are some screenshots of moments from other games I greatly enjoyed:

(Oh my god there surely are more examples than just these, but I must release this article today to not disappoint people)

Parabox has optional levels that often have custom code or are just unusual in another way, that could be considered 'troll' levels. These bonus/appendix levels, half of them are unusual in level design, the other are unusual in aesthetics, or something like that.

In particular the last image is very cursed for someone who's played the game but less obvious why if you haven't. I wish Parabox Open 5 was still a thing.

The game Islands of Insight that I worked on, eventually had a 'Trickster Island' full of troll puzzles and things exploring edge cases. I'm so glad this island made it into the game. You can look at these puzzles just in this article.

The game Bilattice also has a few moments I loved. One of these images is too good and has too much buildup to share and has no trolling but is a buildup to the trolling. The other you can spot the troll just from the single image, but probably not instantly.

Finally there are moments in Lingo custom maps like Ice Height but also involve way more context to understand.

Please remind me for more examples.

Here is a strange list of observations.

• Before you play a game, it could be 'anything'. The visuals give a vibe but not all of it. As you go further along in the game, and get more 'spoiled', you lose something, you lose most of the mystery. And every replay of the game expends something.

• It's interesting how 'illegible' screenshots and gameplay can be before playing a game. I've never quite successfully mapped out a game's entire map by only watching visuals of the game. (But when I actually play the game it crystallizes for me.)

• I once had a very different vibe of "Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective" before playing it, specifically the 'Phantom Detective' bit, where to me it made it sound like you would be doing 'normal detective' things like walking around a building. Meanwhile, the way you move around is so NOT usual in Ghost Trick.

• Similarly open world games feel so expansive, with classic vista shots in games like Breath of the Wild, and especially in games with less content, those shots feel more linear and explored after you play the game.

• It's also sometimes a false feeling that you have 'explored everything' or 100%'d it at all if the game has secrets or hidden movement tech. Often it's a multiplayer game, people complain the game gets boring because the game didn't get updates (some will say this for battle pass battle royales, CCG's, etc.) - but it's a bit odd, because often the true optimal 'meta' still hasn't been discovered.

• Although, the kinds of discoveries you make when you've done something for a month are just not the same, or as large, as the discoveries when you've done something for a year, at least they come much slower. As you learn more, there is less to learn.

This also can apply in a real life context, like learning a bike or instruments, first it's a complete mystery, it clicks (crystallizes) and it is forever 'easy' to improve at it.

Reading about experiences online instead of doing things firsthand have issues and is sort of demotivational even, a blind person may never be able to quite visualize what it is like to see from just descriptions.

This means you should be more open minded about how much you learn about rare experiences (in childhood, or ones that deeply alter your worldview and perception of the world), as these are very vulnerable to misreading as you cannot easily communicate everything that happened.

People who have followed my music journey know that I have a rare experience with music where I have felt some aspects of music got 'crystallized' after over 10 years. But for a normal person music is very resistant to this. Repeating a sentence is annoying but repeating the same bassline and melody is common, it's much more immune to being repetitious. I also find it fascinating why a melody could repeat something exactly X times and it would sound worse if it were 1 more or 1 less. It makes me feel like the composer was perfectly attuned to good things.

Generalizations of life are also strange. It's like thinking of how an 80 year old has 'only' experienced 80 winters. Like, if this were anything else, like 80 games of chess, that's way too small. To say that restaurants all taste the same that you're no longer open to new experience is to have had too many experiences where you try something 'new' and it wasn't really a new flavor or it was bad.

Generalizations of people can also be cursed in the same way, as in many ways people really don't act the same, but when they do (likely due to consuming similar sources of media) it's worth some contemplation. It's seemingly taboo to be judging people by patterns except that literally all communites have people and groups they exclude. I think something that contributes to polarization is that people won't take seriously the "worst" and "best" example of people of each group. People are motivated to not call attention to the worst parts of their ingroup or the best-argued parts of their outgroup. It's not something that needs to be thought about for standard child troublemakers, but it slowly gets more eroding in terms of mutual respect and relatability when disliked/blasphemous things for one community or belief is a normal and true foundational belief in another. When this happens a group can easily develop a warped picture of their outgroup, crystallization 'gone wrong' in that sense.

There is a cursed quote from 4-years-ago-me that I wrote, even in an article context. It's weird how I don't know if I agree with it anymore.

Imagined depictions of immortal people say the world gets boring. I don't agree. It's already impossible to read all the books there are to read, play the games there are to play, watch all the videos there are to watch, and new ones come out every day. So an immortal could indulge in societies even as the mortal people in each generation eventually die.

Did you know that 4-years-ago-me typed in capital letters and proper english to try to be serious good writing, and now the current version of me is just doing it out of standardness/obligation and it's not a thing I care about. Anyway something happened to me in the previous 1-2 years and I feel much less motivated to do 'boring' things like maneuvering or walking in games due to life priorities etc. Actually very cursed for my motivation, and while my mind frequently thinks of this as a "life is repetitious" action, this seems like a rationalization for other reasons life and my body feels weightier. Some life events though potentially did not help, such as LLM's making the idea of reading text on the internet seem like a potential trap and waste of time, which hopefully doesn't spread to other text in general.

I'm reminded of an article, "The Illusion of Explanatory Depth". I was once in a meditation-like mindstate where I really felt younger and more excited and curious again Don't tell anyone it was biochemistry affected, they'll hate you, so you have to lie and say "meditation-like" but that implies you can do it on demand, ugh, and I think what really happened is I felt way less of an emotion of 'already seen this'. The current version of me can't imagine replaying a game unless it was way far in the past, while other people (and my past self) replayed games constantly. I suspect the younger version of me was able to forget things more easily (in a certain way) and treat more objects as unique instead of broken into many pieces.

APPENDIX!

Don't I already have an appendix button?

Anyway it seems like some megaclowns may have complained about work I write for free, shaking my toad, but it actually could use some more points so:

One thing about memory is that if you do something like "try to make a game or song from memory only", or try to list all cards of a game, often doesn't give you everything and details slip your mind. It makes you wonder, if all computers shut down would we be able to perfectly replicate Baba or Slay the Spire or Portal or something? This probably isn't a very entertaining task for most people and takes a lot of time, but still.

Roguelikes/randomizers/procedural generation are all ways to make content that tries to avoid this problem, this is also a combinatorics thing where the combos are part of the design and not explicitly anticipated by the developers. Games where knowledge is the progression are way more single-use and hardcoded so they don't have this.

It's playing it yourself that makes it much easier to memorize a game's map, but this also applies to real life locations, and also it gives a different lens to the "this complicated math/science video is impossible to follow". A textbook looks less engaging than a math video, but with the concept of memory crystallization in mind it's probably the opposite. I also find a huge issue with school education (well besides the School is Hell style issues) is how it gets slowly less related to real-world goals, and math knowledge especially is spoonfed to you so you never get the hands-on experience or personal ownership of it. Things that could be cool like 'my personal technique' like the quadratic formula turn officialized, rote, arbitrary, and boring. Looking at a formula or definition first is the wrong way around too, as each part of that formula comes from certain steps, yet it appears to you all-at-once and is completely overwhelming or 'too big' by looking at it first!

Similarly, I bet there's a lot of design space to be mined with active learning being qualitatively different than passive activities like trying to 'learn japanese from a podcast'. You can change the 'learn japanese' part there to any memory-based thing. That's going to sound completely trivial as if it only means classic-interactive-educational-games, but really I'm pointing to all of the things that haven't yet been done this way.

I think the most important takeaway is the "things seem overwhelming and impossible to deal with at first and become so small later" feeling. Many times I've been in that first place. This is not just small, but 'fast', people who are more skilled/talented/intelligent sees things as smaller, finite, and way easier to do. Unfortunately it's not a place where the 'answer' or 'escape' is obvious, otherwise it wouldn't take so long to get out of, but it can be reassuring to your life if you internalize the lesson more.

Sorry for late-in-the-day article again, I spent hours getting distracted making clippable moments on Samet The Turk's Chess Arena stream today (as that game's "Season 1" patch came out today), and did not know what to make an article about. I could either put out "Puzzle Adjacent Genres: 3D Platformers" and make the case that learning all the techniques in one is a puzzle game or some article about battle royales and the appeal of them, the relation to Battlefield-like moments, and did not know which to write about.

Well, thanks to the philosophy of **COMBINE EVERYTHING** I've found a way to tie these together in some way, touching on:

• Future plans for my barely-puzzle-platformer Poke BALL Toads
• What makes open world games special, the dream of it and why games don't fulfill it

Everyone's familiar with that Zelda Breath of the Wild opening shot right?

This, in my opinion, is the visual and dream of an open world that games are constantly striving for, and ultimately they don't succeed.

Well hold on - they do succeed, but it's temporary. You feel extreme novelty at the world at first, then get used to buildings all 'being the same' or copypasted, or some areas are just flat grass, the minimap gets filled out and then looking at this view on a 2nd playthrough is not as impactful. The way that a game's mystery is lost when you 100% it, that is just as true for open world games.

Even the novelty of the 'open world' itself, as I played Genshin Impact (greatly BOTW inspired anime gacha game, not a puzzle game, I am not in the phase of my life where I could get addicted or money-addicted to it but some are vulnerable to that...) before Breath of the Wild, and having played Genshin first probably reduced the novelty I felt a lot.

What's more is that open world games have always had a tension and identity crisis of the 'aesthetic' of "freedom" fighting against the practicalities of making linear content. So freedom can be limited to "doing linear stuff but just in a different order".

Open World games in the context of my site and audience

Obviously I am way more interested in the 'puzzle' aspect of these games, how an open world can be great for the feelings of exploration, experimentation, creativity, unexpectedness, and surprise. But this article will also be talking about other 'impure' open world games as I figure I should mention them because those are also what can come to mind with 'open world', this is just a short detour hold on:

Some stuff that only applies to 'impure' open world games

The genre does have benefits with the possibility of challenge runs of a skilled player doing high-difficulty stuff early, though even that can have its own problem of getting overleveled, as well as the story-gameplay dissonance of why you're ignoring the main quest.

This is a common Ubisoft criticism as they have made so many open world games, but certainly that's not the only producer of open world games that are a checklist of repeated areas as you just drive to the newest areas staring more at the minimap and UI arrow indicators than actually exploring.

In the world of first person shooters, the Battlefield series, known for its huge 64-player lobbies and variety of weapons and vehicles, has for a long time had the concept of "Only In Battlefield" moments. Extremely true community catchphrase^[1] and probably really effective marketing-wise, these are extremely clippable and often involve a huge chaotic chain of events that caused something incredible, or the sense people consistently praise in which playing the multiplayer of a Battlefield game is like being in a movie with constant action.

The fact that these clips have beautiful long-range vistas or often even involve long distance-shots and events is also a huge part of it, distinguishing it from other 'clippable moments' in other games as well.

I'd also like to mention Borderlands and Xenoblade Chronicles even though I don't have much to elaborate on here.

Back to puzzle games

Open World has gotten um, let's say, "shrinkflation" in puzzle games

Which is not to say they are bad. In fact they have a key quality that other open world games often lack, which is intricacy and attention to detail in environments.

The thing is, RPG's like Final Fantasy can have the feeling of a big world but they are not called 'open world' games. In puzzle games, content needs to justify its space, since people won't tolerate long stretches of walking as much. In battle royales you at least have this excuse: "it's an endurance test to constantly be on watch for potential enemies". Not in puzzle games, and so that has been a complained-about aspect in Talos Principle 2's incredibly large levels (each 'level' contains about 4-10 puzzles in beautiful looking 'hubs' but it did not need to be so spread out)

I don't really know if I'm the only one who has noticed that it's kind of funny Taiji, Lingo 1, and Lingo 2 would be considered open world puzzle games despite not sharing the scale of like, a Battlefield or battle royale map. And then The Talos Principle 2 which does have these monumental scales has the same issues as battle royale games with overly long stretches without anything.

Also when I was 13 years old I stretched a water texture horizontally to 1000x1000x1, and 'explored' it and literally very much enjoyed it. This may seem like a ridiculous anecdote now but games like Manifold Garden and recursion and fractals are universally appealing so really I was just an infinite/vastness extremist

What Does It Mean, "New Content"?

Let us get back to the main idea of the article, whether it's possible to have a quality amount of content such that you'd never lose the feeling of discovery in a world. Such a game might be special and praised.

In my opinion, I felt the postgame of The Witness was intended to be an incentive for you to sit in the world forever. I remember occasionally booting up the game just to appreciate the environment. But you of course had less and less possible puzzles to solve that it no longer felt 'worth your time' even if you had puzzles remaining.

So we come to the question of how to stretch some limited content over an 'oversized' world. It's also worth noting many games already have 'infinite content' in some way, and so maybe the question can be rephrased to be about bridging the gap between games that do truly have 'infinite content' and the lack of it in open worlds.

Game as a Service

Genshin Impact fans are probably thinking about this, and, well, yes probably just having 5 years of backlog content because your game is so profitable is a great way to do that, but RPGs and questlines and monsters detract from the open world experience this article had in mind sorry

That being said other 'open' games like World of Warcraft do have this so I wonder if changes are all that are needed to make an open world feel special. Maybe The Witness could have been added onto for 10 years after release, imagine if we lived in that universe.

Intentional Repetition

Roguelikes are already using repetition and combinatorics to have constant combos and new potential every run, even if you end up memorizing all the game's cards and abilities. Achievements and speedrun-related achievements, and 'officialized' challenge runs are also ways to do this, but it does not make the world feel bigger if you have already experienced it.

That reminds me that Islands of Insight, the open-world game I was involved with working on puzzle design for, and also started life as a battle royale, also had this issue of losing that feeling of intricacy. In that game the environment has quite a tenuous connection to the puzzles in the game compared to other games in the genre that were more handcrafted alongside the environment. The respawning and shifting puzzles in my personal opinion hurt it more than it helped it due to losing a sense of stability, not being sufficient to refresh the idea of 'having already seen the environment'. There were a few excellent secrets but once again it may feel more like The Witness's postgame than a living world.

It's odd because there were so many puzzles in that game, people thought they were majority procedurally generated, when really quite a large amount was handcrafted or handplaced. But it does make you wonder if procgen grid puzzle games could actually deliver on having a lot of content to fill a world, but then again this would have a hard time feeling well-themed, which is what makes it really be meaningful.

3D Mechanics

3D platformers are highly rich in surprise. It doesn't need to be a platformer, just having 3D is enough honestly. The Talos Principle has connectors^[2] that use just simple line-of-sight that can make the 3D aspect very meaningful, even if most Talos Principle puzzles could be described in a top down 2D perspective. In that lens, leveraging the strongest aspects of 3D starts to feel like a connection between this, Breath of the Wild's "sandboxiness" and Only In Battlefield moments.

My favorite platformer game constantly makes me briefly consider the world as if it were a 3D platformer level and there are always surprises and paths you can imagine under that lens. So it's worth thinking about how that sort of thing could greatly improve a 'flat' 'boring' 3D world. It is why I consider Poke BALL Toads's pathfinding to actually be puzzlelike.

Story and Knowledge Gates

Call of Duty: Warzone has a few pieces of 'lore' and strange things in levels, like scanners and locked doors with chests behind them. This is a strangely exploration-game-like quality for a game you wouldn't quite expect it to have. Of course because it is 'competitive', obtuse, and can unlock time limited skins people just upload easter egg guides, but the spirit is there.

I remember people teased the potential secrets in The Witness for a while before people vaguely sort of concluded there wasn't any big secret left. This made me think of actual stories. Storytelling and theorizing can be a bottomless thing, and it's not even that different from knowledge games. Outer Wilds^[3], a very highly reviewed game involving planetary travel, has an unbelievable exploration and 'open world' vibe, but it doesn't even stop at the ending. Because so much of that game is about noticing things, it's fun to watch other people's gameplay to see when they notice particular things in such a different order.

Very Rare Random Events

This is like Stanley Parable's random easter eggs and starting situations or battle royales having a different ending zone each time. This can add replayability and shock value for sure.

Custom Content

Obviously, speaking as a content creator for both Baba Is You and Lingo and other games, with over probably 300 videos combined showcasing custom content, I find immense respect for modding communities for games, probably a lot more than others seem to do (I have heard the sentiment of "I wish there was more to this game" like so many times for games that already have lots of custom content). There is now more content than you could probably ever play, and if you were to shift all that content in your mind as 'official' content they would be some of the most filling games ever.

So why is this idea of an open world exploration game so hard to find then, if I can say that about those games, as if all that's needed is a community to make stuff? I mean I guess a Minecraft server with community builds could be quickly ruined with offensive/divisive stuff, so any 3D attempt would have to deal with that. But still it's so weird that the only real gap between that is that they do not have the 'official' vibes. And no this isn't about getting permission from each person, as you could literally imagine Steam or YouTube as all 'custom content' but that's clearly not what you have in mind when you think of custom content.

Will AI Video Finally Fulfill The Promise Of Infinite Gaming?

No they suck.

This is a quote from a different unpublished article that I feel like dropping here though.

There are world models like Genie 3 now. Somehow they are really boring. Like trying to get hit by a car in Genie 3 is not interesting and instead the car comes to a stop.

These demos showcase being able to spawn an alligator or flood a pool. None of these demos show a good interactive game. It is shocking. Someone pay me $3M to make a good Genie game for real idk. Seriously. And some of the demos are so boring and people can play it in like 30 second trials of you in a boat. Obviously if you want to recreate real life you want to have scenarios with real looking death defying fast rocket stunts while you juggle in the other hand while your anime girlfriend is piggyback riding you, and if you die you keep ascending layers in the afterlife. I don't know what they are doing over at Google HQ. Clowns!

Previously, there was AI trained on minecraft gameplay but with little memory and blurry graphics, so you could stare at a red wall and slowly morph into The Nether, or try and fall into lava and instead fall on honey instead. Getting into 'weird' positions like beating the game was something that the developers paid a bounty for. There was a human competitive aspect to that as well, so I think adding multiplayer could be leveraged.

Some other things!

• Supraland and Supraworld are 'open world' games with metroidvania elements. It got me thinking when I played it, that I had Korok Seed flashbacks. In Breath of the Wild, Korok Seeds became less and less useful and more 'fake'-feeling as a reward for exploration. Supraland and Supraworld gave me this feeling when a 'secret' just gives you coins or a weak upgrade like +1% crit chance, since any 'real' gameplay might have the problem of actually letting you get somewhere new and the game is too actually-linear to allow you to do that. This still seems like a missed opportunity, not having the 'enemy fighting' differ in any way in which getting some great gun upgrades would actually be possible??
• Chess Arena seems to be a game not preferred by the "YouTube algorithm" despite how great it is. Now, there are so many potential factors for this, but for me it makes me think about how you could criticize the game and what it's doing "wrong". Potentially chess+action is too small of an audience but that is speculative.
• However what's relevant to this article is that it's a 2D game trying to take on some of those 'open world' battle royale aesthetics, but it is somewhat lacking in the sandbox elements required for that to happen. Not as much distance, ability combo play, variance between rounds.
• The first version of this article totally forgot to talk about Poke BALL Toads future plans! That's partially because it's still hazy but I've always wanted to make my own open world that's legitimately great to explore. But when making a speedgame with procgen it seems like an impossible task to make it all special, especially the 'intricate' ways that a puzzle game would want to be. I could have a lot more biomes or challenges appear but I'd realistically need to make a lot of content for that. Hopefully combining some of the ideas from this article will do it, I am optimistic!

In my previous article, I've described many games involved in a Poke ALL Toads spinoff. Well now I have a spinoff of a spinoff that directly involves spins as well. There's a recent game jam with the theme 'Countdown', so the game has a lot of timers, card countdowns, durations, and the game name is:

POKE ALL TOADS BEFORE ASTEROID LETHALIZES LIFE

Or to put it in a shorter way: Poke BALL Toads.

Using tons of code and assets and ideas from previous projects, I hope this shows a sign that the minigame plans for Poker ALL Toads will be extremely high quality.

Features:

• Platformer with skills and satisfying gameplay
• Toad poking theming and character selection
• Daily game with leaderboards
• Theoretically connected to the Witch fairy's Crystal Ball
• Nice procedurally generated varying ground + imported 3d assets with the intent that this successfully creates a large amount of statespace
• Starting to think this should have been a more 'direct' racing layout

The game jam deadline is tomorrow so there better be a game link here, it's 90% done I swear This means I have just posted about 3 unfinished 'mostly done' projects on my site in a row by now. What can I say, very recent and unrecent events have made me deeply personally unsure that other people exist in a way where I can get joy from watching them play my games :( sorry

UPDATE: it's heeere POKE BALL TOADS

Writing 'design visions' for games is something I've always loved doing. I think I made like a long one for Islands of Insight, both before playing (talking about my vision for what the game could be) and after testing. I have basically never been idealess after playing a game, except after maybe playing a Chris Souvey lingo map (which is a huge compliment to that designer).

Poker ALL Toads is a game that combines a few ideas I had about incremental game progression, trick playing card design, social world design, as well as the excellent 3D models and idea of the expansions of the world from "Poke ALL Toads Roleplay". However, unless you play an early version of the game for 3 minutes while ignoring all the systems in it very disrespectfully, you will discover the game has far deeper ambitions than that.

In a way, I do wonder if it'll be awkward that it's secretly puzzle-like when showing the game to other puzzle fans. Think about it like how you can play an MMO like World of Warcraft in a 'puzzle-like' way, where there are strats to be more effective, speedrun strats, etc. and while the gameplay has a polished, satisfying feel. I want to distill that feeling into this.

Here's everything I'm putting into this project. In short: incremental with strategy in its skilltree, quality pvp mechanics, world exploration, events, metroidvania elements and secrets, or even shorter, a Poke ALL Toads MMO.

World Exploration

Finding exploits and secrets in worlds is fun, but is theoretically even more fun with friends. With metroidvania-like mechanics, I am planning to have tons of teasers for stuff, hard-to-reach stuff that will be incredible for people to potentially get to.

I'll keep this a bit 'secret' for now but I played a 3D platformer, over 10 years ago probably, where all of the ways you can get to new places truly have embedded themselves deep in my mind. I literally imagine real-world places as if they worked like that game sometimes. A new player of that game would probably take a while to find them. Sadly I don't know of a single playthrough in which the player has recorded their progression, from the slow unexpected realization of how unbelievably powerful and in-control they are at the start of the game. I now have the ability to potentially slam this idea into the player's soul even harder.

Exploits in 3D worlds in general are fun, and there was even a shockingly unintuitive 4-step combo in the Poke ALL Toads world this game was based upon, that I unfortunately never got to show off. Because of (roblox + the world) being a disaster, the chat (and now playing this entire game) got disabled unless you want a privacy-violating face-saving-data-storing age verification, and thus I never got to use it during an event.

Incrementals, Paradigm Shifts, and Poker Mechanics

Incrementals, and really all MMO's (MMO's are basically like, incremental games with more fights, we can call it an ice cold take) are all about contrast in dealing small numbers and having 'weak' abilities at the start and then growing to something way cooler and bigger at the end.

With poker already having all these hands, there is already a lot of design space. Balatro showed some of the design space too. (I had an idea for a poker roguelike and created the cards/hand animation before I ever knew of that game it was going to be more magic-trick and deck-mechanic centered though)

There's a mechanic I haven't yet been sure of yet: whether players should have an inventory of cards that could be used to do something ingame or unlock something. Could imagine a 6 of Diamonds does a huge boost jump in the air or something, or you could collect cards on the ground to make certain hands and unlock doors. This could be cool but also feel too unjustified if not done well, so this is a TODO to think about at the moment!

Basically making 'machines' or various builds that involve poker hands as the inputs/midsteps/outputs, different types of poker cards and modifiers, definitely something I love and want to do.

Intentionally losing the active gameplay part of it?

As it is right now, you simply draw 1 card every 10 seconds and the hand scores when you reach 5 cards (or upon a full hand, if you have a higher handsize). This, to me, removes the opportunity cost for thinking about the skilltree, you're not pausing progression just because you're looking at the skilltree menu. There is also the chance to get a 'cursed' card to make it more interesting to look at as well.

Now the problem is that this might be too unstandard and that some people actually love to obsessively press button to make progress, as it would seem from one tester. Maybe earlygame having buttons to draw a card while having quick automation would be needed. I just find that this is an aspect of incrementals I find unhealthy and addictive and detracts from the hangout aspect, because this game takes place in a 3D world and I want people to feel included if they want to just join and explore the world while not interacting with the skilltree aspects too, a similar vibe to playing an MMO just to look at the world.

Friendly Competitions

In the "Poke ALL Toads Roleplay events" (in which um, people didn't really roleplay at all) the host set up minigames in ways that, best-executed, were fun to score well, perform well, and it was fun to exploit as well. MMO events are similar in this feeling of being special and unexpected.

What I'll have to deal with is to make enough events it feels fun/exclusive/handcrafted without a host, of course.

In an old version of Poker ALL Toads, the progression was that you'd get random cards but have to make them on a 2D board while dodging or poking toads. This 2D board would then get larger and you'd have to 'compete' (it was singleplayer at the time) to spot potential hands quickly enough to snatch them up. This might also be fun but would be a side minigame, of which I am potentially hesitant to do if it might make the game seem overly complex instead of new content or testing that the core game is appealing.

Duelling Creeds

My game has duels. Upon poking another player, both players get 15 seconds to pick potential perks in a mini skilltree and then automatically fight using the same mechanics as the base game (but with much faster card draw). This is incentivized by an 8 second Ultracharge if you win, and is also the most 'active' part of the game, with the hope this is way more interesting than obsessively spamclicking buttons like you'd do in a normal incremental.

One feature that's already in it is that the complexity of the perk skilltree in the duel is scaled down to the lowest level player involved in it.

Daily/Weekly Events

This is another thing that could allow for an interesting challenge and make people or friendgroups come back. I haven't implemented it because I cannot keep this promise without an audience or the game being successful enough. I mean, I know other games have generated daily puzzles but I want all my stuff to be higher quality than that

Poke ALL Toads Characterization

Poke ALL Toads itself has a lot of characters with their own 'abilities'. To reimagine them in a 3D environment with 3D abilities would be absolutely sick, and with the toad tongue, character morphing, and FPS game mechanics, there's a lot I could potentially do. So far, I've only implemented left and right hand pokes for the fairies. I guess I saved this very important paragraph for last because absolutely no work has yet been done on it.

Conclusion

It's quite surreal to write this article and be puzzle-focused, considering how much the theming of this game appears to not be puzzle-focused, and this ties back into my theming article from not too long ago, of not calling the game a puzzle game for potentially more appeal.

Finally I'd like to tease a 'series' coming where I argue that actually other genres are 'puzzle adjacent' or also puzzle games. I've written like 3 articles about that so far, can't wait to post them.

I was writing a personal timeline of my game development learning and history, and then got to this part:

### "Start small" but not pointless
Many advice givers tell you to start small instead of instantly trying to make your dream game. The problem is you may find it either meaningless or that you already are starting small. There's also something cursed about how it's more fun to treat the world and games as hugely unique 'megastructures' that can't be cut into their parts because you feel like you're so far from being able to make it yourself. But, you should split up the task into making 'minigames' for your dream game, you can even present it as a standalone product and combine it later.

That's when I felt I really understood what felt wrong with the 'start small' advice to me. It's that it downscales your ambitions for no reason especially for people shooting for a really big game idea. Many big games can be thought of totally separate 'minigames', and you can gain twice by releasing small parts and being able to reuse them later.

Without a combined universe a one-hit dev's audience is attached more to the game than to the author. My personal body of work has this problem where people even play my games without knowing I've made them, and none feel like a series (unless you really play many of them) because my prior work has no thematic relation or shared universe (except, in a way, for my most recent work). And so I'm thinking that if I had just made a combined universe earlier this would improve the sense of a large work, and that I should not have worried so much about a low quality cringe one. (since if you succeed big they will be thought of as small footnotes)

Now, despite this article being something that's supposed to argue for the value of having all your work be part of 'one whole', there is one hole in the thought process: I did not have good theming or confidence in making characters (nor art skill) for a long time, even my 'big' story-based ideas, even if they had powerful moments, had huge holes in more 'filler' worlds with no idea what they could be, and an overwhelming sense of perfection of what they could be thus it was never capable of being finished. So how could I have created something that felt big? I can imagine that many of my 'earliest' pieces of work were mods that wouldn't be easily thematically tied to your newer work, and even being too attached to your favorite media to make something original (like 10 years ago+ I created "VVVVVV in Talos Principle" easter eggs and loved the idea of the mashup but it contained none of 'me' in it).

And also sometimes I think of making short projects that couldn't be 'as easily' ported into my shared universe, which, to somehow have many recent projects with a unique format that would be socially beneficial to tie in, but somehow doesn't artistically feel right, it's actually quite cursed to still think that now.

So here are ways you may be able to get this effect without needing writing skill:

• Hosting everything on the same personal website
• Having a personal 'hub world'
• Think about the effect of Penn & Teller: Fool Us, the show where other magicians come to show tricks, specifically that it's a huge branding win-win but on the Penn & Teller side (and I think the expertise aspect is also more value-adding than like... talk show late night hosts ) - if you think about how you're attaching your name to someone's work, but in a way that draws attention to yourself as well, and in a unique good way it's great.
• Being an 'aggregator' social media site (often people's usernames are sidelined here, so this on the other hand, often does not feel like a great value-add for society)

Other thoughts on combining a game

I used to be a low-decoupler when it came to games and media, and I think everyone is. So such a big work was a highly 'combined' and unique thing that I considered its own Thing and couldn't even conceive of making as a result. So to think about some of those games and how they actually had very different mechanics and constantly changing gameplay, only 'tied together' by story and theming wasn't consciously noticed by me. It seems much more noticeable when watching this video which I recommend, AurumAlex's "Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story Is the Perfect Chimera" video.

▶ Watch: https://www.youtube.com/embed/bE737LPgzrE

How I'm applying this to my recent projects

(note: if this paragraph feels too ungrounded don't worry...)

There is a second sense of "COMBINE EVERYTHING" that I've recently developed. Having so many project ideas overflowing after having played so many games, I wonder if it was strange my past self didn't seem to have as many ideas, and I wish I wrote down more game ideas even if I wasn't able to execute them. What this has resulted in is that I have like 50 ideas and that they should be combined into one. Unfortunately this means this could be quite unrelatable if you're not me, but I hope it makes sense in the future. For example Lingo Multiverse is a game that is inspired by like 6 concepts in one:

• Expansion of Chris Souvey's unfinished "Lingo Multiverse" map
• "Typeryder" (described in a previous article I wrote)
• (a realization from watching 'fake' Minecraft ARG documentary videos)
• (FPS-related concept from 'failed' Unity gamejam project I made 3 years ago)
• The 'Opanker Roguelike' called "Slippery Key"
• A superior realization of "Slippery Key" that could be a great culmination of all Lingo maps to execute

I wonder if the seeming randomness of ideas would be comprehensible to my past self or just feel unrelatable. Or maybe I had lots of good game ideas but never wrote them down because they seemed out of reach to code, and then forgot??? In any case, I find looking at this list quite interesting to think about how it feels like this game almost has too much potential, and "even if one aspect is weak the rest can fill it". Not a feeling I ever had before.

Teasing: "Poker ALL Toads"

I have showed this game to a group of my fans in a multiplayer session for 1 hour, and it's using the game-combination philosophy maximally as well. This time combining an open world model experience with Poker ALL Toads, and trying to execute the design of various autobattlers and incremental games as strongly as possible.

I wanted to make a game that has less of the problems I see with crowding around buttons and negative addiction patterns with constantly pressing incremental-game buttons, something fun to look at while also having active elements of skilltrees, choice, and dueling incentive with other players. This puzzle element of dueling other enemy players could be incredible if executed well. As well as the wish of having a world for people to hang out in of course.

This game takes so much from older projects (including some CSS I wouldn't do nowadays and is still generic but uses too many helper functions and such to change). You may recognize one as the 2D "Poker ALL Toads" here:

▶ Watch: https://www.youtube.com/embed/7CrYFSKIYN0

I was able to port over all the code of the real looking playing cards, which I mostly made 3 years ago and some 1 year ago and I think is really satisfying to look at, oh right I'm too tired today to film a video of the cards animating into play, well please just imagine drawing cards and scoring is satisfying.

Please enjoy and I wonder if I can request someone to make fanart for the J/Q/K of Toads even if it's MS paint art.

I've always been strangely attracted to how rarity is represented in games, but also how games communicate power and progression in general. It's kind of interesting, right? Because those are the visual component that isn't tied to your actual skill level at a game (which can be visual but can also be very subtle).

This system of color coded rarities, which can be attributed to a game called Angband (but more popularized by Diablo and World of Warcraft), really do kind of feel right in a way, which involves the psychological aspect of the nebulous color theory and qualia of how it feels to look at these colors.

To me: Gray is utterly unremarkable, like a disabled or discarded item, so it should be common. Green and Blue are 'easy' colors (having some 'beginner' feel to them, even), Purple is some royal or at least 'special' color, and Legendary orange/red colors are like you are wielding dangerous power as a weapon. When it goes further than that with gradients or animations it begins breaking beyond.

Borderlands 2 was one of the first games I played with a rarity system that went above Legendary. That hasn't seemed to last throughout the games though.

When I was younger I was enraptured by this and I still feel like I am a more-rarities maximalist. I always feel so disappointed when, inevitably, in these games you get a full set of legendary equipment and there's nothing more to get to.

Of course there is a practical cap to this: you run out of colors and some look too similar. Even if you have subtly-changing colors, gradients, and background effects, of course. Terraria has a lot of rarity tiers:

I look at these rarity tables and feel oddly happy about them.

A Different Source of Power (Visual Polish)

Rarity is interesting to me because it is using something so 'simple' like color for a certain vibe, which means many indie games that lack polish in other areas still have this satisfaction.

But it is worth noting that satisfying visuals count for a lot. Thud effects, screenshake, shockwaves, hit delay, for a big creature dealing damage (or arriving on the battlefield) versus a small one. Contrast matters a lot for that too of course.

There are many roguelikes that seem way more popular than they otherwise would be without effortful visual polish, and this article is to make the point that rarity and power actually are, in some ways, in that category of "visual polish" even if it does not appear like it.

Another Different Source of Power (Incremental Games)

There is another source of power that is 'easy' to make even in a game without polish otherwise.

Literally.

Like, as in a power of 10.

Of course, when you got to the last few entries on that list, if you've ever played an incremental game (and think like I do) there is a wave of boredom right there. '5.342e+45' just sucks to look at, and you no longer feel like you're breaking through to new levels, which is the feeling that an incremental game often gives you (where the progression is on a log scale, while you watch number-go-up-fast on a linear scale).

Before then, each quantity really does feel like you're playing with something that feels new and different, even if the gameplay hasn't 'really' changed. I suspect that this comes from the fact that all of the 'lower' numbers are ones that, even if you don't have yourself, you see other people play with them meaningfully (as in, "100k" and "1B" are commonly seen and talked about in regards to money and audience).

It's like 'million' or 'billion' is its own kind of rarity 'tier'.

There is also the awkwardness of abbreviating Quadrillion and Quintillion (in one of my games, it's "Q" vs. "Qn", but of course "S" and "Sp" for sextillion and septillion come up right after...), but I still like that I get up to 10³⁶ before switching to scientific notation.

When it switches to something like '5.342e+5', I've always hated that. That 'e' feels so artificial, the same problem with "letter notation" (aa, ab, ac...). At least with like, 1.984 × 10⁷² you're still playing with 'pure numbers', even if you practically may always look at the number after the '10' when playing. I have lots of rarities and the "1.984 × 10⁷²" style system in one of my games so I have actually put this in practice.

A powerful image

While there are of course other videos in this genre, I find this one "The Insane Scale of Numbers (from 1 to Infinity) 3D Comparison" to be very illustrative in its visualization.

▶ Watch: https://www.youtube.com/embed/LEuOrHmtSFw

It is always breathtaking to look at the sheer vastness and expanse of the world, when you go from a table to a house to a neighborhood to a city to a continent to a globe and to a solar system and beyond. (This is a feeling I plan to use for Disconcordia 3.) However, I find the video a bit special for how it portrays numbers far above the Observable Universe, which is usually when it stops. Usually things of this genre get a lot of mileage from galaxies and nebulas, but after the Observable Universe there's no more.

In the video, many 'dimensional effects' play after that point still, going faster and faster, and it's sort of interesting how it's not really the fact that "the numbers are getting so large that they are no longer 'real'-seeming" that makes you lose the tether to real scale, but just that there still needs to be a sense of progression, even if the methods are sort of not real. The videos are simulating a psychological effect, the way videos trying to make people 'visualize 4D' don't really work, but you still have a faint psychological effect that mimics it.

This also has overlap with videos talking about numbers that get bigger in general, and games playing with infinity are always a great time.

By the way! These two halves of the article are not as separate as they might seem. Some rarities in games are like, "Cosmic" and "Galactic", and the things those words evoke are of course related to outer space.

The "running out of colors" is broader than it appears

Perhaps I can split this off into its own article in the future, but "running out of colors" has an interesting parallel and comparison with the subtle downside of cosmetics. Because 'adding a rarity expends a resource of color uniqueness' is potentially not obvious and isn't true early on.

But in many games I have played, cosmetics, including premium cosmetics, have often actually caused a cost visually that I often find not worth it. Mechanical legibility is a limited resource.

• Any "premium" card graphic could have represented some upgraded or modified version of the card. (In Hearthstone Battlegrounds, the 'golden' cosmetic is used to represent a triple, which I love, but the maingame uses it as a cosmetic...)
• In Chess Arena, a chess battle royale with different classes, players can choose different piece skins which change your piece's entire color scheme. To determine an enemy player's class is looking at an emblem at the bottom of their piece. I am intensely dissatisfied by this and it is an obvious sacrifice, as colors=classes would be way more distinct.
• Similarly in many chess-variants that add more abilities to chess, natural design space like pieces having status effects and location effects do spend this limited resource, which also tends to lead to a cap on maximum effects-on-one-piece or effects-on-one-square.
• Overwatch was criticized for poor contrast and needing to put outlines on enemies.
• There are also shooters like Fortnite and Warzone adding hundreds of skins, diluting the game's artstyle and occasionally even leading to visibility problems and pay-to-win skins. Even Team Fortress 2, a game praised constantly for its strong silhouettes and red/blue team distinction, had issues of other-team appearances after years of community cosmetics and even dyes.

Other random notes I couldn't get in there

• The YouTube video I listed above is 'flawed', or rather 'could be even better' in these ways: more numbers that really represent a real life scale (yes, like nebulas and galaxies) instead of a combinatoric abstract game, and the 'fractals' section at the end of the video, the cubes could have been presented as much more massive.

• I only worked on puzzle design, feedback, and bugfinding for Islands of Insight (a massive open world puzzle game). Caveat in that it is only my personal opinion, but I felt it was lacking in terms of visual distinction between puzzle difficulties and different areas. It still had distinction in vibes from different symbols and puzzle mechanics, but I wished boss puzzles and secret puzzles had some red gradient or different background, I think it would have gone a long way.

• The different feeling of "beginning vs middle vs endgame" in games like Chess also count as a different vibe.
• The way Cookie Clicker fills the screen with milk is also reinforcing polish.

• Hearthstone and Slay the Spire are outright 'missing rarities' from even the 'standard' five-rarity system. There are many practical reasons for this (most obviously those are not games with traditional level-ups as progression), yet perhaps there is some execution of a Slay the Spire endless mode where that would be incredible and enhance the game.

• Minecraft updates have been very disappointing on this front. Only Netherite and Copper added after so many years, and still linear instead of representing choice or difference in how they function. Enchants look cool but I can't believe there's still only one shine style.
• Hearthstone's Shatter mechanic could've shattered the rarity gem into left/right halves.

• I find Yellow to be a 'mediocre' color, and so it being a high tier color in Terraria is a bit weird. Gleam/shining is underrated for rarity but it is kind of interesting how it can be recontextualized so much. Brown can be poop-worse-than-junk, but you then give it gleam and it is bronze now. I remember thinking it was a little silly how camos in Battlefield Hardline had 'bronze', 'silver', and 'gold', but no 'platinum'. Because probably the platinum would look indistinguishable from the silver and not convincingly pass as a higher tier. Similarly, Yellow can easily become recontextualized as Gold.
• It's also interesting the way the colors can 'wrap around' but with some different saturation or brightness value. I once had dreamed of a highly customizable FPS game where white was a color of finality and final achievement.

Now if you'll excuse me I will be admiring my favorite pony.

I have basically failed the Thinky Jam 6, a jam where you're only supposed to spend 48 hours^[1], with DISCONCORDIA0 which is currently a nonexistent project, and am definitely not helping the problem by writing this article instead of writing the game. I haven't really failed game jams or deadlines before so I'd like to contemplate what went wrong.

Did it go wrong?

It gave me huge productivity like every jam. My planetary clock automation game DECA was something I am utterly shocked to have made in 2.5 days (even if I did have a lot of mechanics and themes planned in my head about a potential project). The converse^[2] is that I ended up with a lower amount of intrinsic motivation to expand the project. So it went wrong that it's not finished but it went right in that it made the project exist at all.

To be fair I didn't fail DISCONCORDIA1 either! That one I spent 2 months on and every beat was there in month 1, it just need a lot of extra bonus patches in the next month.

Also there was a game jam with the theme "Reflection" that I came up with a pretty good story/theme/plot for that has some good mechanics/story and also was never complete. Maybe that's why people do this 'collab' thing. Maybe I need to make a game jam for people's incomplete jam games.

Yes the graphics suck I didn't know how to really draw footprints in a good way. It's about making footprints/paths and mirrored reflections in a snowstorm. It probably doesn't look like it.

Stories must be written to fit the whole way through

To be 80-90% done making a story game is pretty much 0% done, because some wrong detail or poorly written line ruins the whole game, even failed player conception ruins it. Single-page mysteries are much easier to work with, and some people with more self-control than me did those for the jam.

I've never designed a game this way but I do wonder what it'd be like if I made a game that was always a 'finished product' at each step. This feels inefficient but you would never end up stuck with an unrelease-able product at any point.

Story suggests scope creep

This doesn't feel true, until you actually write a solid plot yourself, but there is a serious problem with your characters getting away from you and not letting you wrap things up easily, or forcing certain events to happen as a consequence of their traits and behavior. Before you experience it yourself, it feels like 100% fancy roleplay to say that. Now it's like 50%.

The version I 'could have' released would be missing lots of great details and multiple endings I came up with in the week or two afterwards, now I don't know what to do.

What is wrong with me?

My self perception is that I can look at a situation and instantly figure out what's up with it and how to extend and expand it. This has been true every time I finish a game or look at someone else's project. So when you stare at your project for an hour or two without progress it makes it tempting to get distracted doing anything else hoping it gives motivation and inspiration for your project. I guess this is a reminder that you aren't really your thoughts, or something.

This is also likely the reason I have like 20 projects at once, under the 'idea' that you can work faster overall if you're constantly changing your mentality and have more chances to make a breakthrough after shuffling your mind around a lot. This of course means limited focusing time on any one project, and so may not be recommended.

Failing a second challenge

I was planning to even submit this to the Mystery Craft jam (as some others were mentioning it and it's allowed for it) due to that one's theme of 'Death', combining with the 'Locked Room' one. Ironically that one literally tells you to only make a 15 minute game and mine could take way longer to think about. Whoops again.

But not only that, there was a "fake"^[3] "30 Day Empty Room Challenge" jam that I also seemingly failed:

▶ Watch: https://www.youtube.com/embed/sXCDaN38DH8

DISCONCORDIA0 was supposed to be Empty Room + Locked Room + Death. But I had a second plan! Yes a second plan. A genius plan, to make an ambitious project that gets out of control and will likely spend 30 days or more thinking about for your "2 day" weekend project, then make some quick 2-day one for your "30 day" one. Why not increase the irony, if it got shared and popular despite having far less effort and thought put into it than any of my other work.

In fact here it is right now!

Whoops, well obviously I was going to link to a newly created playable game here, but as it turns out I have also failed to write and make this one, with some level of scope creep of wanting to visualize the events onscreen, then coming up with 3 different great potential ideas and not settling on one.
How did that even happen?
Maybe it'll show up someday.
Christopher Sououeyuvey, collaborative Lingo designer, has also failed the 30 Day Empty Room Challenge, being busy with random 4-hour bugfixes that players won't notice in a fork of Unreal. At least milvanis (a different Lingo designer) has made an empty room.

Blurry teaser of what was supposed to be here:

I am in love with Poke ALL Toads and I have made so many videos on it. In fact my playthrough series on it has recently finished.

One time, the developer has posted how the game looked with placeholder graphics.

The insane contrast here made me finally consider something, as someone who is fine playing games with terrible graphics:

The theming of this game plays such a big role in its popularity and quality. Even the title 'Poke ALL Toads' is an instant description of that hook regardless of what the genre was.

You could reskin this game to "Turn on ALL Turrets" with the same mechanics, but lose so much in the process. The characters don't even have a written story, just hints of personalities through excellent art. So much theorizing, characterization, and fanart.

In fact, there has been a developer that made a different game very inspired by Poke ALL Toads but with a more 'abstract' theming and it looks like this.

And a conversation between that developer (yanatus_vincere) and the Poke ALL Toads developer (Matra):

[4:53 PM] yanatus_vincere: oh, I know [Poke ALL Toads] from icely's video! this was a big inspiration for my game

[4:57 PM] Matra: haha Im flattered. Now it makes sense why the mechanics felt so familiar to me

One thing that is really fun to me is that the 3rd and 4th fairies in Poke All Toads are 'less interesting' mechanically, in a way that might even seem meandering and boring in a less-well-themed-game, as the 3rd fairy literally does nothing, and the 4th fairy can only walk and be controlled but also does nothing, is somehow actually charming due to the theme.

It's just so weird, because I remember thinking way less of story before. That is probably because it is very easy to skip lore and walls of text if they seem superfluous, and because for people like me and especially puzzle game players, enjoying abstract game mechanics 'is' the story. It doesn't seem odd because Minecraft and Terraria are not games that seem to be character-centric either.

But clearly story or even the hint of lore can also add unbelievable amounts to the game when done well. Let us think about some other games:

Gentoo Rescue

(New addition to this article) The puzzle game Gentoo Rescue about sliding penguins into portals used to be called "Slicursion", you can see the old trailer here and the new trailer here. I literally did not know about this retheming until after I had posted this article and the developer of Gentoo Rescue saw it. Literally turned generic looking sliding blocks into penguins because of the idea the old theming would not sell copies.

Animation Throwup

I kind of feel like I don't want to mention it by name because it's kind of insulting to all the designers of less P2W CCG's at the time (including, unironically, Old Old Chess Battle Advanced), but there was a Kongregate P2W CCG where you could strictly-upgrade cards, long wait energy systems, infinite campaign, blah blah blah. This game ended up with 3 versions of the same game and mechanics with different reskins, from a war sci-fi game to a fantasy game to a successful collab with a major animation series (wow you can just use screenshots from the show's season episodes as card art) and it got on mobile. I think the other 2 'versions' are taken down now, but wow does it not show you need originality, just reuse your own game and reskin it, wow.

Helltaker

Helltaker, a viral free game with over 50,000 reviews, is of a genre that people find usually does not get viral - puzzle, sokoban (block pushing) with limited movecount, short game with only 10 levels. It does seem likely that the game's theming of a tsundere demon harem is the reason for its popularity.

A Little Perspective

The puzzle game A Little Perspective, did not have a story in its demo. It later got a narrative, somewhat connected to the idea of different perspectives, that expanded the feeling of lore and interest and broadness of what the game was about.

Other Games

• Stray, where you play as a realistic cat in 3D. Games tend not to have realistic cats in 3D.
• Another game with "Poke" in the title, Pokemon, which also has this appeal of cute characters, later a copied aspect by Palworld and Batomon Showdown.
• While somehat overdone now, 'invisible narrator' style games like Portal and The Stanley Parable can turn basic looking rooms into facilities and offices with lore.
• Much of Order of the Sinking Star's budget is a huge graphical upgrade to PuzzleScript games, turning 2D games with 5x5 sprites into 3D layouts with texture and detail and much more animation polish.
• Matthew VanDevander, the inventor of Taiji (a sizable game that is like The Witness but in 2D, and was the first game to do that), said on a stream once, when referring to some other puzzle games that were 3D but could be converted to a 2D interface (like The Talos Principle but not only that), "It's 3D so you buy it". Despite this clearly being just a silly statement in some ways, the aspects in which this is true (which is 3D improving a sense of quality, vastness, etc.) this has rattled in my mind for over 7 years.^[1]

Why does this matter?

I know it doesn't seem very puzzle-related, but this is a genre where people frequently lament a lower audience size, and have come up with thoughts about how to fix that, sometimes "betraying" the cause and not marketing their game as puzzle-centric. Often you could say that a game's mechanical hook wasn't interesting enough or was too abstract and not cool looking enough, which can be true, but I seem to see a lot less people talking about retheming.

Quote from Jonathan Blow about making games more polished and "unplayable by normal people" without it

Context: Order of the Sinking Star is like a $27m budget game to convert puzzlescript 5x5 pixel graphics to high polish art.

IF YOU HAVE A REALLY COOL GAME DESIGN, LIKE, SO IN THIS GAME YOU KNOW WE BASED THE STUFF IN THE BEGINNING OFF OF EXISTING GAMES LIKE HEROES OF SOKOBAN AND ALL THAT RIGHT? THOSE DESIGNS ARE REALLY INTERESTING... BUT THEY'RE ALSO KIND OF UNPLAYABLE BY NORMAL PEOPLE; LIKE, YOU'RE ASKING PEOPLE TO BRIDGE A PRETTY BIG GAP TO GET TO THE PLACE WHERE THEY CAN SEE AND UNDERSTAND WHY YOUR THING IS SO INTERESTING AND COOL, RIGHT? AND GOOD GRAPHICS AND GOOD GAME-FEEL AND BETTER DESIGNED, MORE UNDERSTANDABLE LEVELS AND ALL THESE THINGS ARE WAYS OF GOING TO MEET PEOPLE WHERE THEY ARE, SO THAT YOU'RE NOT ASKING QUITE SO MUCH OF THEM.

I think the reasons you don't see much story or lore in games, is that it would seem to require art that people don't have the skill or budget to make, but also, I remember once being very nervous about my ability to make a good story, or write in character. In hindsight that was obviously:

• Low life experience
• Among other 16-year-old-writers, you can go a long way by copying inspirations (either shallowly copying cause "that's just what the genre does" and still managing to have surreal/otherworldly vibes, or creatively mixing but still copying)
• Overawareness of lack of immersion of your own work as you are writing it (because you are writing it after all, versus experiencing it as a finished product)
• Low confidence in making characters from thin air (this ties in to low life experience to me, but it may not be the case for others - that's because with low life experience your characters are often not going to have 'a point' or be trying to represent something new, you don't fully know how to do that, or even combine a bunch of motivations together to make a coherent whole)
• Perfectionism (wanting every moment to be subversive or new somehow)

Now I am not nervous about saying these things. However, giving advice on this is tough, it would be like giving your entire life experience. So here is a motivator to be better at understanding things:

There are so many mystery novels where there are puzzles from "following the rules of real life" and analyzing events, and trying to predict where the story will go, which is a core life skill as well, if you don't have it you will be easily taken for a ride by manipulators good at spinning lies too. I just kind of never connected the idea, despite playing Ace Attorney and other mystery novels, games tend not to try to be both mechanically interesting gameplay AND storywise in different ways. Likely because story games can afford to have all its gameplay be about the story, but not think about how a gameplay game could be improved in its mystery with a little extra story.

There was a Baba levelpack with a story that, to me, was just a simple execution of "two movies one screen", and one of the reviewers who was judging this pack rated it 10/10 on that basis. That is a concept that I consider too prevalent and divisive in real life to be treating it as a novel concept, especially because it is so much more complex and multifaceted than the levelpack did, but it also made me realize there's a first time for everything and everyone, and not to forget about this when you are thinking about your audience.

I wish I was not so worried about making some embarrassing trash story, it is how you improve, but it's hard to wrestle with the feeling of wanting to make something excellent and then clearly not being cut out for it.

The Lesson

Clearly the maximal application of this philosophy is that your game's title should be an instant hook, 3D, natural-like graphics, great animation and polish, anthropomorphic animals and/or anime waifus, with mysteries and teases of future content all the time.

Is that just Genshin Impact

The open-world word puzzle game Lingo is truly special and has become my favorite word game ever made.

I have a massive playlist of edited videos about it, and have made over a dozen custom maps on it.

I have sort of wondered if there is a specific thing that makes it so special, that other games could take inspiration from. Why are many other word games obviously a lot less inspired in their design space?

After all, Lingo itself has game design inspired by The Witness with nonverbal communication, and usage of 3D space for a game interface that seemingly could only take place in 2D. Much like The Witness, the 3D does actually have an important point - it allows the 3D-involving puzzles to not be obvious that they are using the world, and expands the possibility space even in puzzles that end up not using 3D, but that's not the whole story...

This article obviously will have spoilers, so either play the game or watch the playlist where I cover the early game.

▶ Watch: https://www.youtube.com/embed/lSnrDhJICK0

There is also a great article "Adventures in Word Puzzles", by hatkirby, another early player/tester and modder of Lingo, that has this quote:

Lingo has a lot of tricks that help the player deduce the solution to a puzzle, outside of how the text on the panel is crafted. Many puzzles are hinted by nearby puzzles that share a theme or combine to a greater solution. There's also a set of words that the game is fond of that are repeated across multiple puzzles, which means that you can sometimes figure out a puzzle just because the solution word is salient from having seen it earlier on. This in itself is a form of "second hinting", as I've suddenly chosen to call it, and it's likely that I'll end up using it in some form in my randomizer.

These secretly repeated themes throughout the game are cool, but those still aren't the mechanics that make it special.

Creator quote

The creator of the game, Brenton, has said this about it (when discussing the design of Lingo 1 vs. Lingo 2):

The Lingo 1 mech structure was one of those once in a lifetime, lightning in a bottle, accidentally tripped over this thing idea. I can't do that again. I'm always trying to think up things that haven't been done before and I hope whatever Game 3 is, it has a similar kernel to it.

It is also interesting because, well, Lingo 2 has not quite had the same level of sheer innovation in modded content as Lingo 1. 'symbols' map to 'colors' and many ideas for mechanics have already been done in Lingo 1

Are the base rules extremely simple?

As you may be aware, your mentality of a game is way different before you play it, when you're just learning it, and when you finish it. In fiction 'characters' start as strangers, then you subconsciously buy-in to them, and they become familiar faces, could be said for all of life but also applies to mechanics.

There is something incredibly pure about using colors as a representation for mechanics, so it is very easy to get attached to.

Plus, thematic and literal repetition is also more visceral when descriptions for the mechanics become fundamental instead of arbitrary, especially as puzzles start to involve more elements.

A literal description in a sentence of a more complicated Lingo puzzle would often be way way more complex to describe than the player who is ingame conceives the puzzle to be. Here is what it would be (spoilers!):

"Synonym of ATTACK, conceptual addition of TOOTH, letter-removal of ATTACK - the answer to two of those three puzzles put together make the answer to the third word. Some meta aspect of THAT (pointing to the 'TOOTH' block), (add letters to BOTH + some meta aspect to BOTH (pointing to the 'TOOTH' block) that share the same answer), some meta aspect of THAT (pointing to the 'TOOTH' block) - the answer to two of those three puzzles put together make the answer to the third word."

Does it create a system that fits many wordplay mechanics into a broader theme, which also expands your mind by extension?

Before I ever played Lingo, I was of course familiar with obvious wordplay-related concepts like 'anagram' and 'palindrome'. What was amazing and cohesive was managing to put all of these into a system that did not even require those terminologies to exist to make sense of, and that also deeply sparks the imagination due to having unused aspects that custom creators can build upon.

For example in this video I go over mechanics that seriously bring 'meta' and combination aspects that could fit in the maingame and feel like such natural extensions of the game's mechanics.

▶ Watch: https://www.youtube.com/embed/ffQpM8Mgl8s

In a display of how 'complexity' is actually subjective and concerns audience expectations, Baba Is You also hugely leverages an English-speaking audience. Spelling 'a sentence' and having an effect is natural. Using text to refer to objects, then literally having the word TEXT appear is an incredibly meta thing. The well-known fan mod of Metatext can be recursive! The base game left so much untapped potential with words and what could target what (I have played years of new Baba mechanics and it still hasn't run out).

It's kind of odd to think that in both examples I make the point that the games leverage something fundamental about 'the real world', even though the English language is not actually fundamental, but might as well be. Mystery games like Ace Attorney and cross-examination/contradiction logic finding are broadly using the rules of real life so their design space is also infinite, and you could fit any story in an Ace Attorney-like format.

Maybe what's also special is that in both Baba and Lingo, the game mechanics allow you to draw some surprising connection between things that should be very far apart. In Baba "EMPTY", "MIMIC", and "MORE" are very mechanically distinct, yet just by being pushable text they fit in the same game. The wordplay in my Move Counter game is also something that is similar in the way of connecting faraway concepts. It could be a game jam style challenge to connect two seemingly utterly unrelated things like 'stairs' and 'curtains' and 'constellations' and you may get something interesting if you followed a chain between them.

Lingo 2 in some ways could have had a moment where symbols were revealed to be extensible and expandable like a conlang.

There have been some thoughts I've had for a long time, about making a language learning game, or math/periodic table memorization game, that's actually good. The problem is so many people have also tried to make language learning games, often with the problem of getting tacky educational vibes, or that the topic is actually just way too big to be useful to people who seriously want to learn it.

If you try to make a realistic periodic table learning game you suddenly have to try to make covalent bonds a game mechanic. Lingo: "Level Apple" involves learning Japanese through Lingo, but that doesn't scale you to 2000 kanji and everything. And also you likely wouldn't make that for $0, or $10, probably instead $10 a lesson or $10 a month for all the effort it'd require.

I hold hope one day that these games can exist though!

Recursive art is basically always very visually instantly appealing and distinctive. It captures feelings like infinite detail, infinite depth, surreal bending of space, unanalyzability to some extent. This is something I've been enchanted by, but that's by no means limited to me.

I was inspired to make this article due to a chain of things. A recent 3Blue1Brown video, "How to take the logarithm of an image", shows a piece by M.C. Escher, and how it's actually made is with a 'normal' (unwarped) piece of recursive art that can be mathematically described using a logarithm that warps the image:

▶ Watch: https://www.youtube.com/embed/ldxFjLJ3rVY

Interactive recursive worlds

Inspired by that video, Print Gallery of an Artist was made - by Daniel Linssen, the creator of excellent puzzle games like Leap Year and HopSlide that I have covered on my channel.

This hit the itch front page, and gave a whole new group of people the experience of how it feels to be in a recursive universe. But of course, it's not my first time.

In Patrick's Parabox, a box-pushing game where boxes can contain levels in themselves, you can push boxes into other boxes, and even a level can be inside itself. This is an amazing hook, for me I immediately wanted to know:

How does it feel to play recursive puzzle games? Surreal?

I would say:

• It connects parts of physical space that are seemingly unintuitive to connect.
• The adjacent squares of the recursive boxes matter a lot, and less experienced players are not as easily able to see connections and paths made by that.
• The levels where the key moves involve important bits that are 'offscreen' or small in some way, are hardest to notice.

There is also a special one of 'getting your bearings' which is so interesting, and you definitely feel it more in Print Gallery of an Artist than in Parabox. See, there is one particular level in the 'Reference' section that constantly zooms out:

In Print Gallery of an Artist, it can often look like there are multiple copies of an enemy, or a collectible, even if you 'know' there's only one. Especially in the fractal geometry it's hard to tell, but also a very strange feel of the fractal geometry is that sometimes the character you're looking at becomes too small or (less interestingly) goes offscreen, and you have to switch what character you're focusing on, as if you should have an eye tracker when broadcasting this game to people.

It sort of messes with the default impulse to be managing multiple characters in a platformer! If there's only one player and you're dodging fireballs, you're safe for 'all' the players on screen.

While you don't quite have the curved fractals and action gameplay in Patrick's Parabox, there is still a part of the same feeling in Parabox where you need to switch what character you are looking at in the two Reference levels with the constant zooming in. A part of me wishes it was more frequent in the game, but that level has apparently caused motion sickness in some.

While writing this, I thought about what other tricks you could do with the camera, and thought you could tie in camera zoomins and zoomouts to entry and exit, even negatively valued ones (where you zoom out at a time you'd normally 'zoom in' for a huge disorientation).

There is also this special moment:

Some of the playful bonus levels in each world are "ASCII" levels, which present levels in a totally different layout where you see all boxes at once. This also cuts out the recursion visuals, and this feels different in an interesting way. Adjacencies and chains of adjacencies are somewhat less obvious, but some 'misleading' aspects are removed - it makes it clear there aren't multiple players, multiple infinite boxes, etc.

It's just so odd, because there are worlds like "Swap" all about basically turning the recursion stack inside-out, and the surreal visuals make this seem like a very distinct operation (and, it is) but those visuals just don't apply in the ASCII version.

And obviously there is no sense of dizziness, in fact you can press a button to turn off the visual effect in Reference by just pressing the '7' key, though I find it a cognitohazard to tell players this too early or to use it on every level.

That makes me wonder:

Is this sense of dizziness anywhere else?

Anything that involves self-reference seems to dodge attempts to understand it in a simple way. Things like "This sentence is false." seem to annoyingly cleave at your distinctions of truth and lies despite being so simple. But specifically in the attempts to 'think about' a statement like that, to give it a truth value only for it to logically flip to the other one. Some paradoxes even target and defy fuzzy logic, third categories, etc.

But I think the common ground is paradoxes that send you 'in a loop' somehow, like the expected value of the 2 envelopes paradox of switching the same two envelopes nonstop.

The problems can feel like they have a life of their own getting ahead of you.

Learning about recursion for the first time, with things like the recursive definition for Fibonacci numbers (fib(n) = fib(n-1) + fib(n-2)), or even solving equations defined as functions like f(x) = f(x + 1) - 1, requires a certain kind of thinking to get used to, to be fine with a function not having answers unless it calculates a large amount of times before 'bubbling up' to the final answer.

I also feel like trying to think about mathematical induction is recursive-like, where you prove a statement is true for n=1 (or some other base case), then assume n = k is true, then prove for n = k+1. Recursive functions also often have a 'base case' - the Fibonacci numbers do too - and the way that you often morph an assumption to prove the next one, while also assuming the truth value of n = k, it's both unintuitive and recursive-feeling.

Other infinite media

There are games a bit like Patrick's Parabox but are 2D with a continuous grid instead of a rigid one.

In these, the player does not 'scale up and down' to perfectly be a 1x1 block, meaning that changing your scale by going through different recursion levels is a mechanic. Jack Lance's INF is also quite similar.

The scaling reminds me of the 3D recursion in Maquette. When small, it takes FOREVER to traverse a big world, and the game ultimately needed to be rigidly locked down in terms of design to not get out of hand. It has mixed reviews for having 3D as a visual setpiece and walking simulator instead of puzzles.

Things that don't feel like recursion despite being recursion, and vice versa

The game "Recursed" has chests that teleport you to other chests. But because it doesn't really have visuals to show what chest leads where, there is no cool visual quality to this recursion. I think the game really could have used that feature as well as a minimap.

In addition, just looping does not fully feel like recursion. Programming-wise, many functions implemented with recursion could also be implemented with a loop (which is called iteration). It's kind of cursed that often in recursion examples, the normal looping function is faster and more obvious what's happening.

Visually speaking, looping can give vast and huge feelings too, such as in Manifold Garden, a game with infinite looping worlds:

I do think Manifold Garden had a feeling of lost potential, despite how visually stunning it is, and I couldn't put my finger on it for a while. It was not quite that the puzzles seemed maybe a bit small-scale and enclosed. I think it is that the dream for these types of games is imagining the vastness, looking at how far away you can go and see and still not reach the end. This implies potential secrets and aberrations within the infinite, and I wonder if there could be more of that. (The secrets in that game kind of go there, I suppose, but not the maingame.)

It is also hard to call a real-life phenomenon 'recursion', but a hall of mirrors, or pointing two mirrors at each other, also has this sense:

Overall, I think what's awesome is to capture the 'big' in some way, whether it's an unbelievably large amount of 'small' beneath you, or just taking a small glance at the 'big' above you. Both in 2D and 3D.

Small setpieces and other miscellaneous stuff

I consider "exploring the world while small", or "exploring the world on a different gravity" and such things, incredibly high potential for the feeling of a world being of infinite depth.

The Stanley Parable also uses recursion on its title screen for a neat effect:

• A video, "Universe in a Box" by Buttered Side Down, with a literal "PARABOX" is a short film based on 3D recursion. Playing Parabox you notice some small inconsistencies as to how this would really work, lol
• Superliminal's finale involves a classic recursive moment of undefined behavior that's given a dramatic ending.
• In Patrick's Parabox, there is a level near the end of the game where the camera focuses on a place that isn't the player, which is also a bit disorienting.
• Patrick has released a game called Bubble Sort which is a different take on rooms-in-rooms.
• Baba's Bababox implements Parabox mechanics in Baba Is You.
• The custom Lingo map Luodongo has a moment where there are 3 layered castles and you get to experience recursion in it. This is honestly shocking it was made in this engine.
• The custom Escape Simulator map The Devilish Diorama and The Devilish Diorama 2 are incredibly awesome experiences with recursion. I have a video scheduled on it, stay tuned!
• I'm Too Big for the Target is a much smaller puzzlescript game where the recursion is 'obvious' after a minute, and very well made.
• One of the images in this article is from I Made a Game About Recursion (Game Inside a Game Inside a Game Inside a Game).
• Check my Empty Escape Room video for some 'video' recursion.
• How much more is there to explore in this genre still? We have had 2D, 3D, warped curved 2D space, I guess we need warped curved 3D space, does Hyperbolica count cause that's just a 'sphere'...
• Time loop games don't really count unless you can 'travel to a time' and get something back out, probably
• Fractals probably don't count enough, is there a game where you explore a fractal
• Can there be recursion in Baba rules? The game in fact has infinite loops, but not recursion...

For even more on this topic, I wrote this as well.

(I suspect there are even more examples of recursion, this site very much needs a comments section, or at least an indicator of community. Thanks PlushLoler for pointing out some issues with this article!)

For those who don't know who I am, check my main page for all my projects. Over the years, I've created lots of games, hundreds of videos for semi-daily video content, and lots of puzzles.

However I'm starting a new thing today. Because, TIME IS PASSING BY SO FAST!!! Sort of inspired by Inkhaven (a daily writing challenge for a month with on-site mentors, which is coincidentally happening this month too, and my previous Thirty Time Signatures project where I made 30 pieces of music in a month last year), I always wanted to write about a lot of interesting stuff and share it with people. Although because of unhappy events, and even though this is very insane to say, I feel like I'm primarily writing this more for a certain entity.

They can be any length, about any topics, but probably primarily about game mechanics, puzzle game releases, etc.

Also I intentionally don't have the style of journalist's purple prose game-review-sites. To me the unbelievable overuse of filler, fancy fluff metaphors with fake and needless specificity is grating (also unfortunately that is basically the default LLM writing style... and some people love it, even people who dislike LLM's if not told very existentially frustrating). I care about compact and relevant information.

Enjoy these articles while they last, I don't know how long they will.

Some preview teasers of topics I have in mind:

• Recursion in games like Patrick's Parabox
• Sense of scale in games
• Puzzle-adjacent genres like detective games and even strategy games
• Specifics on theming and marketing
• Past projects
• Interactibles, spoilery topics on surprises in certain puzzle games

I have an RSS here.

also remember to poke all toads. This beautiful toad will change every day.

▶ Watch: https://icely-puz.github.io/random.html

Coronation - a Lingo 2 fan map by Morphious86 that is Lingo 2 recreated in Unity and playable in browser - was so cool to me, amazingly faithful to Lingo's design.

If you haven't played it, click here or watch my video!

The creator expressed wanting to recreate this project in Godot for a Lingo maingame DLC - but the browser aspect is so novel that I wish it was referenced ingame. I wondered briefly if the Godot version having differences and surprises compared to the browser version so people would go between versions to compare aspects (almost like mint in level 2) would be interesting as well.

However I've also had some other Lingo-related ideas for a while, predictions of things and moments that Lingo 2 could do that never quite happened. With the github source code release of Coronation (ty for providing it <3 ) I was interested in making it somewhat... but I never used Unity successfully before and just spaghetti messed up the code.

Because of this, it feels like these ideas might kinda languish in my mind, so I feel like I should release them to see if others are inspired by it.

Typeryder

Yes this image is real. (ok the keyboard is edited in a way but yes a unity-dropped city is actually in lingo )

Basically, I will turn Lingo 2 into a puzzle platformer :walc

But also it'd be an insanely cursed contrast to have a surprise experience where suddenly you are in Unity-Asset-Store experiences, highly detailed realistic environments but with the Lingo UI on top.

And with Coronation being in Unity it's not as far as it seems from being possible!

But then again I tried and I couldn't even get a tree to not display with a bright magenta error texture

Anyway here are some more:

• Seeing letters and words physically in the environment with the right perspective
• Having a "meta keyboard" that controls your ability to use actual keys, which includes WASD.
• The additional keys can have some standard stuff like R = Restart and C = Crouch, but also high speed, high jumping, flight, etc.
• Having different key pickup colors was so cool in Lingo 2, so:

• White Pickup Keys allow you to access a new meta key ability, so yeah you would pick up R to restart (there would be puzzles about checkpoint tricks too). Ideally it would be fun if every letter corresponded to the first letter of the ability name in a way, like "W = Walk Forward", "S = Step Back".
• Gray Pickup Keys are the equivalent of the "one-use" (purple) pickups. This is kind of funny with WASD because what 'one use' means is one continuous hold of a WASD key, but you lose it if you let go (but you regain your gray keys usages when you [R]espawn), and you could make a puzzle that requires one-copy of WASD, and 4 panels each blocking a door to force you to un-hold WASD and 'consume' the key.
• Black Pickup Keys make you lose a meta key.

• The opening scene could be getting hit by a car into some sewers and rolling down slowly until you hit a white "W" or something. Though this messes with potential gray key progression (in that it's strange to get a white W then replace it with a gray W), maybe instead you hit a white "R", respawn somewhere and fall on a gray W.
• Of course, regular panels still exist, and I did wonder if, when in a panel it should freeze your keyboard so you're not using meta keys anymore, or it could do troll things where you type R in a panel and whooops you just reset your position. That's probably a bit too troll though?

The vision is that it would be so cool to have meta-keys that had stuff where you flied around and collected chains of letters and did midair fly dashing stuff in L2. You could even imagine a L2 panel with multiple solutions allowed, and the word you type BECOMES YOUR META-KEY keyboard layout to solve a platformer puzzle.

Other ideas:

• Gold Keys that reveal that letter in the answer.
• Take away your Escape key, YOU CAN NEVER ESCAPE etc

Anyway I'd also be interested in level design for this project but yeah it'll be hard to make with the lack of code existing and all lmao. Chiristpohpeoriovey Souvey even troll-commented in my face by saying that the white/black key system was probably simple enough to implement in one day or something, but only after I implement it, and with my lack of programming skill that's not happening .

This is such a longshot but it would be so cool if this was like the basis an ultimate lingo 2 customs collab, that's my dream anyway, even though Gen Alpha people have already memed l2 customs :walcomebuck:

ok the last 2 images arent actually-in-unity ok

after a small convo with the legend the coronation creator i thought of these additional points:

• even if it's a maximally gimmicky experience and each ability is very shallow there's still so much novelty in the experience that even if there's only like 1-2 minutes of content for the 22 gray letters + 22 white letters it's still like a 44 minute+ experience!
• M = minimap and could reveal stuff from the sky's pov maybe (although it might conflict - as in it prevents you from just looking at it from a bird's eye view naturally instead of just pressing M - with the idea of "seeing letters only visible from different perspectives" that i really wanted with lingo 2 lol)
• collecting one-use letters from the sky to use them like air-dashing
• one of them definitely a 'dash' or speed boost ([Q]uickness maybe?)
• one of them definitely some sort of super jump (J?)
• F to fly for some very short amount of time?
• more "hub like" metroidvania structure where climbing on buildings or other high stuff are there to be ascended to (in partial contrast to puzzle rooms which would be more enclosed I suppose)
• there is a twister-like meme quality to the idea of needing to use many keys that are far apart, but unfortunately we can't expect everyone to have n-key rollover keyboards to make that meme really happen lol