In somewhat higher spirits after a much-needed break. Last week was also the monthly housing inspection, which is always a nerve-wracking experience. That on top of the yearly recertification and all the stuff I had to do during the week made me look forward to a weekend of rest.
My spouse and I briefly considered early voting and going to a local Halloween event on Saturday, but between her illness and my exhaustion, we stayed indoors all weekend. I managed to make about 15 levels for Slime & Goo 2, which is a pretty good clip. I won't finish by Halloween, though. I had thought about making it vaguely halloween-themed, since it's about collecting mushrooms in a spooky forest at night, but there's no way I'll be done in time for an Oct. 31 release. If only I had thought about it sooner. Ah well.
I have, however, come up with some interesting new mechanics and written a couple paragraphs of story and dialogue, which is more than any of my other published games. I hesitant to mix my interests too much, because it's easy to overdo text in a game. I don't want to fall into the trap that a lot of independent games do where large amounts of text are used in lieu of interesting interactions or dynamic storytelling. I think I'm striking the right balance so far, and I have more ideas for levels that feature interesting mechanical storytelling even in puzzlescript's very limited toolset.
One positive limitation of the platform is that you can only fit a couple hundred characters on screen per message. It's helpful in preventing me from overdoing it. I've decided 3 of those messages in a row is the maximum I'm willing to accept per story moment before it gets back to puzzle-solving. If I keep it to one of those sequences every few levels, hopefully that'll be a satisfying pace.
Game Badges
I haven't been nearly as active on RetroAchievments.org lately, other than continuing to plug away at Mario's Picross on my phone. I had a brief intense phase of 100%ing games, but I think I'm running out of games where I care to do that. It comes from having a different philosophy than most of the people designing achievements: I think 100%ing a game should involve doing everything in the game. For some games, that means there aren't going to be a lot of achievements, and that should be fine. Coming up with a bunch of arbitrary achievements just to pad out the number is counter to the spirit of the game.
For an example everyone can understand, take Super Mario Brothers. It's a pretty linear game, but there are things the designers included to add some spice and mystery. Here's my idea of a perfect achievement set for SMB:
- Finish the game
- Find a warp zone
- Finish the game without warping
- Find a pipe to a secret coin room
- Find a secret 1-up in an invisible block
- Get 6 fireworks at the end of a level
- Get 5000 points from a goal pole
- Defeat King Koopa with fireballs
- Defeat King Koopa by getting the axe
- Finish the second quest
That's pretty much everything the designers put in the game. Sure, there are multiple secret pipes and hidden 1-ups, but there's no way the designers expected the players to find all of them. You'd have to finish the game at least twice to 100% this set, and it's not an easy game! It's only 10 achievements, but this would be a fun, challenging, complete experience.
The rA set had more than 10 achievements, though. It has 77. It includes tasks like this:
- Finish the game without losing a life
- Complete world X without harming enemies or being fire Mario (x8)
- Using shells, defeat every kind of enemy that can be hurt by a shell
- Hit a buzzy beetle from below while it's in the air (???)
It's just a bunch of nonsense. There's also achievements for defeating every King Koopa with fireballs, for finding all the coins on every level without dying, shit nobody actually finds fun. It's the quintessential retro video game, it has nearly 50,000 players on rA, and less than 2% of them have 100%ed it. That's a bad achievement set.
What's more, if you want a gold badge, you have to get every achievement without using save states, so there are several achievements where if you fuck up once, you have to restart the entire game.
The save state thing is turning into a big problem, because the rules don't differentiate between saving your state to cheese difficult segments, and saving your state to come back to the game later. So in games without battery backup, which is most of them, I have to leave the emulator running all the time to keep my progress, which is preventing me from playing other games. Also, I'm finding myself only playing games on my PC or (God help me) my phone. I have a hacked 3DS and I'm not using it, because I can't get retro achievements on it. I feel like I may be missing the forest for the trees.
I recently stumbled on gamedad.club, a charming little shrine to the device the author has neologized as the Game Dad: cheap generic emulation handhelds. From Game Dad as Time Condenser:
The Game Dad creates Game Time.
It takes the games that you used to have to commit an hour to, and it overlays them with instant save states, meaning at any time you can pull a console out of your pocket, play for a minute or two or three, then instantly save and put it right back in the pocket again.
The Game Dad collects the wispy mists of useless time that would have otherwise been lost to doomscrolling, and it condenses them into Game Time. It gives you time to play the games that you meant to play twenty years ago but didn't have the time for. This time is chewy and satisfying. It scratches your restless brain and fills up your empty stimulation tank.
When the tank's full, when you've had enough Game Time, you turn the Game Dad off and your hands are still, your mind is quiet, and you don't feel the tug of your anxiety rectangle. The time that comes after Game Time is quiet time. You don't want to switch to a different app, your device is back in your pocket. Instead, you might chat with someone else whose car is also up on the lift at the mechanic, or just watch the clouds and have an idea.
I thought this is a lovely sentiment, I agree 100% and I realized how silly it is that I've been emulating games on my phone, when I've got a device with a perfectly good D-pad. Well, the new 3DSXL¹ actually has a slightly-too-small D-pad and it hurts my thumb if I play intense action games for too long, but whatever, it's still leaps and bounds above playing anything on my fucking phone.
Anyway, I started thinking about what I like about retro achievements, and how I can incorporate them into my life in a healthier way. I realized there are two main draws:
I like seeing a neat grid of gold badges
I like when a set is thoughtfully designed, and makes me appreciate the game more.
That second bullet point is far and away the exception rather than the rule, but for example, Super Mario Bros. 3 is my favorite game, and the achievement set actually made me appreciate it more. On first glance, a lot of the achievements appear daunting, along the same lines as SMB1; however, it all clicked for me when I remembered that after finishing the game, you can start over with an inventory full of P-wings.
I never played the game like this as a kid, because it takes long enough to finish, the game doesn't have saves or passwords, and I was never allowed to leave the NES on for that long. Also, I never had a reason to play the game a second time after finishing it. Being able to fly through most of the game was novel, but it wasn't really that interesting.
Except the achievements give you plenty of reasons to go back through the game with P-wings. It turns it into a proper second quest. 100%ing Mario 3 was the most fun I've had with retro achievements, my other experiences on the site have been trying to chase that feeling, but very few of the sets are that thoughtfully designed.
Well, I don't actually need an emulator to programmatically prove that I did all the things. I can just do it on my own, for fun. And I can ignore the not-fun parts.
What about the satisfying grid of gold badges? Heck, I can do that myself. And so I created: Game Badges.
It's very much just in the prototype phase, and it doesn't have a mobile-friendly layout yet, but this is what I want to start doing instead of retro achievements. Every badge will be a link to a page with information about the game, what self-imposed challenges I've completed, a link to a video of me playing the game (if one exists) and maybe a mini-review. There will also be a section for non-gold badges, for games I haven't yet completed to my own satisfaction. So it'll kind of serve as my personal backloggery, too.
This will be a slow long-term project, but it'll open me up to playing more games in more situations than I was allowing myself. My 3DS is in my backpack and it's loaded up with all the games I've been playing recently.
Uh, but I can't really play anything at work. I can get away with using my phone, but sitting at my desk with a Game Dad will definitely draw unwelcome attention. But that's okay. I can use this time for reading and writing.
1. The 3DS isn't definitionally a Game Dad, but a hacked one can serve the same function. Maybe it's a Game Uncle?
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