nothing’s quite clicked but having fun fucking around in rpgmaker again, I have a lot of ideas but as always who knows what’ll actually come out. making some awful bricklined dungeon that mixes Hasbro’s The Game of Life + Wizardry IV, the characters level is replaced with “Age” as in Hoshi Wo Miru Hito. As you age your character develops according to Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, I think the idea of experiencing an entire lifetime as a series of annoying random encounters and textboxes feels fitting for the form.
The first challenge is getting out of the menu. There’s dozens of nested menus, that open up and change as your character ages and develops. When you die there is a bardo-esque gauntlet of encounters that determines rebirth. I haven’t finished it yet but if you successfully get through it I want to make a nice afterlife you can hang out in until you get bored. I posted screenshots of this area like a year ago but I think it might make a nice location for it.
I’ve felt incredibly burnt out by making games to the point it’s made me just break down in tears the last few months when I’ve tried, but I am determined to make at least one cryptic dungeon crawler before I totally give up. I haven’t bought a game in almost a decade and am totally out of the loop but in 2022 I managed to get on a kick playing random gamejolt/itch hobbyist RPGs and their 40-year old home computer equivalents. One of the few things that still draws me towards games is the disconnect between the fantasy its supposed to embody and the reality of its constraints. Something like Hydlide II is supposed to be this passionate living breathing fantasy world, adding towns, people with dialogue, a morality system, on top of the first games colorful diorama world- but in the end they’re all still constrained to the template of the first game, the morality is a stat, there is a “talk” mode along “attack” and “defend” but the citizens are still just interacted with by bumping- I always kill the farmer guys for the first few levels because they’re harmless, but then the shopkeeps won’t talk to you, so I kill zombies for 20 minutes and everything’s good. The strange effect this has I still find hilariously compelling.
I feel like the stuff I want out of games feels really contrary to where they’re actually at, but I do still really love the weirdness of this aspect, a bunch of value systems moving up and down with whatever materials from life pinned on top of them, repetitively working itself out via some dinky ruleset- I don’t know if I’ll ever actually finish this game but I guess the fantasy of it is one of the last things that makes me actually want to try and “make a game”. we’ll see!!
