What have I been doing? making? reading? thinking? planning? in 2023?

I last wrote in April, six months ago! It seems longer. Life has asserted itself in my life, for the past year at least. I’m surprised I got any letters in earlier in the year! I have felt so distracted from thinking deeply about games. But I have been doing stuff.

PuzzleTree

After starting on ComboJumper late last year, and then porting it to Godot, I’ve been building out a toolkit for myself to make 2d grid-based games. And then, after talking a bit about it with puzzle folks and getting some excitement, I decided to clean it up and make it public so others could use it too. I named it PuzzleTree. It has a github: https://github.com/jackkutilek/puzzletree. It has been helpful to design it as a separate thing from my game scripts, and to think through it in enough detail that I can explain how it works to others.

I made a few example projects in it, and some other incomplete sketches too. I even tried making a different version of lizard game in it one day. It worked great, I got the idea up and running very quickly! but I decided that the design was lacking, the idea needed to be rethought. It was a nice daylong experiment though. I also spent some time re-implementing parts of my sokoban client in it, which also went well. I’ve always wanted to expand the client to work with other sokoban-likes, such as Splitting Headache or Safe Robber, and I was able to basically get Safe Robber working in PuzzleTree with the agent-less control scheme pretty quickly! I can see PuzzleTree being a better foundation for the next iteration of that project.

Or for most projects I am interested in, actually. The more I’ve considered it, the more I like the dynamics of discrete state changes as a game space to explore and learn. And grids provide a nice spatial place for discrete changes; I have deep affinity for geometric and spatial relations. So I’m all in on it. For ComboJumper. For block-pushing puzzle games. And for haiku games, like my variation on lizard game, or whatever else I’m going to make. Tiles in grids, changed by an ordered series of scripts. Quick to display, and simple ™ logic to reason about. And all of Godot there too if I want to make some fancier visuals on top of it.

I am excited about PuzzleTree. For as long as I’ve been programming, I’ve imagined one day having made my own tools to make with, bits of code I can re-use, and etc. And naturally some ideas that I wanted to express and explore… but I could never find a way from dream to reality. I was caught in a cycle of making a house of cards and then burning out. I only recently found the wherewithal to achieve some success with it, the product of a long change in attitude towards what I expected from my making process. Progress feels slow in the moment, but looking back I always see that a surprising amount of progress has been accumulated. Most importantly, I allow myself the time to slow down, and maintain my tools, and myself, and make sure they won’t buckle under the weight of my ambition. It feels good.

ComboJumper

It has been nice to be able to bounce between work on ComboJumper and other projects. Guided by curiosity rather than any strict deadlines or expectations. ComboJumper has continued to stay fresh that way, and I am as excited about it as ever. Ideas don’t always pan out, but letting them drop when they stop working has kept what’s there good and exciting. Progress can be slow, but there is always eventually some progress.

I can see a nice through-line from many of my earlier puzzle games through ComboJumper – a focus on movement mechanics in a grid, and a reverence for mechanical interplay in that space. It’s encouraging to see evidence of that kind of journey.

While I still enjoy playing them, I’ve recently noticed a distaste I have for certain aspects of puzzle games. There is a kind of ‘paint-by-numbers’ feel that they have, which I actually really, really like and find endlessly fascinating, but also I am wary of it. This promise of a solution, of a right way to do things – it enabled me to continue ignoring my fears of … my own agency, my own sense of self, in a way. You don’t have to pick anything for yourself, you don’t have to be anybody. You don’t decide to climb the mountain because you want to, you don’t have to believe in its possibility, that it will be a fun thing to do. You don’t have to believe in anything. The puzzle promises ahead of time. You can just go through the motions, and it is exciting, it is fun. You ARE thinking for yourself while you play, but it is like bowling with bumper rails. And I think I grew to resent this, that it helped me to wallow in my fears.

Even as puzzles gave me a sense of place, a community to be a part of, a craft to challenge myself with – and all of that did actually help me out of my well – I never took the blinders off, and puzzles never really asked me to. And I wish they had, I wasn’t going to do it myself. But of course that’s the thing, you have to do it yourself. It’s not actually any fault of puzzles.

It all came to a head in [Recognizing Play], and after some time to process it all better, now I think ComboJumper is helping me to stay close to what I have always liked about puzzle games, the bouncing between the guard rails, without the negative associations. It is a vehicle for me to develop a new, healthier relationship with this kind of play.

Haiku Games

Of course all this toolkit, framework, systems, puzzle-y state-space skating work is far from my other dream of connecting with ‘the world’ – Haiku Games! Haiku Games were born out of that same trapped feeling, I think. And though I’ve come to accept that systems and form are part of the ‘real world’, and connecting with those abstract things is connecting with ‘the world’, I still yearn for a better connection to poetics, in games.

But in all the project bouncing I did recently, I only rarely bounced into haiku games. I think there is still something about them that scares me, ha. Making the poetic leap. And when I tried to make more haiku games in the past, I frequently got bogged down with technical details trying to make them work how I imagined. I just need more practice with games, a more complete fluency with tools, to be able to realize a game quickly and experiment at that poetic level. Again, I am excited to use PuzzleTree for it. But really I could be doing it already, and I just haven’t… except for the lizard experiment. But I want to experiment with new ideas. I want to make my idea about basking in the sun, shaking off the cold, then cooling down again, then back into the sun, and etc. My partner wants to collaborate on a game, I need to make that happen. We will make a haiku game.

Reading

Reading also slowed down the past year. I think I needed a break. After Grasshopper and Well-Played Game, I didn’t read much on games for a while. Or on other things either. (I did read Pure Colour, though, after it was gifted to me. It has some very nice parts in it. 🍃)

But as life was starting to settle into a new rhythm, the changes slowing down and pressures easing up, I stumbled on Finite and Infinite Games in a used bookstore. And then I was reading again. It’s such a curious book. It’s not really about games, but also it is, in the sense that it is about life, and games are a big part of our lives. It uses the language of games to talk about all sorts of topics. Finite games are games with strict rules and a winner. Finite games lead to the ‘theater’ of power and authority. Infinite games are games with changing rules and no winner. Infinite games can contain instances of finite games. Infinite games last a lifetime. Infinite games are games where we seek to play well with each other – that is winning. It is reminiscent of zen and Taoism, about focusing on the present moment, the infinite moment. (A friend was recently recounting a conversation he had: ‘wait are we just talking about ‘present moment’ again?)

And then it was my birthday, and my family was asking about gift ideas. It was time for The Nature of Order. I’m a few chapters in now. It is nice to be reading Christopher Alexander again, I really like the way to expounds on ideas. I last read the theory of centers, and the blank sheet of paper example. Inspiring, though I don’t have any notable thoughts on the book yet. Just a story: my cousin just finished architecture school, and was talking about how he kind of hates architecture now. And then I coincidentally started TNOO, which laments the field in its opening pages so eloquently. I shared the excerpt with my cousin, and he couldn’t believe how well it described his feelings. It was a nice, serendipitous introduction to Christopher Alexander.

Socializing & ECS

Most of my gamedev community experience has been online-only. My anxiety made it hard to seek out in-person connections (or even talking about my online connections). But things are changing now. I recently started attending events at Glitch City. It has been nice to meet people with similar interests, to have another venue to talk about games things with, and share my progress on my projects. In-person interaction is so different from online.

Anyway, through glitch I got re-introduced to the ECS pattern, and in a way that it finally clicked for me, in a way that really I thought it already had (but it hadn’t). It probably helped that I had been approaching similar ideas while developing PuzzleTree… but it’s given me some big, new ideas to make it better. I had been struggling with where to store data that each system uses, and even considered storing it in the grid instead of globally – but now it is clear. The data should be in the grid, on entities or something like them, with a way to filter grid cells by the data they have, more than just which tiles exist in which layer. I am currently working to develop a robust UI system for PuzzleTree, but that is going well, and I feel that once ComboJumper reaches it’s next milestone, it will be time to start experimenting with some of these ideas in PuzzleTree’s design.

Exciting, but a ways out still. Must be patient 🙂