game dev log

motivations

while i was recovering from surgery in bed for a month i played a lot of minecraft. i've been a fan since the game was in alpha, and i don't think i've played any game more often. i also realized that upon recovering from surgery, i would have no job or degree and that i would be losing my health insurance. so i'd need some sort of marketable skill to get paid for, and i figured 'why don't i make a game.' the next question i asked myself, then, was 'what sort of game would i make?' and then 'what do i even find fun about games to begin with?' minecraft has lots of different aspects that appeal to people of course, but i figured i would start by narrowing down what i enjoy about it. notably, when i start a new game in survival mode, after making a bare necessity house, i don't bother upgrading it right away. instead i start to save up resources based on an idea for a finished house. a few of my friends played on a server with me, and they both had large but unfinished wood houses, whereas i went out of my way to manufacture and collect stuff that would let me build something appealing of a specific size out of say, white terracotta and deepslate bricks. so i think for myself, the aspect of adventuring out into the world and collecting resources, and then the aspect of planning out builds, i find very appealing. i've always been a fan of games with 'level editors': minecraft, little big planet, tony hawk's american wasteland, halo 3's forge mode. so i think the ability to remake the environment is a must-have for my game to be enjoyable to myself.

in addition to playing minecraft for a month straight, i did a lot of idle thinking about other topics. i read about quantum circuits and the challenges posed by limited qubits, and thought about how minecraft players are incentivised towards making their redstone circuits efficient due to the high cost of mining resources. i read about genetic programming, strange loops, tamagotchi, new advances in ai algorithms, esolangs, albert camus, retro handheld consoles, death and grief, ancient wayfinding tools, busy beavers. i tried to connect it all in my mind to make something cohesive but i haven't succeeded quite yet.

i thought it might be fun to have a game sort of like the 1983 game Worms?, but where the creatures you command are basically 'made of code', little runes you can inspect, and these runes govern their appearance as well as their behaviour. you can't edit them directly, but when the creatures breed the new babies are a result of their parents. like if you were to anthropomorphize genetic programming as a concept. i thought maybe in this way a player could idly experiment with hard-to-grasp concepts like quantum cirtuits or ai agents, but the feedback is presented in the abstract form of 'creatures with blue horns are better at finding things' or 'creatures with red tails can jump 2 blocks instead of 1 if there's a purple-back creature nearby.' i'd want the game to have the atmosphere of watching a fish tank or an ant farm, you set up an environment for the creatures and watch them explore it and how their behavior emerges. there's no real win condition or even explicit goal, it's a sandbox. but you might name the creatures and keep around ones you're fond of. i read this good article about what makes games 'cozy', and i felt like the coziness of minecraft (in the late game) is what drew me to it when i was in pain from surgery and couldn't leave the rental house.

this of course leaves aside all the details of technical implementation...