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[rj]

i guess i'm starting. ok so we're trying to figure out what this is. your turn


(to be edited later) (?)

[droqen]

i planned to immediately start prototyping your letterboxing fps idea, probably have it done within a couple hours if i don't go to bed first

give me your media recs, rj

[rj]

so i actually imagined it as a 2D thing, with 2D art moving thru a hand drawn bg.

like this

but an fps...would be incredibly cool...and probably easier to scope down? yes. yes. i'm digging this.

media recs: definitely kaiba. kaiba is the best anime ever made imho. has an amazing sense of place and i want to make it into a game world forever

i finally watched jordan peele's Us and that's on the list

spider-man: into the spider verse (obviously)

the good place v much

crazy ex-girlfriend (if you haven't...it's much better than you'd think from the title. i almost feel like i say this every time i bring it up to someone who hasn't watched it)

outer wilds outer wilds outer wilds

for this windowbox thing hellblade senua's sacrifice probably since that has one of the best approaches to audio in a horror context i've seen

RUSSIAN DOLL

god russian doll is so good

EDIT: hold on i actually wrote a list beforehand to another friend and i'm copying and pasting that here now:

MOVIES


MAGNOLIA: “the most ambitious artistically  complete movie ever made” is probably the best bit of praise i can give. this is AMAZING. this film manages to thread plot and character beat and meaning and feeling so deftly it makes me angry, and ON TOP OF THIS it has the audacity to be almost 3 hours long AND be basically flawless on a technical precision level? watch this first if you haven’t seen it

FANTASTIC MR. FOX: my favorite film? has the best dialogue in any movie. i can quote every line from memory because every line is good.

SPEED RACER: it’s fucking speed racer. it manages to turn a 60s anime into a hundred million dollar art film takedown of capitalism (?) that celebrates sincerity and is flooded with weird transitions and leads to a pure euphoria finish

ANNIHILATION: a film that utilizes metaphor as text so effectively you’ll barely notice it’s doing it.

NIGHTCRAWLER: a dark hole of a movie to crawl inside and feel nothing. evil incarnate. practically flawless. mandatory viewing.

MINDGAME: if you can pause this movie at the ten minute mark and without looking it up tell me what happens at the forty minute mark i will give you every dollar i have

southland tales: there is no movie like this. i can’t fucking parse this film. what the fuck is this movie? what am i looking at here? dwayne the rock johnson says “i’m a pimp, and pimps don’t cry” in this movie. justin timberlake performs a 1940s war tribute set to a sam’s town era killers song while bleeding out through his shirt. buffy the vampire slayer is a porn star??? snl actors are everywhere? a truck FUCKS A CAR. ALL OF THIS STUFF IS IN THIS MOVIE. IM NOT MAKING ANYTHING HERE UP.

[droqen]

man i need to play outer wilds but can't (i should probably get a refund too while that's still a thing)

HAVE NOT WATCHED RUSSIAN DOLL. can rectify.

i like the good place. what would a 'the good place' game look like. wow.

desperately want to make a dungeon meshi game (or 'delicious in dungeon'), love the detail

played EYE OF THE BEHOLDER recently. i don't like solving puzzles but i really liked it for like 1-2 hours? never got into dungeon crawlers much (except etrian odyssey i guess.) stupid old game recs.

ROOT (board game, maybe look up it being played or something?)

add'l manga: dead dead demons dededede destruction, saturn apartments, girls last tour

jessica jones (season 1 only) is dope a f, i wouldn't have thought about it in context of media recs for game, but it is a strong media rec from me in general. wonder if there's anything for us steal from there

i'm happy my 2d/3d confusion lead to good stuff
here are somegifs of the primarily 2d prototypes i've been haphazardly working on, these are like basic things that i already have a functional codebase for. ofc going to 3d throws these completely out of the window, but just in case any of these trigger something cool we can go with them

CLICK FOR MORE

ARRIVAL

THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE OF EBBING, MISSOURI

NOISEMAN SOUND INSECT (15 minutes)




oh yeah and NEVER FORGET KYLE REIMERGARTIN'S FJORDS

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i can say i HAVE WATCHED NIGHTCRAWLER, and agree with your assessment.

[droqen]

too laggy at any reasonable resolution to make a game out of right now but letterboxing fps prototype in action using an uboa i found on the internet:

[rj]

it's him

things to steal from for games that nobody's stolen from for games for some reason (?) the way that outer wilds is the video game version of the movie source code

also, watch source code

primer's time machine in a time machine bullshit

baby driver's cut-everything-to-the-music-including-gunshots evokes rhythm games but i think you could do something more interesting with that

slumdog millionaire's kind of a whatever movie (fun though) but its structure would lend itself super well to a mystery/detective game that pulled you into a game show thing and back and forth like that

inception has been done before but always as a joke or a psychonauts, and never to the degree inception takes it where gravity shifts shift downward and everything in one layer becomes echoes upon echoes of itself in layers down

concert film movie




all of these are maybe bad ideas nvm let's just make sonic the hedgehog

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something about raps, involving raps, rap-heavy soundtrack...hmm

[droqen]

i already played a 10-minute text adventure / twine whose name i cannot remember which came out before source code and was literally the entire plot of the movie but without the bad parts and only the cool parts, so by the time i watched source code i was like "i've played this before, and it was better"

primer's good

baby driver's good, what great energy

been too long since slumdog

so you're saying re: inception: fractals? i made a messy prototype this one time of rooms you could push around on one layer and then you could go down a layer to go inside the rooms, i generally am super interested in layers that echo downwards


i'm down for something that has a musical kinda focus that games don't normally have. what about something like hitman/harvest moon/skyrim where the world has a 'schedule' (or a better example, since it runs through once: majora's mask or, obviously, outer wilds) that's timed to the music, and you can rewind (like braid), and it makes the music and also the world go backwards. something you'd want to explore a few ways -- like majora's mask/outerwilds. i do really like this actually. with a rap, maybe there's a central character who is doing the rap? the vocals could get louder/quieter
oh man, what if there were like 2-3 rappers and the vocals cross-faded out depending on who you're closer to, or who's dead or something

[Superb Joe]

baby driver's cut-everything-to-the-music-including-gunshots evokes rhythm games but i think you could do something more interesting with that

i always wished somebody did a space invaders extreme version of berzerk. i feel like the issue of poor music integration can be solved with hitscan weapons

[rj]

that would rule. hitscan in general would feel great cut to a beat. crypt of the necrodancer style more than rez;

haven’t played space invaders extreme (always heard good things) but i have played the music focused space invaders infinity gene, which

if you haven’t played that

either do so or look up the first minute or so on youtube because it is wild

i’m EXTREMELY into doing a game timed to an album, like a literalized version of sword and sworcery ep. outer wilds had that thought in my head a bit as it does a thing with music timed to how much time is left in the loop, with an “end of album” kind of track marking sixty seconds before the supernova hits.

i’d be extremely into either that or a crossfaded version of that, but the two would be very different. if you did a crossfade thing, the play session could be like 3 to 5 minutes at most with the entire soundtrack being beatmatched and maybe even in the same key;  depending on where you were in the world a different song would be playing, with the whole thing synced.

you could go really far with it and make the world a city shaped like a vinyl, with a fountain at the center and the streets representing the grooves of different tracks

i guess you could do that even if it wasnt beatmatched

[rj]

holy shit that drawing looks awful

doing this with fractals could be nuts. the music fractures the further in you get. mutated. gets less human and more unhinged

[droqen]

is the vinyl-city constantly rotating?? trying to think about how that would make something cool to play with
outer reaches are rotating faster than inner parts
full rotation = some kinda time reset? maybe there's a barrier that resets things as they pass through it, so if you're in the middle you can fully heal yourself by running through the barrier anytime, while at the outer reaches you have much less control over how often you get reset personally

tried making a little first person thing. you gotta get the balls to unlock the door i guess, but the big needle is resetting everything it touches. might be cooler if there was like a rotating skybox that made it seem like you were spinning around, rathr than it looking like the needle just goes around on its own

[rj]

yeah vinyl city should constantly rotate so this rules hard. maybe you could stay ahead of it by moving fast? the bg music would then be tracking your relative speed, where standing still would be normal play (as you’d move at pace with the vinyl)

 having things gates off and then having to reset each time...i feel like the thing to do here would basically be to thread it as one giant inscrutable thing you slowly figure out. so you wouldn’t be told in words a tutorialized “i have x many balls remaining” but there’d be a visual nonverbal counter of it.

it would be great if something impeded your progress besides the reset, and by actually leaning into that and letting it hit negative numbers, the door would open to somewhere else than doing the challenge the “right” way. so you’d have the +10 and -10 exits as possible endpoints, each ending up in a different spot with its own hurdles but still on the same timer

[droqen]

btw i totally watched a half hour gameplay video of space invaders extreme and then watched some more shit about berzerk. berzerk seems cool, similar to this other shooty enemy game with robots where you mind control other robots whose name i can't remember
it seems like it could be a neat core here, to have a bit of a twitchy loop where you need to deal with dangerous enemies by shooting them (something something synced to the beat)? i love the idea of hitscan stuff that's audio-bound.

i'm thinking that most of the obstacles would be pretty basic stuff like, set yourself to a certain state to bypass an obstacle, maybe one or two obstacles (or, say, mega-obstacles: combinations of obstacles: whatever) in the whole game require you to do any kinda weird time travel bullshit where you're outrunning the record player. for the most part i'd like to play the 'reset' straight and use it just to tableaux out the world musically and bind the player to an understanding that the world is constantly cycling.
ooh fuck before i forget, another media rec along these lines

[rj]

this video is fucking amazing thank you, ive never seen this

similar/related music videos to pull for this that are both mandatory (also michel gondry. dude has a thing for this)





i have no fucking idea how the above is even remotely creatable. it’s a pure filmic magic trick.





architecture...should match the tunes exactly like this

i guess the ideal end result here is a game that you almost learn like a performance piece; first it’s vaguely similar to the beginning part of a witness puzzle, where you don’t even have the information to begin, and by the end you’re performing complex maneuvers you taught yourself

[Superb Joe]

that would rule. hitscan in general would feel great cut to a beat. crypt of the necrodancer style more than rez;

haven’t played space invaders extreme (always heard good things) but i have played the music focused space invaders infinity gene, which

if you haven’t played that

either do so or look up the first minute or so on youtube because it is wild

i've never played infinity gene but i have had an obsession with it ever since i saw the first trailer on gametrailers for japanese phones with the darwin quote and the insane music. i used to watch it every few years for the music. it was similar to this but cut differently





despite that i have never played it, if its on the upcoming collection i'll buy it

[droqen]

watched RUSSIAN DOLL. what a mess! i liked it, fun characters and interactions, but the 4D stuff felt a little out of left field? i didn't end up understanding how things worked or even really what the loopy-mechanic meant to the characters..

i've been working on some platformer stuff that's like a clone of past stuff and now there's another game i really want to make based on save states??? maybe it's the same game, i dunno, it's a whole idea all glommed together though (you know how it is, i think)

 

these feel like core stuff to go after based on everything we've been talking about::
- looping (outer wilds, source code, majora's mask)!
- events sychronized to music (star guitar video, new age of space invaders games)! very into this, though i'm not 100% sure how to do it in a real-time game where player has agency.

i like a good mastery-performative aspect

oh you should check out this game, i don't know how to distribute it but you can watch it being played here? SPOOLSIDE, a game i worked on that ended up having weird time travel bullshit going on





i liked writing characters stuck in time loops that you could visit in the future and the past and the future again, it was fun getting to play with causality (i don't know if anything i wrote actually is in the game though?)

(the game had problems, also idk how good that playthru is, i haven't watched it)

(edit: part 2 is better, but the videos are pretty decent)

[suttebun]

keep going, it’s fun to watch this

[droqen]

Oh fuck have you played 140? extremely tight well done audio sync feel gameplay imo

Inspirational for some of the stuff I can think of along the lines of 'what if star guitar but a game'...

Can watch gameplay here:

but it's a really good experience to play yourself, nice short game

[droqen]

when i have a good long free day i'm going to dig into outer wilds. i temporarily have a powerful windows machine.

i expect to come out of it with new ideas, but we'll see.

[suttebun]

come on guys, keep it up