⌗ game design (5)

runbacks, level design, and boss fights

(yeah this is about hollow knight: silksong but it’s bigger than that.)

we cannot escape the firehose of discourse around silksong’s challenging nature. i’m not here to talk about difficulty really, but to touch on one of the topics that people feel strongly about: runbacks.

blasted steps in hollow knight: silksong. iykyk.

runbacks refer to the traversal between the last checkpoint and the boss fight you keep dying on. sometimes the checkpoint is near the boss encounter, making for a quick return after death, and sometimes you spend longer getting back to the fight than you do actually in the fight before dying again. if you listened to reddit, every boss encounter should have a checkpoint three feet away from it, but i’m here to make a case for the runback:

the runback to the boss fight is also the boss fight.

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no solo minifesto

i don’t want to be a solo dev.

i don’t want to be a Solo Dev (with 20 contractors in the credits).

i’ve had multiple folks tell me “you should work on your own thing!” with various tutorials and tricks for doing art while i’m not an artist. i’d love to learn how to draw, how to paint, how to texture, how to model, etc, because those seem like interesting avenues for expression that are different to what i know and do. but i don’t want to learn them just to do it myself in addition to design and coding.

i don’t want to remove other humans from the equation.

i am here to make games with people because i believe the shared experience is greater than the sum of its parts.

i want to make as many games as i possibly can with as many different people as i possibly can.

making games is a fundamentally social experience for me.

i want to make games with people as equals.

✌

finished playing: pillars of eternity 2 deadfire (2018)

i started this up a month ago with the naive hope of blazing through it to be ready for avowed but i pretty quickly realized this wasn’t something i wanted to speed through. i told myself avowed will be there for me when i’m ready to play it, so i savored pillars of eternity 2 deadfire and goddamn dude. god damn dude. some good fucking food!!

i loved the first one so i had no doubt i’d be into the sequel, but i just didn’t expect it to hit so much harder for me. it’s so narratively dense and rich without feeling impenetrable. the variety on display in character depth is masterful, i truly felt bad swapping some of my favorites out for certain quests because i would MISS them. and the game’s overarching philosophical and religious themes around mortal self-determination and agency, the gods’ duty to mortals, and what faith means in the light of this all is just brilliant.

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finished playing: minishoot' adventures (2024)

i think i first heard about minishoot’ adventures from nic mcconnell, your favorite retro game instruction manual reading twitch streamer, on bluesky a few months back. hadn’t seen it at all before but nic’s praise was effusive and the trailer looked slick, so i threw it on my wishlist and eventually grabbed it over black friday.

hot damn.

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finished playing: hero core (2010)

a discord pal mentioned a short freeware game called hero core during a bigger conversation the server was having around combat design and i thought, what the hell, why not, it’s saturday, let’s download this bad boy and give it a go.

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