Noctis, the 'No Man's Sky' Forerunner Whose Creator Retreated from the World
timeextension.com
timeextension.com
Its nice that there was a community around the game and that Alessandro felt part of it. But I'm sad that he felt pressure to finish the next version and that that might have weighed on him. Because its very easy for fans to ask for something, but actually very hard to be the person that has to do all the work to meet their expectations. The fans are free to drift off and find something else to enjoy, but the feeling of unfinished projects and broken promises can stay with the creator for a long time.
In short: As a creator its easy to get wrapped up in fans demands but in reality you need to have boundaries. Perhaps you dont want to spent the next four years making something for them. Perhaps you've got other things you want to do with your life.
Source: steam says i have 2k hr into X4 foundations
What goals do you pursue? What drives you to keep going back?
More often now I'm hacking mods as much as playing the game; working out a "perfect game" system of going from a (customized) start to a billionaire empire and no remaining Xen (or anyone else you care to take offense at) in say, 24hr or less.
I don't play the way anyone else does, apparently. I never do "missions" and on my todo list is a mod to hack out the one they've apparently added recently that appears to happen regardless of player input. In that respect, the creators notion of the game gets in my way; I'm cheerfully distorting the universe here, got no time for the individuals in it.
1: https://80.style/#/hsp/noctis_widgets_and_accessories/noctis...
Wouldn't that just be done by a text editor?
Eg in emacs C-u 70 M-x fill-region. (There's probably a better way)
at the end of the
line. Every thing
lines up exactly.
There's no spaces
at the end of the
line. Every thing
lines up exactly.In part, it's because it's a proof-of-work - there's no way to automatically do it. I've been musing about using word embeddings + dynamic programming to do just that, however: you take a list of all possible synonyms with their embeddings, and calculate every rewrite that results in lining up exactly, and then choose the ones with the minimum cumulative embedding distance between the original words & their replacement.
It's so cool :)
I didn't know about his depression, but I could sort of feel it through his game world. He mentioned, a long time ago, that the game was partially a product of a painful breakup. The game, especially the backstory, reflected that loss.
He had a advanced CMS website and Noctis had an "Inbox" of worlds that people had discovered and I think named that you could download.
But it’s way lower level ?
It sounds bad but indeed, early NMS did feel kind of meaningless, which as you said had a certain poetic quality.
Melancholic curiosity, or loneley exploration, are two things I am trying to capture in games I make. There is a game called Infra that I highly recommend if you enjoy that mood, and city infrastructure.
To me it wasn't really a precursor to NMS, but more to Minecraft. The "infinite" terrain on worlds is what kept me interested.
It was a really magical game from the pre-iPhone era of the web, so experimental it barely made sense. It's sad to hear of the creator's struggles, I hope he focuses on himself instead of worrying about letting anyone down.
We have outsider art in software too, like Noctis. Not just games: TempleOS is a well known example. I'd call Dwarf Fortress outsider art too, an unusually successful example that has had a lot of influence on mainstream games.