Jerk
ivanish.ca
ivanish.ca
> I haven’t seen anyone do a shrinking game.
While I'm also not aware of a shrinking game, there are more than a few[1] growing games. Some aspects of the mechanic are the same - "what was dangerous before is not a problem now and vice versa"; it's just the plot that changes.
So: in a shrinking game a small enemy will become a large threat and a narrow passage will become a large escape route - and in a growing game a large enemy will turn into a small threat and a previously large passage will become inaccessible.
A cool thing about the game is that time also scales with size. So the challenge provided by moving objects also scales with the character's size (sometimes beneficially, sometimes not).
(Ostensibly, in a growing game you get bigger as the game progresses and vice versa for a shrinking game; this lets one play with perspective to make things bigger or smaller as needed.)
It also touches on the real thorny issues of metabolism, heat transfer, and density, aside from the obvious geometry and ergonomic concerns.
IIRC the idea is that it would still be a game with progressive exploration (if not necessarily Metroidvania-style exploration), as terrain-navigation-gated area design would be combined with more-mainstream keys-and-locks area design — so while you're losing your abilities that allow you to "sneak in through the back door" of areas, you're gaining key items/flipping switches/making friends that enable you to "come in through the front door" instead.
Also, as with a "shrinking game", you'd see things you're currently "too powerful" to enter and need to come back when you're "weaker." In this case, because some abilities you start with would be too powerful — trading that power off for having too little precision/finesse — and so would be preventing you from entering some areas because every time you try to do so, the ability kicks in and pushes you past the gap you were trying to fit into (or whatever.) It's only once you lose the ability that you gain the precision required to aim for the gap.
This is brilliant. It solves the inherent tension of metroidvanias wanting both ever-increasing power and ever-increasing challenge. Rather than unlocking new areas, each time you lose abilities, it changes your relationship to existing areas. But the knowledge you gain — room layouts, enemy placement, hazards, short cuts, etc — becomes way more helpful when you can't just fly (perhaps literally) across the map.
The tech that is useful, like dashes and double jumps, is really nice to have but not especially interesting to lose imo. If you "need" the dash then it's just a key. If you don't need the dash then losing it is just less satisfying movement.
It's fun because it makes you realize that you already had the power for a more a different solution, but didn't notice.
Although, I'm already imagining a sequence where you trade away your last movement ability and walk down some long-ish path to a place where you get all or most of them back (or different ones!). That could be fun and rewarding but it would definitely have to be done right.
(Not trying to advertise for sales as the company went under years ago)
[1]https://store.steampowered.com/app/754850/The_Spy_Who_Shrunk...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerk_%28physics%29
But that is not what this article is about. It's about (spoiler alert) quitting your job to write games.
I'm curious to learn how you define clickbait. Did I get baited?
By the way, physics/everything in games works in discrete steps of time. Accordingly, acceleration is constant[0] and so it follows that in game(dev), infinite[1] jerk is a constant[2].
[0] acceleration is unchanging during each physics step
[1] changes in constant acceleration occur instantaneously, "between" steps so we're dividing by zero (seconds) and I get to make the rules
[2] unavoidable; as in "the bickering was a constant"
Pretty much like this:
> I clicked because I wanted to know what ... they were talking about.
That depends on your interests. If you care about the finer points of sound editing embedded in a rather extensive personal narrative then yeah, it's good. Otherwise not so much.
If anyone was intrigued by the idea of a game about shrinking, I wanted to recommend this tiny indie game about using laboratory equipment as your body gets smaller and smaller:
[1]: https://www.dmitrivolkov.com/misc/risset-polyrhythm/ [2]: https://soundcloud.com/danieleghisi/black-rain
Cliff would like a word with you, sir.
Yes that's the point. Tried it on a lark, and it created weird feelings so I leaned into it. This is my personal website, and I've been trying to make it more deeply personal lately.
Talked about it a bit in this thread: https://mastodon.social/@spiralganglion/112747815905067127
One of my eyes sees things kind of slanted when I'm not wearing my glasses - I felt like I was seeing that when I was on the mastodon thread and trying to observe the change the server admin suggested...
Sometimes helpful, often a curse.