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A little belated an announcement, but check this out - we drew a set of toki pona hieroglyphs!
( rambling about the process )Tags:
( rambling about the process )"Non-Player Character" is a portal fantasy about an anxious neurodivergent person who is cajoled into joining their MMO friend's tabletop roleplaying group, and we kind of really love it? It is, like a lot of portal fantasies and adventure stories in general, very much about someone being pulled out of their familiar world, forced to deal with a new and terrifying situation, and discovering and developing new strengths in the course of rising to that challenge...
...and in this case, that actually starts before anyone is sucked into another dimension? Tar joining the Kin game is such a brave moment for them, and that ends up being enormously positive in their life before they and their group are handed a whole lot of magic and another entire world to try to navigate. It's a story about making friends, supporting each other, and saving people along the way.
It's also about disability and neurodivergence. It's about people having struggles because their brains and bodies can't do what needs doing on their own, and it's about people having friends who help them get through anyway. It's about having internalized negative stereotypes and being told how amazing they actually are. It's about finding ways to manage, no matter how weird.
It's about a group of marginalized queer people surviving and thriving. It's a kind of story we personally haven't read enough. We're glad we had a chance to read this one.
(p.s. In the course of writing "Non-Player Character", Corva accidentally wrote a sourcebook for Kin, the tabletop roleplaying game from the book, which we haven't yet played but could imagine ourselves running a game of. The flavor is very good, and we like how effectively it simplifies its mechanics by reusing systems.)
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(crossposting this from itch.io, with minor edits.)
(also: this didn't make it into that review, but content warning for description of workplace sexual harassment in Chapter 2 of the game.)
I think we came into Silicon Zeroes with the wrong expectations, and as a result came away from it deeply frustrated.
In an old Game Maker's Toolkit video, Mark Brown suggests a distinction in videogames between puzzle solving and problem solving - to roughly summarize: players find the solution to puzzles, but invent solutions to problems - and from my experience with other programming games, I assumed this would be a problem-solving game. The general framing of the plot reinforced this to us - the player is working for a company designing computers, and after the first few introductory steps, each level represents a new task that needs to be completed.
It's not a problem-solving game, though. It's a puzzle game. There is a solution, there is a specific solution, and the game already knows what it is and wants you to find it. And new mechanics are being introduced not to give the player a broader toolset with which to approach problems, but to give the developer more options with which to invent puzzles. And because of that, those mechanics will absolutely be taken away from you if that serves the developer's goals with the current level's puzzle.
Silicon Zeroes has a lot going for it as a programming game - frankly, this is the first programming game where we actually used the "save an old design for the future" feature - but I'd rather people know what they're in for before they sink too much time into it.
I think part of how we Packbats will approach the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality (which is running for another two days and change from the time of this post) will be inspired by Errant Signal's "Talkin' 'Bout tiny Games". Specifically, the idea that small games do not need critics - those who can disassemble their themes and techniques, evaluate their successes and failures - so much as they need champions - those who can make public that which might otherwise be overlooked.
There are 1,659 items in the bundle. That's a lot to be overlooked.
We'll probably try to occasionally talk about what we've encountered and been delighted by in the bundle here. (For example, i'm sorry did you say street magic.) But we don't need to talk about what didn't click for us. That's not necessary.
We just played through "Escort Yourself Out", an autobiographical game about dealing with triggers that was part of the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality on itch.io.
The way itch.io is structured assumes that what you do when you play a game is that you rate the experience afterwards.
...ratings on a scale from one to five stars feels like the wrong framing for conversation about this game. It was worthwhile to us to play and stars are not how we'd talk about that.