@nprofile1q... Dragonruby toolkit does this style as well! And yes, it is very fun to have access to the direct sprite blitting! In dragonruby you make hashes and drop them into the dragonruby engine hash to send them to the screen. The engine does what it should, making that look consistent, without getting in the way of opinionated sprite collisions, etc. I love both dr and pico8 because of how pure data to screen can be without a "game object"

@nprofile1q... Oops, IGN levels of water. 😹

@nprofile1q... Yes.

See also, Dungeon Encounters. No plot really happens, interactivity/strategy is almost empty, but uncovering every space and fighting each encouter is totally addicting anyway.

If you make a world that rewards exploring, everyone playing will try to find all the things to do. It's really easy for us developers to get stuck in the "playable content" headspace. But if the game is fun to explore/play, the player can be trusted to be motivated themselves!

@nprofile1q... I feel ya here! I have been playing my backlog of older stuff (like ps2/3 era old) and wow, the amount of filler hallways or dumb minigames/fetch things is a lot in this era. I get the system couldn't handle much but there are so many empty hallways or like...walking. And of course most plots boil down to "go visit the 5 villages to pick up the things and maybe we made them interesting along the way?" Really neat to see how far we came in using this medium to make story!

@nprofile1q... Oh yes, for sure! This is no reason to make the middle, or even the end, bad!

I was mainly thinking of how expensive some of these endings are to pull off. And how a lot of games with plot/lore almost forget the middle entirely. (Most good ones do, of course. But as I play through my backlog of games this is happening a lot, lol.)

I think a lot of the answer lies with the speedrun communities, or the endless hunting of more information in puzzle games like blue prince. I'm not sure what the best answer is. I do think it depends on what the game is.

But I see a lot of games where the lore just stops once the player takes control, and starts again when they finish the game. And those ones leave me as a player feeling the most empty when they end, despite how big production the ending cutscene is.

It feels a bit like a no win situation. That 5% is very small, but they are also the most didicated to your world, or at least most interested in whatever mechanics/gameplay you made. Enough to trade going somewhere else for it.

Do you leave them a final big surprise? Do you require getting there?

Or do you and them both know you have gone too deep, handshake on it. Maybe sell them a hat and thanks for memories tshirt?

The old skool game design was to lock all that behind 💯 completion. But if only 5% get there, is your plot and world design even going to feel like a thing?

Just sharing some open Saturday afternoon thoughts.

@nprofile1q... I do kinda get what they are trying to emulate, having seen and used some hardware mixers IRL. A lot of feel to using that stuff. But yeah, this seems really silly...

@nprofile1q... This does make me wonder... This is presumably audio processing/mixing software, right? How much of the gigs of memory is used by doing this?

How much faster/lighter would the software be if these were video gamey dynamic knobs/dials? Or even 3d knobs rendered using the same graphics space for textured 3d uv maps instead?

It's certainly a special way to do the interface, I suppose. I guess being "exactly the same" was really important for the software users.

@nprofile1q... When you leave the artist in charge of implementing dial rotation, lol. 😹

I am unsure if this is lazy or an incredible effort. They appear to be photographs of a real knob? Oh dear...