Things Happen in a Place

This is a place where we ask the big, difficult, fraught questions. Like, will our characters have pupils in their eyes? Wildermyth does not use pupils, and I think this was absolutely the right choice. The problem with pupils is that they need to point somewhere, and if they're pointing in the wrong place, it's distracting, confusing, etc. The chance of having a pupil pointing in the right place even most of the time in procedurally-generated interactions between procedurally-generated characters--which are theoretically going to be deep and emotional--is basically zilch, assuming I draw them in manually for each eye/expression. You could go as neutral as possible with pupil placement. Not quite "thousand yard stare," but just always assume somebody's focusing a few feet in front of them, except for certain expressions like "guilt" or "dismissive" where they might be looking another direction. But would that like, debuff the expressiveness tha...

I'm reading The Aesthetic of Play by Brian Upton, which so far is pretty interesting, and one thing that jumped out to me was a description of sensory pleasures as being distinct from the game (rules), but adding a lot to it. This connected with some stuff in that Cozy Games paper, and it made me think about smell, particularly, but also touch and temperature. Games are pretty good with visuals and audio, but evoking the other senses is often just... not done. Books on the other hand can do it really well. So the whole ideas is... what if we just tried? Little popups could show up near your character when they entered an area / encountered a change in their sensory environment They would just pop up and go away on their own, no need to interact or click through, and give you a little sensory prompting. I've been playing Subnautica, and I notice they do this with the fish you can cook. Each fish type has a little description about what it's like to eat it. Very brief but gi...

  Don't have NPCs in your game who could easily solve all your problems, but don't, and yet still act friendly. Hey it's the Zombie Apocalypse and I have this ultra secure outpost, and you're wearing grass for a shirt. What? No, you can't stay here at night when the zombies are active, don't be silly. Make your own house somehow, with your stone axe. Oh and can you run a fetch quest for me? I have lots of cool merch for sale! If you have money, that is. Hey the Earth has been destroyed by alien space monsters, and we have this outpost with food and technology. Oh, your ship is stuck in orbit over a strange planet and you're hunting aliens with a handmade bow and arrow in order not to starve? Cool. We have stuff for sale. And can you run a fetch quest for me? Ugh, it's really difficult to get over this stuff. I get that you want trading in your game, or something, but when it totally invalidates your survival-crafting game, then it's bad. Why should I...

Gonna keep these here for after they disappear into the depths of Slack: Reminding myself to also draw: A door that is lots of doors. A megalopodoor with different parts for fliers, crawlers, regular folks, demons, giants, etc. That's probably part of an event chain or something.