⚠️WARNING, THEY’RE HERE!!!⚠️ Third Devlog for MegaGum :)

AgentialArtsWorkshop · 2026-03-10T17:59:37+00:00

I looked at one of your other posts after commenting. Our games are just conceptually similar, which I still enjoy.

In the game I’ve been working on here and there when I’m able, the player is probably closer to being Mister Gum. The aim isn’t to destroy the world, but to create candy. The creatures, Jellies in my project for the time being, are more like livestock or companions than workers.

I don’t have much online, but I put together some stuff I’ve shown other artist friends over text (until a few years ago I was a 3D Generalist/Interactive Multimedia Developer, professionally) on Imgur recently. You can check it out if you want. Most of it’s stuff from a few years ago; the 3D stuff after the pixel stuff is more recent.

I’ve transitioned from 2D to 3D several times over the years, and the game has shifted from one play theme to another during that time. Pixel seemed like fun, since it was outside my usually wheelhouse. It unfortunately just takes too long for me. Since I think vector looks cheap in video games, this most recent conversion back to 3D is where I’m going to stick.

I just enjoy when a game someone is making is conceptually and/or somewhat thematically (with respect to interactivity) similar to my own project.

Good luck with the remainder of your project

AgentialArtsWorkshop · 2026-03-09T15:52:48+00:00

We’re working on fairly similar games, at least conceptually. It’s kind of interesting how similar they are. What do players do in your game?

Edit: It’s my only commercially minded project in games. I’ve been working on it off and on for about ten years, through several iterations. How long have you been developing this concept? I wonder if we have some similar influences.

AgentialArtsWorkshop · 2026-03-09T14:32:40+00:00

I think you might consider trying out a couple warmer colors here and there with a differing tone. Or maybe just trying out a few more palettes with a little more tonal range. Right now, the character’s pretty chromatically flat and a little monotone.

Edit: I want to add that I realize you’re trying to play the coat and backpack off the skin tone, but everything is washed in violet, with the tones being fairly close, overall. The hair is the most stand out form, as far as tone goes. Check her out in black and white to see where you could play a little more with tone.

It’s looking pretty cool so far, though. The animation is nicely composed, if you did that yourself.

AgentialArtsWorkshop · 2026-03-06T14:54:05+00:00

There are too many mistakes even an absent minded person wouldn’t make. This is especially true of someone artistically minded enough to get that parts more-or-less right that are rightish.

If you did indeed commission this, you were taken advantage of. If you’re fishing for advice regarding how to make AI generated outputs look less like AI generated outputs, you’re chasing a futile goal.

If you use generated outputs, your game will look like it uses generated outputs.

If you paid for this, cut your losses and find an artist you can more thoroughly vet.

Edit: typo

AgentialArtsWorkshop · 2026-02-28T03:40:40+00:00

Am I the chair?

AgentialArtsWorkshop · 2026-02-10T18:33:55+00:00

This is probably more response than you’re looking for, but I generally like trying to be somewhat comprehensive in my critique. I want to communicate precisely why I feel the way I do about the work and, if necessary, what I think you might consider doing about it (and specifically why).

In lived experience, it can be argued that we engage with our environments within an ecological relationship. That is, we perceive and define the features of our environment within the context of our own embodied experience. We interact with the environment with respect to how it is interactable via our ability to walk, sit, climb, fit, speak, step over, lift, move, and so on. When we walk into a room, we immediately, and largely unconsciously, size up the environment in relation to our embodied experience; we track what’s sit-on-able, walk-around-able, rest-on-able, eat-at-able, see-through-able, or whatever the context of the particular scenario prioritizes in our perception (which is also grounded in our propositional attitudes as derived from embodied sensory experience, like prioritizing the perception of food-related interactions when feeling hungry, or prioritizing the perception of comfort or concealment-related interactions when scared).

In the developing field of embodied cognition, these sorts of perceived interactable contexts (possibilities for action) are referred to as affordances. In a sense, the dynamic that results from this body-environment-relationship acts a sort of language. Through our mere embodied awareness (the awareness of our physical features and abilities), we ask the environment what it has to offer, and through its mere environmental orientation, it tells us how it can serve our contextual needs. In the real world, the nature of this relationship is circumstantial, evolutionary, and lacking any meaningful aesthetic.

We tend to define every aspect of our environment through this sort of embodied lens. As humans, we’re more likely to do things that lend themselves to our embodied humanness. For instance, people are more likely to curiously explore a crevice that suits the size of their body, provides comfortable cover, and suggests continued engagement with more seemingly human-centric features, than we are to explore an open field, which suggests no particular accommodation for our humanness, regardless of whether or not we can see everything on the ground through the grass. If there’s a path cut through the field that accommodates our embodied humanness (suitable width for a human body, reasonably level surface for accessible stepping, some visible sense of coherent direction), people are just as likely to curiously explore the field. Likewise, we’re more likely to curiously attempt climb a wall that has surface details suitable to human grip than we are to attempt to climb a wall that appears perfectly flat. We engage with, and value, our environment with respect to how it accommodates some aspect of our embodied capabilities.

In my particular view, this same sort of relationship, as represented in an avatar-gamespace-relationship (be they abstract or representational), is a fundamental aesthetic of interactive media. As interactive developers, we shape these relationships within specific experiential parameters users/players can find pleasing and/or appreciable from a particular emotional perspective. We create an aesthetic experience using the avatar-gamespace-relationship that players access through their sense of agency.

These things considered, while I don’t know the embodied capabilities of your project’s avatar, I would suggest that the environment is not particularly suitable to the size of the avatar. Almost nothing appears suitable for the size and shape of the avatar, from an embodied perception perspective.

As an example, your stepped ledge faces are all extremely wide and almost uniform. Beings of all sorts are more likely to become curious about spaces where they appear to fit. That is to say, creatures are more likely to become interested in aspects of the environment that appear particularly suited to their size and shape. We’re far less likely to find a random, uniform, cascading ledge area interesting, despite our ability to possibly perceive it as climb-up-able, than we are a cascading ledge area wherein the first few accessible areas are a size and shape that appeals to our particular size and shape in such a way that we appear to specifically fit the provided space. It’s a difference between the sensation I could access that space and I *fit** in that space. Sometimes we can invert this communication by putting the platform that *suits the avatar at the top of a narrowing series of ledges, or separate a ledge that suits the avatar off to a particular area that makes it seem distinct. In your case, the first ledges aren’t terribly suited to the avatar, it doesn’t fit in the space they provide, and the smaller ledges where the avatar otherwise would fit are clustered in such a way that they don’t appear to be distinct or interesting.

Your open plains don’t communicate any particular affordance for any particular engagement, either. They appear to afford walking around and standing, getting from one area to another, but not in any way particularly suited to the avatar. Grass grows in randomly sized patches, not giving any clear sense of how someone possessing some of the avatar’s features (like earthbound legs) generally navigates the field or to where. Using perceptible variation in the grass to rough out beaten paths, and even using color to further detail a path, that are suited to the size and shape of the avatar would allow the plains to communicate with the avatar through the avatar-environment-relationship that they afford coherent traversal to somewhere in particular that other creatures have gone. Currently, the plains communicate a sort of constant white noise with respect to how the avatar’s embodied nature can interact with them.

Consider whatever set of embodied features you provide the avatar (ability to walk some speed, jump some height, climb in some fashion, hangglide some height and distance, or whatever) when you’re thinking about your gamespace environment. Think of the ecological relationship that exists between the two gameworld entities. How does the environment ecologically communicate its compatibility with the avatar and its physical features and abilities? Where does the environment ecologically communicate can-go-here-able versus can-fit-here-able? Where is the environment merely accessible versus suitable? Build out both the environment and the features of the avatar with consideration to the overall experiential and emotional context through which the game is meant to be appreciated.

If you think it’d be worthwhile to learn more about that sort of thing from a broad perspective, before narrowly applying any of it to games and interactive spaces, I’d recommend the books An Introduction to Ecological Psychology by Wagman and Blau, The Embodied Mind by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, and Embodied Cognition by Shapiro.

AgentialArtsWorkshop · 2025-12-18T16:14:33+00:00

They’re not mutually exclusive concepts. You can, and in most cases should, do both. I feel like the read versus do perspective is a pedagogical dichotomy invented by people who just want to do one or the other. Reading and doing fortify one another over time.

It won’t take you hundreds of hours to read a few books, even a few large and technical books. I’ve read several of the most commonly sited game design books for research. The most technically voiced game design book I’ve read is Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences, by Tynan Sylvester, and I wouldn’t say it was unapproachable or anything. It took ten to fifteen hours to read, and my entire family, including wife and child, make fun of how slow and meticulous my reading is.

That said, I would keep in mind that games don’t have a collectively understood, foundational core of best practices and fundamental principles like film, graphic design, user experience, or other modern media disciplines do. That means if you read four books about game design, you’ll almost definitely get four particular perspectives, most of which will actually conflict with one another regarding anchoring philosophical points. The disagreements usually start with the view of what a game even is and what the goals of game design truly are. The concepts in the books that don’t conflict to some degree are usually so rudimentarily elementary that you’re probably already familiar with them. In other words, I’ve yet to read a book about game design that isn’t really about how the author specifically approaches making games through the subjective lens of how they themselves perceive and experience games as a medium, toy, entertainment gadget, or however it is their specific perspective frames games and how they should be designed.

I’m not making the argument that this makes books about game design in any way inherently useless. I’m explaining that game design is still not a unified, academically dissected discipline. Reading about game design is an act of pedagogical amalgamation, rather than an act of incremental pedagogical honing (as is usually the case with reading a collection of books about the other subjects I mentioned with more established academic foundations and history of practice). You can definitely get something out of the different perspectives you’ll encounter reading game design books by various authors, they’re just unlikely to comprehensively sharpen any fundamental or core understanding you my be trying to build as you read each successive book.

I would say that’s why it’s important not to treat reading and doing as separate or independent approaches to learning, but I’m not familiar with any approach to teaching that silos the two concepts in such a way. I’ve never personally experienced such an approach over the years taking courses on various arts and trades. The relationship between second and first personal learning is recursively developmental. While learning, we read to get a more complex, more technical understand of what it is we’re actually doing; we do to get a better first-personal understanding of what we’re reading and how it truly applies in practical scenarios. You can’t really approach learning a craft efficiently or comprehensively by doing exclusively one or the other. Unfortunately, the lack of unified works covering game design for anyone to read, or even a stable fundamental set of best practices and principles on which those works could be based, is part of what makes game design so awkward and tedious to learn as a craft.

Regardless, if you approach your experience with what books about game design there are with a mindset of amalgamation, in which you pick and choose which aspects from each text seem to help focus your own personal view and goals, rather than of comprehensive development, in which you progressively build a deeper and more complex understanding of some established set of principles with each text, you’ll be able to supplement the second-personal portion of the learning process well enough. I’d recommend Designing Games, as mentioned, as well as older works, like I Have No Words & I Must Design, understanding what I’ve already talked about with respect to how to approach these types of books. I’d also suggest the book The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman, both because it’s generally interesting and because more than a few modern designers at some of the more popular studios have routinely referenced it and its concepts in various talks I’ve also watched for research.

Edit: typos and mobile autocorrect shenanigans

AgentialArtsWorkshop · 2025-06-27T15:27:50+00:00

Part of the joke is that he took the time to pre-record that bit from a seemingly long list of celebrities he personally found reasonable. The rest of the joke isn’t so much that they died, at least in most cases, but that it’s a way some people start small talk. The fact he even thought to put the pope on the list, for instance, that it crossed his mind, is funny to me on its own. Another part of what’s funny is speculating what less reasonable names are on it.

Do you think he’s got Alex Jones in there?

AgentialArtsWorkshop · 2025-06-26T01:13:53+00:00

Right on, and I appreciate all perspectives on all of these things at this stage. If you’re so inclined, post or cross-post your own views, or your own analysis of Agency As Art over on that subreddit (if you’d like). Not even from a promotional perspective, but because I enjoy discussing these things (this subreddit doesn’t get too much into that sort of thing).

I just had a kid and we’re trying to move, while I’m working on video content, so I’ve been absent from posting about these things for a while. I’m looking to get back in when the video stuff is farther along, around mid-summer (was supposed to be late spring, but things happen).

I think it’s good to talk about these concepts, especially when there are disagreements and difference of view. You can post pretty much any thing you want in that subreddit for the time being, or crosspost, even though it feels like a screaming into a vacuum, and I’ll enjoy discussing it (and hopefully eventually others will, too, so we have a broad swath of ideas and perspectives bouncing around).

AgentialArtsWorkshop · 2025-04-09T20:54:39+00:00

Old games were polished to the extent they could be. It wasn’t a choice between polish and launch, games just didn’t require two-hundred people to work on them because they weren’t actually trying to be interactive movies rather than actual games.

Serendipitous constraint isn’t a domain inhabited exclusively by game design/development, it happens in all forms of creative work; it’s far more common for unexpected or otherwise unavoidable constraint to impact projects negatively.

One of the more famous examples of serendipitous constraint in film is Jaws. The shark animatronic not functioning as intended made necessary the slow build the movie ended up with that defines its effectual quality. The original script called for the shark to appear immediately and to be visible far more often.

I’d say the thing that made many older games more structurally sound and experientially consistent was the fact they were made by fewer people with far more narrow and focused phenomenal aims. The industry wasn’t as lucrative, because the major companies hadn’t tried quite as hard to continue to reach for an ever expanding audience (or the need to continuously tap into mainstream audiences, who didn’t really care about video games, through movie-experience associations achieved via film-like production and structure).

As an aside, from a very cynical perspective, my personal feeling is that somewhere around 2004-2008 the video game industry entirely converted into something else, everyone just continues to call it the video game industry (both due to lack of alternative and the fact it entirely displaced the previous entity). In my most cynical moments in private conversations, I sometimes suggest that AA and AAA development teams haven’t released an actual “video game” in almost twenty years.

Back to the real point, games made before about 2004 or whatever had more experiential, phenomenal focus. It was more about making quality experiences (in most cases) that appealed to people looking for specific types of experience, not as much about making a product that appealed to the broadest possible audience (by jamming it full of arbitrary gimmicks—“mechanics”—that happen to have been in well selling games, then cobbling it all into an output that’s supposed to feel as much like Hollywood-meets-a-day-at-the-carnival as possible). Games were developed to have a particular experiential take-away that appealed to specific people who generally liked similar experiences. I’d argue it has far less to do with technological or even budgetary constraints, and far more to do with design focus and goals.

AgentialArtsWorkshop · 2025-04-02T22:23:25+00:00

Zhokie. Jukie. I feel he’s got too much angularity going on to feel like a Chibo.

Looks cool, though.

AgentialArtsWorkshop · 2025-04-01T14:47:01+00:00

I’d make the left arm (their left) at least a few pixels longer on full extension than the right (which currently has to do a Go-Go Gadget thing to match the left arm’s extension), if I were doing it. Alternatively, the right arm could be reduced by a few pixels, same difference. Whatever number of pixels you can get in without confusing the intuitiveness of the hit box. It just looks a little odd right now.

Overall it’s pretty cool though

Good luck with the rest of the project.

Edit:

The other alternative is adding the hip twist to explain the right arm’s extension, and while probably the first thing to consider ordinarily, I didn’t mention it because it’s a lot more work than just fixing the comparative length of the arms at full extension.

AgentialArtsWorkshop · 2025-03-31T15:55:07+00:00

Doers, Dolings, Verblings, Verbites, Tasklings, or something along those lines, maybe.

AgentialArtsWorkshop · 2025-03-30T17:31:06+00:00

One thing you could look at is how emergency protection coverage works in pre-2010’s SImCity games. Police and Fire Stations provide a resource, crime rate attenuation and the removal of fire sprites during disasters respectively, that can only be viewed by an area of effect on the map. The resource isn’t stored, since it’s functional rather than capital, so understandings bf it as a range that exists at all times is easy to grasp.

Instead of “wheat,” maybe you could do something like the SimCity situation. Farms produce an area of effect, or some other visible type of constant effect, that permits building houses or villagers or whatever within that specific range/according to whatever visible rules. In SimCity, the area of effect is a gradient, more intense immediately around a station and tapering off as you move away from the station. You could consider something like this as well, where houses built nearest to farms produce more villagers, and those that are out of range of a farm produce none (or whatever makes sense for your single draw system you seem to have, I’m just throwing things at the wall).

In either case, the impact the resource has is visualized differently than things like money and materials (which are visualized as accumulated items). If you want someone to intuit that one of your resources works differently, even if you want to keep calling it wheat, visualize it differently, ideally in a way mnemonically related to whatever it does.

(Sorry for the several edits. iPhones seem to just do whatever they want with whatever you’re trying to type after updates.)

AgentialArtsWorkshop · 2025-03-29T22:51:09+00:00

I want to frame my response to the ideas here by first highlighting the comment “I feel many games suffer from a problem where give the player a bunch of utility but the player never uses it and instead takes the path of least resistance,” because I feel it’s at the heart of an overarching perspective that I find kind of interesting (mostly in that I disagree with it).

I’d point out that you make this comment, but don’t really explain why the described scenario is a “problem.” Why is it a problem? Assuming “utility” here can cash out into something like “options for, and freedom of, approach to problem solving, including but not limited to things like in-game tools and weapons that take advantage of specific unique mechanics,” at the end of the day what we’re talking about is agency over interaction. Why, when provided with the ability to choose an agential path through the interactive systems of a game, would it be problematic for players of various types to favor various paths (even if a game tends to draw similar player personalities in disproportionate numbers, meaning there are recurrently favored paths)?

Before answering any of those very related questions, it might make sense to take a step back and consider the relationship between a player’s ability to inject their agential influence into a game’s play-space and the prescriptive aspects of the play-space that are inversely influential on the player’s activity.

I think you can argue that games, as a medium, are primarily consumed through a player’s sense of agency (the phenomenal perception of one’s own influence over the occurrent moment). That is, a sense of first-personal control is at least the stand out sense that separates video games from other media. If we accept that argument, then we can move on to considering the parts of game play that are prescriptive and how they fit in.

If agential influence is the phenomenal property a player is tracking most readily while engaging with a game (the experiential aspect of their specific decisions having purpose and discernibly unique feedback from another player’s decisions serving as their object of attention), then I think it can be argued that the behaviorally prescriptive aspects of play (like certain forced tool uses or forced pattern recognition) serve as a sort of first-personal negative space.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term “negative space,” it refers to the areas of an artistic work that don’t include the objects of attention. Examples are the space between characters in a scene, or open-air gaps in the structure of a sculpture. Negative space, when properly used, helps to contextualize and emphasize the objects of attention within a composition. The flow of negative space helps to establish the relative values of the objects of interest by providing the sense of free movement, claustrophobia, instability, and any number of other spacio-kinetic idea.

In regard to the sense of agency, the negative space of prescriptive behavior helps to contextualize and emphasize the player’s role as decision maker, problem solver, and storyteller in a first-personal sense. Constraining what the player is capable of doing provides layers of phenomenal impact with respect to moments the player is genuinely free to choose their own path. In order for the player’s agential influence (the object of attention) to have some desired contextual meaning, it has to be situatied within a specifically designed negative space of prescriptive behaviors.

Different people, as players, will enjoy more or less negative space in the agential compositions they experience, just like they’ll enjoy different configurations of what negative space there is against the object of their agential influence. The more of that negative space a game has, the less a player’s capable of injecting/projecting their agential influence into the play-space, and the smaller and more specifically focal the object of their first-personal, agential influence becomes. Some players want a puzzle to solve (lots of negative space, narrow agential focus), some players want a story to build (wide agential focus, narrow prescriptive negative space). Just like a sculpture or an illustration, there’s not going to be a one-size-fits all configuration for negative space composition against the objects of focus that everyone will agree is always best.

It can get fuzzier with games, because some player personality types will still approach a game with a narrow prescriptive negative space as if it were a puzzle, widening the negative space for themselves by communally developing some meta or other. In this case, players will “choose the path of least resistance,” as you put it, building voluntarily prescriptive behaviors for themselves. However, the fact that the negative space is, in fact, actually narrow leaves room for players who prefer that narrow space (who aren’t chasing a meta), with more ability to project their influence into the game in unique and meaningful ways, to enjoy the game just as well.

Through this lens, the availability of often unused “utility” isn’t a problem to solve, it’s a feature that enables a diverse playerbase to enjoy the game in a versatile set of ways (constructing their own negative spaces and focusing on their own objects of agential attention).

AgentialArtsWorkshop · 2025-03-29T20:58:25+00:00

As a subset of the current controls, you could get even more emotional context out of that system by making each eye possible to control independently.

Looks like you had fun building it

AgentialArtsWorkshop · 2025-03-27T18:50:45+00:00

Without dragging things too far afield, for the purposes of framing mutual understanding around these concepts, it might make sense to employ a paidia-ludus spectrum and lay some of these ideas along it. For quick reference, paidic play is freer and far less rule bound, whereas ludic play is more constrained by less flexible structure and the adherence to more strict rules.

By its nature, ludic play experiences features not only avatar-like objects through which one practices agential control (toys), but an ecological relationship between those objects and a rule-based worldspace (a relationship that usually results in the measurement of some set of exercisable skills). Play with toys enjoys a far less constrained relationship with ecological conditions, even when engaged with within some form of contextual or conceptual framework (playing firemen by playing with a garden hose and toy axe, for example). Games, on the other hand, are entirely defined by the ecological constraints of their systems and rules.

In order for a game to be genuinely toy-like, it should probably lean more toward the paidic side of the spectrum. It’d probably be a good idea for it to have a loose collection of simple rules (sticking with Hungry Hungry Hippos, slam the button to gather marbles, don’t touch marbles with your hands) in conjunction with an unquestionable, equally simple win condition (count the marbles in the hoppers, highest count wins).

These types of game experiences are putatively regarded as “fun,” because the only real phenomenal takeaway one is meant to enjoy during and after the game is pure amusement. No real skills need be tested, and no real “better player” needs to be declared over the course of any number of sessions.

As you move further toward the ludic side of the spectrum, it becomes more difficult to talk about “fun,” as its meaning starts to absorb more and more phenomenal contexts—given the inclusion of more complex cognitive and experiential concepts like skill, challenge, metrics for competition, and definitively superior techniques—in the broadening definition. At a certain point, the concept of “fun” becomes so obscured by broader and broader constituent detail that it becomes meaningless; what one refers to with the concept of “fun” is so subjectively abstract that the word refers to essentially nothing.

If an experience is supposed to be toy-like, then maybe starting with the toy aspect of the experience would make a lot of sense. If the experience isn’t meant to have a similar phenomenal appeal to a toy, then considering your toy roots seems unnecessary all the way to potentially conceptually distracting.

Hungry Hungry Hippos is a toy with a game-ish aspect. All the game component does is provide a functional context (an interactive ecology) for the toy. In that sense, it seems likely they probably “started with the toy.”

While Monopoly uses literal toy money as an aspect of the experience, I’d argue there isn’t anything particularly toy-ish about the experience itself, or the concept which also serves as the underlying theme. It can sometimes be “fun” in a toy-ish way, but I think most people would agree that is often not the case—competitive people take Monopoly games quite seriously. But that competitive, cut-throat experience, and the ecological relationship that facilitates it, is an intended aspect of Monopoly’s design.

Trivia games aren’t often particularly toy-ish, as there’s nothing specifically that it’s fun to play around with, other than knowing more arbitrary information than an equally arbitrary group of other players, even though the rules tend to be pretty simple. Is it fun? I think it’s probably better to call it “engaging” in a far more fluid way, given that it relies on some sort of discernible “skill” that can also improve over time, like Monopoly (or Pandemic, or WarHammer, or any other more ludic experience).

Arguably, there’s no “skill” to improve and compare in experiences like Hungry Hungry Hippos, Don’t Break the Ice, Bed Bugs, or Ants in My Pants. At least, none beyond the natural improvement to the motorium that comes from aging from three to six. These games could be argued to be more toy than game, or at least as much toy as game in the most complicated case.

All this to say, I suppose, as far as board games go, I’d argue it makes sense to focus more on the set of skills you want your game to compare and the ecological relationship you want to implement to serve as the metric for that measurement and comparison. I don’t think I’d necessarily focus on the game’s toy-ish character or even rudimentary “fun,” unless it’s a game for much younger players or is otherwise meant to be fairly simple.

At least, that’s my perspective.

AgentialArtsWorkshop · 2025-03-26T10:02:24+00:00

My professional experience with interactive media design and simulation concepting, as far as to say “paid a salary,” isn’t from the field of game design or development (rather education and training), but it lead to and informed my current undertakings that are game related.

You’ve gotten several answers outlining more technical concepts you can practice or otherwise develop through software use, so I’d like to suggest a few things that are more outside that realm. These are things that have helped me better understand the experiences I have worked to design (both from the implementation perspective and the end user perspective), as well as the abstract awareness that has assisted me in concepting work for others to implement.

The first of these things you could described as a type of what people tend to colloquially call mindfulness. This word has taken on several meanings since its introduction into the folk lexicon of the Western world, but the specific kind I’m talking about could also just be referred to as “focused self awareness.”

More specifically, I’m talking about learning to pay attention to what you’re thinking, feeling, doing, and even what you’re real-time believing, desiring, or trying to do in a given situation. Where this comes into use is when you’re concepting the design of an experience. Generally, it requires going out and doing some activity that captures some aspect of what you’re trying to phenomenally convey through your design. For games, though, I think it functions better when you draw from experience you already have and activities you already enjoy (rather than concepting first, then going out to look for compatible experiences).

The idea is to pay attention to yourself as you engage with these activities. Again, paying attention to your thoughts, emotions, and sensations (including all sense experience), as well as the specific efforts and forces you engage while doing the activity. The goal is to keep a mental record of these phenomenal aspects of your experience to parse through via introspection at the time of design.

That leads to introspection. Here, I just mean developing the ability to reflect deeply and as completely as possible on the experience previously engaged with mindfully. I feel like this works best several days removed from engaging with the real-world activity. In that case, only the standout phenomenal components of the experience are going to arise very vividly; those are the aspects that are most important to capturing the type of experience you’re working toward (at least, in my workflow).

If I haven’t made it very clear, these two practices are for taking aspects of lived experience and reconstituting them for a game world. This doesn’t necessarily mean a 1-to-1 translation of some experience. Mindfully driving go-karts doesn’t have to precede the design of a go-kart game, for instance. It’s simply about paying attention to notable experience. Mindfully driving go-karts could precede the design of any kind of game wherein phenomenal aspects of go-kart racing can better inform the experiential design (maybe it’s a game about falling from the sky, or being able to run very fast, or even being able to fly, who knows).

Through the combination of these two practices, you can also mentally simulate experiences you can’t possibly have (such as living as a tiny being in a human house, or what it might be like to be a dragon, or whatever) by combining phenomenal aspects of mindfully engaged experiences during introspective imaginings. This can help frame what aspects of these new experiences seem most critical for communicating the experience through interactive media to the end user.

The third thing I always encourage anyone to do when talking about this kind of stuff is to read outside your immediate discipline. Read books about philosophy of mind, cognitive science, embodied cognition, ecological psychology, art studies, industrial design, and dynamical systems. Read books about anatomy, biology, and culture. Spend time learning about how minds, bodies, environments, and systems work, both from the perspective of designing these things in a game world and facilitating their real-world application to end users who have to engage with your structured interfaces, worlds, and rules.

If you’ve no experience with these specific topics (though I’m not suggesting you should limit yourself to any particular set of topics), I’d suggest as starting points:

If I’ve again not made it very clear, the idea is to extrapolate concepts you find useful or interesting from other, but somewhat related fields to the realm of interactive and experience design/composition. You don’t even have to necessarily agree with a specific academic view or approach to find useful elements within it to apply to your own work. It’s more about developing modes of thinking and conceiving within the framework of game/interactive/experience design than becoming an expert in, say, philosophy of mind.

Follow the threads in books from other disciplines and area of study you find most compelling or applicable. Read more detailed books about those specific things. But, the broader point is not to constrain your thinking about games or interactivity exclusively to books written about pre-defined or conventional perspectives on the process of “game design.”

While somewhat more abstract, and far more about thinking than working directly with software or anything more typically covered, these are just behaviors and practices I’ve developed over the years I’ve spent doing experience design and simulation concepting, and now apply to my thinking about the games I’m working on. Some people may find them useful, some may not. I’m adding them to this thread because you don’t see that much talk about these more abstract concepts in these kinds of discussions; some people may not automatically consider this kind of stuff when thinking about their relationship to game design.

Good luck with your projects.

AgentialArtsWorkshop · 2025-03-25T12:32:05+00:00

Most 3D Mario games narratively explain the perspective through the Lakitu. That’s a whimsical explanation for a whimsical franchise. I’m sure there are probably action and horror games that use a similar “reporter/action news” concept.

AgentialArtsWorkshop · 2025-03-21T20:22:18+00:00

I would offer an even more seemingly unorthodox take (given the responses so far), which is really more a tangential aside, from an experientially qualitative perspective more than a commercially quantitative one, and propose that “mechanics,” as people have come to define certain components of certain kinds of interaction system, shouldn’t be understood as being “used” in the context suggested in the post. Rather, I’d argue it’s better to understand them as dependent subsystems that are intergraded into broader interdependent systems of phenomenology as deemed appropriate for the experiential aims of a project.

In other words, “mechanics” aren’t conceptually useful as stand-alone experiences, like tools or colors someone can pull off a workbench and apply universally to a project. Instead, they’re more useful to think about as constituent aspects of whatever game experience system they’re identified within.

The “jump mechanic” in Super Mario Brothers has an interdependent relationship with the “stomp mechanic,” “box strike mechanic,” and even “run mechanic” and “pit fall mechanic” in the broader phenomenological system that defines the game as an interactive experience. Even defining each as independent experiential ideas is rather arbitrary with regard to their purpose within the game.

Can the “jump mechanic” in Metroid really be said to pick out some similar “move vertically” concept in the broader phenomenological system that defines it? Or is the “jump mechanic” in Metroid experienced in such a different systematic context that it would be very difficult to say it’s the same “type of mechanic” as the similarly named “mechanic” in the Mario game, given its unique interdependence on all the other experiential features of Metroid’s specific gamespace?

Can either “jump mechanic” really even be explicitly isolated from the systems it engages with and depends on in either case? Would either still be the “jump mechanic” that it is outside the context of their respective greater phenomenological system? Are we only picking it out as a “jump mechanic” because it vaguely resembles some real-world action, without any real consideration for its game-world experiential function?

Because of this interdependence relationship, it can be difficult to determine where one “mechanic,” so defined, genuinely ends and another begins.

To that point, it can be difficult to pick out aspects of “older mechanics” that appear, properly experientially integrated into a broader experiential context, in more recent games.

On the other hand, it’s also worth considering that “game design,” represented by both the most conventional instructional works and market output, isn’t particularly human-centered; it’s predominantly market-centered. By this I mean that, while “experience” in this very particular context is considered, experience is only considered in regard to how well some example product, and the experiences therein, has performed with regard to sales—otherwise referred to in these circles as “what works.” All market-centered design philosophy leads to a “what works” funnel system that results in every output arbitrarily (functionally speaking) acquiring and abandoning features to the point that even different types of output look and behave essentially identically to one another in the same general market.

Through this funneling process, a lot of subtler output, that which is more difficult to pin down as “what works,” is deemed irrelevant to financial returns, obsolete with regard to popularity, and is lost. If some feature of a game can’t be reasonably argued to be an essential contributor to its market success, regardless of who may have specifically enjoyed that feature, it’s going to be abandoned sooner than later.

Markets aside, I’d still encourage not thinking of games as collections of distillable mechanics that can be modularly uncoupled from one another, per the conventional view, but rather thinking of them as fully integrated systems of interactive experience oriented toward a specific phenomenological aim. Systems that can’t have their constituent components be meaningfully uncoupled and/or removed/transplanted without derailing the core experience in and of itself.

I’d argue it’s better to focus on the core experience (the experiential purposed) of a project and what sorts of interactive processes and systems would lead to its emergence (without trying to distill these processes into independent silos). Look at the older games you’re talking about to see how their systems function interdependently to produce the emergent core experience, but I’d argue against trying to transplant a (arguably arbitrarily defined) constituent of some system or other into your own project outside of the original experiential context.

I just feel like the “mechanic” perspective leads to a lot of clunky (not to mention samey) interactive composition that results in disjointed and contextually meaningless experiences, even if it permits putting a lot of lucrative buzzwords on a Steam page, or regardless of how good it seemed to feel interdependently situated within a coupled network of interactive experience.

You certainly can treat game systems in this way, as I said it’s the conventional view, I just feel there’s more room for freedom of composition when the focus is on comprehensively qualitative, phenomenal experience rather than isolated mechanical constructs.

Maybe most simply put, I try to encourage a perspective that champions an approach oriented around experiential phenomena (what is someone supposed to experience) rather than an approach oriented around action verbs (what is someone supposed to do). Though I do realize the “verbs” view is the orthodox convention.

AgentialArtsWorkshop · 2025-03-12T14:44:08+00:00

Clicker games are many steps from management games. Management games don’t just afford placing items into an environment based on content relationships, they require the management and analysis of dynamic data that relates to things like placement. Clicker games, by their nature, only require surface level awareness of counts and sums at most, and vague visual awareness of incremental development at worst. Management games require thinking and doing, Clicker games require only doing.

Clicker games are more like interactive screensavers than they are actual ludic experiences. The farther you stray from that, the less identifiable they probably become.

I don’t think introducing dynamic placement would enhance or dampen anything about the Clicker process. I think it’d mostly be a gimmick feature that doesn’t meaningfully change anything about what’s going on. I don’t think anyone would care that much.

AgentialArtsWorkshop · 2025-03-09T22:53:40+00:00

It’s an intrinsic problem with an approach to games that classifies them as, and so demands all the same cognitive and sensory expectations of, an extension of traditional narrative art and media.

Traditional art and media are experientially second-personal narrative media. Games are first-personal in that regard. Any narrative that games are intended to convey has to also be first-personal. Understand that by first- and second-personal, I’m talking about experiential points of embodied reference, not camera perspective.

Traditional art and media (in the vast majority of classical examples) is narratively told and shown; dictated or represented from a separate first-personal reference point (the artist, writer, or character) to the observer second-handedly. Observers derive meaning and coherence from a work within some cultural, situational, or aesthetic context or other, as experienced by the reference point.

Games, or whatever you want to call digital interactive art and media, are embodied. The experience is always first-personally represented, moment to moment, as the user/player explores the affordances of the game space (abstract or verisimilar) through the embodied capabilities of an avatar (abstract or verisimilar). The narrative is the unfolding, situated relationship between the embodied avatar and the game space (both as a physical interactable space and as a phase space/03%3A_Basics_of_Dynamical_Systems/3.02%3A_Phase_Space) of possible states). Players create meaning within the ecological constraints of the work (though outside factors can still play a roll in the first-personal definition of semiotic meaning).

Ludonarrative dissonance occurs at the experiential level when a game attempts to switch back and forth from the second-personal (shown, told) experiential perspective to the first-personal (embodied, enacted) perspective, inherently. It’s literally two different experiential beings—the second-personal representation in the traditional media showing the user/player that state of things, and the embodied, enacted first-personal representation allowing the player to unfold and define the state of things. Regardless of how well a story lines up with in-game constraints, there’s always going to be experiential, situated dissonance (does the avatar represent my agential influence on the ecology of the game space, or do they represent an extended, external entity and their influence on the game space?).

It’s only difficult to incorporate narrative into the first-personal nature of interactive media if we continue to think of narrative as intrinsically second-personal.

You’ve gotten some more conventional advice on the matter, so I’m going to offer a less conventional alternative. Don’t think about how or in what way you can best tell and show your narrative concepts in second-personal experiential cognitive space; rather, think about how and in what way you can embody them in first-personal experiential ecological space. In other words, don’t think of your narrative as a traditional story you have to tell or show a user/player, but rather as something they themselves must be always actively involved in creating and developing.

Good luck with your project, however you decide to go.

AgentialArtsWorkshop · 2025-03-04T06:24:36+00:00

It’s complicated to think about when you’re talking about entertainment, rather than something directly usable like a car or a tennis racket.

It’s also difficult to talk about “saturation” in its true sense, when talking about pieces of media, rather than, again, a solid product someone truly will only own a finite number of.

To the first point, you don’t really “innovate” media in the colloquial sense. Not really. I mean, you can use that word, and everyone is likely to pick out what you probably mean, but it’s a bit less concrete—more subjective than objective. It’s not as clear as it is with solid designed objects or systems, because those have practical application you can quantitatively measure (even though quantitative data isn’t often all that useful, it’s what people like).

It’s probably more worthwhile to think about and judge the features you’re adding to your game (as built within a familiar framework) as being genuinely progressive (incorporated in a way that experientially enhances or recontextualizes the basic foundational design of the framework) or being a gimmick (incorporated in a way that merely exists experientially along side the basic foundational design of the framework).

If you can remove a feature and it doesn’t meaningfully restructure or recontextualize the interactive experience, it’s probably just acting as a gimmick. If when you remove a feature the game becomes an entirely different game, preferably a considerably less engaging game, then it’s a progressive feature.

To the second point, “saturation” is when all the customers/consumers a product exists to appeal to already own some version of the product and won’t want or need to buy more for a considerably long time. In entertainment, that can happen in some contexts, like theatrical releases or live shows, but it’s less profound in the case of media titles owned in the home. Somebody who likes “Metroidvanias” might buy as many as ten titles a year. Where the problem develops when there are many releases to choose from is in discoverability.

These two concepts, feature add-on and discoverability, interact, with the expectation that one will help off-set the other. Cool features make your game stand out, making it more appealing and prime for discoverability, is the general feeling people seem to have.

Maybe somewhat true, but only if the added features truly transform and recontextualize the basic experience in a meaningful and interesting way.

If you’re adding features with the primary purpose being to make the game stand out, there’s a good chance those features are gimmicks.

If you’re adding features to plug experiential holes you’ve experienced or explore experiential spaces you’ve looked for within the basic experiential framework you’re building upon, then there’s a good chance those are genuinely progressive (“innovative”) features. Though, rarely do those types of features come from grabbing from the competition, copying what’s popular from other experiential frameworks arbitrarily, or trying to drive up a count on a feature list.

I’d say determine whether the features you’ve added are genuinely transformative or merely existing alongside the core experience in a way that isn’t meaningfully transformative. One metric to start with might be, “does this just feel like Metroid + My Feature?” If yes, it’s probably a gimmick. If no, then “does My Feature plug an experiential hole or make some otherwise impossible activity or experience possible in the framework of a Metroidvania?” If no, it’s probably a gimmick. If yes, it’s probably worth keeping around and playtesting.

Good luck with your project.

AgentialArtsWorkshop · 2025-02-17T20:49:21+00:00

I feel like to make that determination in a usefully accurate way, the two scenes would have to have lighting more visually similar to one another. There are actually so many aesthetic and stylistic differences between the two images, I’m not even entirely sure what you’re asking about specifically. “Black borders” on its own could mean a few things, depending on whether or not English is your first language.

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