3593

warning: has a very brief intro sound

i played mut's cláudio:

https://mutmedia.itch.io/claudio

as part of my participation in jack's avoidance jam:

https://itch.io/jam/jacks-avoidance-jam/entries

for which i made a way to dance all alone:

https://itch.io/jam/jacks-avoidance-jam/rate/4866545

i felt that it was an interesting and easy-to-clone basis for a game. i had this vague idea (which you will find is not well-explored here at all) of making an avoider game where in order to set yourself up for getting a high score, you had to do some amount of non-avoider labour, the titular "clean[ing] your room", and that you wouldn't need to "clean your room" if you didn't really want a high score, but if you did, then you needed to do this extraplay labour. i thought that was an interesting idea and planned to clone mut's cláudio as the basis for this experiment.

however, as i started to do this i was distracted by a number of things, and created a number of interesting systems that i didn't know what to do with. i added a flower growing/planting system directly inspired by michael brough's Vertex Dispenser, and layering that on top of the strange dust-spawning semi-avoidance system of spawned enemies, the way that dust particles mutually annihilate (they also destroy flowers which is mostly bad but sometimes good and necessary), an awkward movement system, i struggled to think about what to score in this game, before i remember my knife, 'kill gameplay'. at this point the study had gone on for a little too long, though, so i decided i would just try to wrap it up.

i decided that roses (the final flower) would be the end goal, and if you make ten of them, the grey eyeball spikey guys (who in the code are called fiddlers but in my heart i call alexandres) stop spawning (they actually slow spawning by 2^number of roses frames up to 10, then at 10+ stop spawning completely). this done, i briefly considered the possibility of making a fake-out scoring system, where you could collect points from alexandres in a way similar to the original cláudio, but the goal was 'actually' to get as low a score as possible, before arriving at 10+ roses. however, i decided that this was not very interesting because it would be trivial to realize that scoring high was not difficult, since there is no death state, and i couldn't think of a death state that would make any sense (you really can't do gardening without destroying a large heap of alexandres)

i think i had already decided to some degree that i was not even very interested in making another high-scoring game after a way to dance all alone, and i wanted an ending. this game does have an ending of sorts, but it doesn't self-terminate; the end is officially when you have ten roses.

it may be interesting to try and maximize the number of roses at this point, but i think it is probably too exhausting to attempt this.

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i lamented on bluesky that i had abandoned the game at this point:

https://bsky.app/profile/droqen.bsky.social/post/3mv57f233pc2v

that lamentation lead indirectly to the creation of this account:

https://droqenstudies.itch.io/

i hope to post more abandoned failures here! let me know if you find these interesting.