Spoiled Prompts

‘House Spirit’

is a reply-in-kind to the fish swimming through wet cement that wrote love letter to a star ruler.

This prompt lives on bits of recordings made over winter, shaped with ffmpeg into a flower crown both for Videotome Jam 3 - “Spectator” and in response to “love letter to a ☆ ruler”, the kinetic novel, using the videotome engine (yes, this is my first articulating artifact), at maybe 3 minutes in length with no choices to make.

A body sloughing off rent-seeking emotions cusps losing its maintainer.

૨⁑⌒≀˚

I might consider praise a greenhouse emotion, more ballast water than sweaty gesture…

---

aside

Working with this engine gave me a dream. I’ve been between machines - and in and out of housing - since CoV-2, so I build this game editing text in zarchiver and trimming audio in termux. Maybe not the experience game devs dream of; But it’s my first time building anything like this. I’m not a person who sees something appear on the screen and feels success. As that one person from NarraScope said (in another context), “I have a hard time starting projects, and I don’t feel joy finishing them.” This workflow was enough of a departure for my body to struggle so vividly to understand what the jam’s request to make a game is asking to do that this dream germates (that’s not the word) from the effort.

I don’t know why my body does what it does. I’m just glad to get a smile now and again. Onto that dream.

Dev Dream

The dream is of game. The game is a souls-like. It has only the player, a world, and one boss.

The world is full of life that help you defeat the boss. But the boss stops toying with the player after a time. Does an ultimate, sending them away. The player is left to find something in the world to survive the ultimate. Exploring the world, looking for the ultimate occuring organically in ecosystems in the world, and the animal that survives it, and how they do.

The boss learns about the players habits. The boss is fond of the player. The palette of the world is river-green.

The megafauna in the world have their own fights with each other, and will spar with the player, incidentally digesting the boss’s moves with the player.

The more the player learns about the world and its creatures - different megafauna in the world have different defenses against one another. Learning about, recording and binding these moves to keys allows the player to craft moves.

Exposing the boss to recorded moves has the boss talk about the creature the move is from, during the boss fight, sharing stories of the animal and new locations (marked on the map).

Some moves mess with the boss, putting them in a bad mood, the weather turning incliment. For one, moves that megafauna will only perform after being toyed with or pulled apart, performed by the player, can have the boss throw the fight out of disgust.

Some moves leave the boss giggling, or delight them, increasing fondness. For one, moves that megafauna will only perform after being cared for or instigated to play.

There are various endings, based on which tactics with the world a player elects to pursuit:

• The moves a player exposes the boss to
• The fight itself (the path the player takes)
• The relationship the player has to the boss.

Most travel in the game is fast travel; slow travel is unlocked by crafting mobility aids. Each terrain is lethal in its own in its own way.

When the boss see a move from thr player from a new biome, the boss talks about that biome, and you learn about the animals in it.

Anyway, the prompt this month: videogames.

---

Happy making.

More prompts at: https://devourplural.itch.io/1/devlog

A lot of my friends are in jail right now, so put 8 money in my local jail support: