> I could get along better with Lua if it was just a little more performant. I really miss things like true consts, macros, inlines, and other basic performance-focused features. Overall it feels very much like a good scripting extension for a core compiled system and using it to build an entire game, even at the relatively high level I'm working at, is beyond the spec.
Kinda wondering why Lua on the PlayDate seems to have performance issues in his game. Doesn't seem the game does very graphic intensive stuff.
And from my experience LÖVE [0] is quite fast as is LÖVR. I would think Lua should be able to handle much more, but perhaps the animations in the article don't tell the full story.
Perhaps the PlayDate doesn't make use of LuaJIT [1] as LÖVE does? Or perhaps the hardware of the PlayDate itself is just much slower than I would expect.
Yes, PlayDate uses Lua 5.4, for a good reason - it is a retro console with a ARM Cortex M7 running at 168 MHz. This is similar to RPi Pico or ESP32 and LuaJIT cannot run on it.
In such environment you'd best utilize Lua for configuration, implementing branching dialogs, scripting the story events and similar occasionally-triggered high level code that needs frequent tweaking. A more static project (turn-based, or a card game) could be done just in Lua. Using interpreted Lua in hot loops will not only drag the frame rate, it will also bring down the battery life.
Luckily even the plain Lua can easily be integrated with C, so it's not that difficult to take a chunk of Lua-prototyped code and push it down to C. For LuaJIT it's a non-issue for most part (and most algorithms can be reworked to be more efficient while staying in Lua).
I love seeing the interplay of story and mechanics, the game started as an idea for a mechanic mostly, with a little bit of story on top. When that mechanic wasn't enough, asking questions about the story led to new mechanics.
Obra Dinn is a top five game for me. If you haven't spent a weekend binging it I can't recommend it enough.
Obra Dinn is a must-play. Even if you don’t like the genre, even if you don’t like the aesthetic, even if you don’t like video games, you should sit down with Obra Dinn and check it out. It’s an incredible work of art. it belongs in a museum
As a vote in favour of that comment, it has to be one of the most consistent and best games I've played recently. Trying to say as little as possible, it has gameplay that made me feel clever, _fantastic_ sound design, effective use of its restricted graphical style, and a story that had me intrigued from end-to-end.
Savour it though, you can only play it "for real" once.
You are right to question such statements, but let me add more input: I think everything Lukas Pope does is a work of art.
The man is an artist. An artisan. He makes no two games the same, and he is not a copycat. He really explores the design space and comes up with something novel.
I think he is the best game designer of this age. Sorry if it sounds hyperbolic, and you'd be right to doubt it -- but he truly is.
My wife doesn't like video games. if I sat her down to play Obra Dinn, she would hate video games forever with no hope of reform.
Obra Dinn was an incredible work of art, but it's not accessible by any definition of the word. I don't think anyone would enjoy it if they weren't already deeply in love with video games and puzzles.
The Outer Wilds (not worlds) is another one that I think rivals Obra Dinn, and is more accessible. It might be the best narrative-focused puzzle game ever made.
I tried this with my wife, after 10 mins she had a headache and never wanted to touch it again. I love the graphics but they are jarring to a lot of people. (My wife's not a "gamer" but has spent hundreds of hours in Borderlands and Minecraft over the years.)
She got all the way through "The Case of the Golden Idol" though, which is a totally different experience but probably uses similar bits of the brain. I'll try her on Pentiment next, but I suspect she'll get bored quickly.
I think Outer Wilds is brilliant, but the ability required to precisely control that spaceship is way beyond any casual player.
You mean those casual players who, after a bit of time spent familiarizing with controls, can control things like Flappy Bird or all those running-jumping-three-lanes-with-obstacles mobile games with near-pixel perfection, putting even seasoned "serious" players to shame? :)
The Outer Wilds ship controls are not too complicated, but the player needs motivation to get used to them initially.
Hmm... In Outer Wilds your ship is moving in 3D space, close to objects with gravity (some of them moving) and you control thrust and rotation on multiple axes while looking through a small porthole.
In Flappy Bird you repeatedly press a single button to flap.
I don't think they're remotely comparable, but YMMV!
You’re talking about games that have extremely limited axis of movement, while yes anyone can eventually go extremely fast with them, initially your options are so limited that learning is trivial.
Outer Wilds is one of the few games with truly 3D movement as part of it’s blood. Not just a jump but a jetpack and ship that demand traversal of the third dimension. And I’ve taught enough people who are new to games over my life to know how hard they find using a controller in a game with more simple set ups initially. Outer Wilds…a casual gamer could probably learn it, but to someone who has rarely used a controller or mouse/keyboard movement in a gaming context it would be quite a bit more difficult.
I really don't get people who have a lot of trouble with the Outer Wilds ship controls. Is it just that people don't expect Newtonian mechanics and treat it like FreeSpace or something?
Then again, I'm the kind of person who plays DCS, has over 350 sends in Getting Over It (one left handed), and flies the VTOL VR AH-94 with SAS off, so I'm probably not a good baseline.
To be fair, a lot of modern games over simplify controls for a large variety of gameplay elements. I think its an expectations thing. The closest games I played that share Outer Wilds control complexity are the original Lunar Lander, Solar Jetman, and Space Engineers.
The Case of the Golden Idol was such a sleeper hit for me last year. I'm always looking for more games that capture the same feeling that Outer Wilds and Obra Dinn did and Golden Idol absolutely scratched that itch in the best way!
If you haven't seen it, I recommend checking out The Forgotten City. The time loop/learning more each "run" reminded me of Outer Wilds, and I enjoyed the story/mystery.
I am a filthy casual and I can control the Outer Wilds spaceship just fine? I don't think it has to do with gamerness.
I get stuck on the puzzles and give up for a while (days, weeks, months), because I only can get through a single rebirth or maybe 2 per play session (due to my casualness, other commitments, etc). But every time I come back, I can fling the ship around the system no prob, just can't remember enough of what I did last time to progress.
On the other hand, my son smashes every vehicle in every game into every wall he can find. That boy needs some driving lessons, stat.
Yeah the ship controls are the major barrier. They tweaked it a bit at some point and it’s better, also much prefer mouse and keyboard to controller personally. Trying to fly the ship was where my boyfriend flunked out of outer wilds.
I don’t think you need to love video games to love Obra Dinn, a lot of what makes it weird and hard to play are the things that make it unlike any other video game.
It’s definitely a game for people who love complex puzzles and have a lot of patience. I think someone who loves super complex puzzles who has barely touched a video game before could still like Obra Dinn. (Countered to Outer Wilds which, while a more generally accessible great puzzle game, has a control scheme that would he incredibly painful for people not already somewhat familiar with 3D game movement)
> The Outer Wilds (not worlds) is another one that I think rivals Obra Dinn, and is more accessible. It might be the best narrative-focused puzzle game ever made.
If only I could play it again for the first time. There's really nothing quite like it.
By the way, it's just Outer Wilds, no "The". Still easily confused with The Outer Worlds, though.
Outer Wilds is probably one of the top ten video games of the last decade. It's not perfect but it mixes the groundhog's-day mechanic with Myst-like elements, all under a folk space genre umbrella.
I almost wish for amnesia to be able to play it for the first time again.
It's very much a unique and artistically sound game, but geeze that aesthetic really wore on me to the point of physical fatigue. I suspect it was in part because of the crisp screen I played on (heavy contrast of light and dark). It was hard on my eyes, and the gameplay mechanic of "elminate the suspects" wore on me in an entirely different way. In the end, I respect the work, but I certainly can't recommend it broadly.
The game is so realistic and engaging that after playing it for two hours, I honestly felt a bit seasick. I had to turn it off and haven’t come back since, but I still very much intend to!
There's some slack with just guessing randomly when you're down to something like three candidates for who someone might be. Some of the definite hints get very obscure and a normal playthrough will probably end up using a bit guesswork.
I tried playing it a while ago, and it was just really boring at the start, I couldn't push through it. There was no idea of what my goal was, there was no explanation of what was happening or an idea of how I'm supposed to find more information. It was just "this person died, and there's no info on who they are" a bunch. I assume it gets better, so I'll probably give it another try soon, but yeah, the start of the game didn't hook me
I think the "intro" is designed to show the core gameplay loop quite explicitly – find a dead body, see the vision of the past, find another, see a clue, find a third, put 1/2/3 together and know what happened, and have that confirmed by the game.
This took me 15-20 mins while reading the tutorial and notebook content and at the end it was pretty clear to me what came next. I've seen similar experiences in reviews of the game.
If you quit before the end of that loop it would be pretty unclear, but it's fairly short so do try to push through. If you did complete that and aren't hooked, that's fine, maybe it's not your sort of thing. If you completed the loop and didn't understand what was going on then it might be worth playing through it again and taking more time to read the instructions as it's all fairly explicit.
It’s essentially one of those “Alice, Mary, And Bob could be at one of three locations” puzzles, just with more than 70 people, a much more complex set of things for the locations, and instead of simple sentences as clues you have last words and frozen movements in time as your clues.
The way the game sets up its clues is brilliant but ultimately that sort of game isn’t for everyone. You do have to figure out a lot from small bits of information.
Which game is "for everyone" though? Pac-man? Lots of people hate pac-man and similar twitch-based games. Bejeweled and its clones? Would I really want Lukas Pope to be making Bejeweled clones?
I don’t know why “isn’t for everyone” is shorthand for “is something only a small subset of the population will enjoy”, in American English, but for some reason it is.
And no, I’d rather people make extremely interesting games that will be 10/10s for the people who love them and 5/10s for everyone else. (And as a person who loves both paper puzzles and puzzle video games, I love Obra Dinn) Just wanted the person who made that comment to understand why it’s a game a lot of people will bounce off of.
There was an interesting profile on Lucas Pope in Ars Technica years ago. [0] What struck me was that he's very development tools oriented. Development not as a means to an end, but as much a love letter to the process itself. Comes through in every aspect of what he does. Couldn't come up with anything more inspiring if I tried tbh.
The biggest "explosion" there has got to be Dwarf Fortress, where the interplay of every object and aspect of the game causes some really interesting emergent behaviour (like catsplosions or whatnot).
This goes for any type of product development. Speed is a requirement for innovation (you need to try lots of things to see what sticks, and if you can only try things slowly then not many things will be tried), and good tooling is a requirement for speed.
Best, of course, is if you find ways to use off-the-shelf tooling (maybe with some exaltation) so you can spend more time on the thing you're supposed to be doing. Either way, you should have a toolmaker in the team.
The gameplay seems different, the only thing in common is the "window" showing a random person -- er, alien -- and the limited desk space. Everything else seems different to me.
> The accelerometer is oriented for holding the device flat on its back. You're looking through a vertical window here so the metaphor doesn't hold. There's a missing axis that precludes vertically-oriented readings.
Is it just me, or does that sounds like a really bad hardware decision regarding the accelerometer? With that limitation what could you still use it for other than digital variations of a marble maze?
Lukas Pope is a true artist. He is without doubt one of the best game designers of this generation.
I don't intend to get a Playdate (it's unavailable anyway, right?) but I do admire this guy and I enjoy reading his blog and updates.
He really is a genius. I don't say this lightly. A lot of people rave about games which are essentially either tech demos (impressive, but is the game really good?) or a bunch of cutscenes with a dodgy/cliché story by wannabe film directors.
Not Pope. He really focuses on engrossing gameplay and novel ideas. His art is always in service to the game. Where else would I get a game about an immigration office stamping entry permits -- an engrossing, fascinating game?
Yes, building stories out of the experience of applying mechanics is the thing unique to games, "agency as art." We tend to call games "good" when they most resemble one of the other two prominent narrative art formats, movies and novels. But games aren't better at being those media than those media themselves are, it's a creative dead end imo.
He seems to have a really good sense of what games can do that is actually unique to the medium of games.
58 comments
[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadKinda wondering why Lua on the PlayDate seems to have performance issues in his game. Doesn't seem the game does very graphic intensive stuff.
And from my experience LÖVE [0] is quite fast as is LÖVR. I would think Lua should be able to handle much more, but perhaps the animations in the article don't tell the full story.
Perhaps the PlayDate doesn't make use of LuaJIT [1] as LÖVE does? Or perhaps the hardware of the PlayDate itself is just much slower than I would expect.
---
[0]: https://love2d.org
[1]: https://luajit.org
In such environment you'd best utilize Lua for configuration, implementing branching dialogs, scripting the story events and similar occasionally-triggered high level code that needs frequent tweaking. A more static project (turn-based, or a card game) could be done just in Lua. Using interpreted Lua in hot loops will not only drag the frame rate, it will also bring down the battery life.
Luckily even the plain Lua can easily be integrated with C, so it's not that difficult to take a chunk of Lua-prototyped code and push it down to C. For LuaJIT it's a non-issue for most part (and most algorithms can be reworked to be more efficient while staying in Lua).
Obra Dinn is a top five game for me. If you haven't spent a weekend binging it I can't recommend it enough.
Savour it though, you can only play it "for real" once.
The man is an artist. An artisan. He makes no two games the same, and he is not a copycat. He really explores the design space and comes up with something novel.
I think he is the best game designer of this age. Sorry if it sounds hyperbolic, and you'd be right to doubt it -- but he truly is.
Obra Dinn - You're an insurance adjuster filling out paperwork
Papers, Please - Dystopian document simulator, you're a low ranking customs agent in a soviet style country.
Obra Dinn was an incredible work of art, but it's not accessible by any definition of the word. I don't think anyone would enjoy it if they weren't already deeply in love with video games and puzzles.
The Outer Wilds (not worlds) is another one that I think rivals Obra Dinn, and is more accessible. It might be the best narrative-focused puzzle game ever made.
She got all the way through "The Case of the Golden Idol" though, which is a totally different experience but probably uses similar bits of the brain. I'll try her on Pentiment next, but I suspect she'll get bored quickly.
I think Outer Wilds is brilliant, but the ability required to precisely control that spaceship is way beyond any casual player.
The Outer Wilds ship controls are not too complicated, but the player needs motivation to get used to them initially.
In Flappy Bird you repeatedly press a single button to flap.
I don't think they're remotely comparable, but YMMV!
Outer Wilds is one of the few games with truly 3D movement as part of it’s blood. Not just a jump but a jetpack and ship that demand traversal of the third dimension. And I’ve taught enough people who are new to games over my life to know how hard they find using a controller in a game with more simple set ups initially. Outer Wilds…a casual gamer could probably learn it, but to someone who has rarely used a controller or mouse/keyboard movement in a gaming context it would be quite a bit more difficult.
Game is totally worth it though.
Then again, I'm the kind of person who plays DCS, has over 350 sends in Getting Over It (one left handed), and flies the VTOL VR AH-94 with SAS off, so I'm probably not a good baseline.
https://forgottencitygame.com/
It looks right up my alley, thanks for the recommendation.
I get stuck on the puzzles and give up for a while (days, weeks, months), because I only can get through a single rebirth or maybe 2 per play session (due to my casualness, other commitments, etc). But every time I come back, I can fling the ship around the system no prob, just can't remember enough of what I did last time to progress.
On the other hand, my son smashes every vehicle in every game into every wall he can find. That boy needs some driving lessons, stat.
It’s definitely a game for people who love complex puzzles and have a lot of patience. I think someone who loves super complex puzzles who has barely touched a video game before could still like Obra Dinn. (Countered to Outer Wilds which, while a more generally accessible great puzzle game, has a control scheme that would he incredibly painful for people not already somewhat familiar with 3D game movement)
If only I could play it again for the first time. There's really nothing quite like it.
By the way, it's just Outer Wilds, no "The". Still easily confused with The Outer Worlds, though.
I almost wish for amnesia to be able to play it for the first time again.
I think the "intro" is designed to show the core gameplay loop quite explicitly – find a dead body, see the vision of the past, find another, see a clue, find a third, put 1/2/3 together and know what happened, and have that confirmed by the game.
This took me 15-20 mins while reading the tutorial and notebook content and at the end it was pretty clear to me what came next. I've seen similar experiences in reviews of the game.
If you quit before the end of that loop it would be pretty unclear, but it's fairly short so do try to push through. If you did complete that and aren't hooked, that's fine, maybe it's not your sort of thing. If you completed the loop and didn't understand what was going on then it might be worth playing through it again and taking more time to read the instructions as it's all fairly explicit.
The way the game sets up its clues is brilliant but ultimately that sort of game isn’t for everyone. You do have to figure out a lot from small bits of information.
And no, I’d rather people make extremely interesting games that will be 10/10s for the people who love them and 5/10s for everyone else. (And as a person who loves both paper puzzles and puzzle video games, I love Obra Dinn) Just wanted the person who made that comment to understand why it’s a game a lot of people will bounce off of.
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/from-uncharted-to-obr...
"Great tools help make great games. Spend as much time on tools as possible" (c) J.Romero.[1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFziBfvAFnM&t=884s
Best, of course, is if you find ways to use off-the-shelf tooling (maybe with some exaltation) so you can spend more time on the thing you're supposed to be doing. Either way, you should have a toolmaker in the team.
founders: you want a toolmaker that can build fast iterable tools that effectively balance the needs of Eng/Product/Design when you grow past 10+.
Is it just me, or does that sounds like a really bad hardware decision regarding the accelerometer? With that limitation what could you still use it for other than digital variations of a marble maze?
From a technology perspective, 1bpp lends itself to some pretty hilarious optimizations relative to AAA ray-traced alternatives.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1763030/Master_Key/
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/778295166/master-key/
https://minitgame.com
https://store.steampowered.com/app/609490/Minit/
I don't intend to get a Playdate (it's unavailable anyway, right?) but I do admire this guy and I enjoy reading his blog and updates.
He really is a genius. I don't say this lightly. A lot of people rave about games which are essentially either tech demos (impressive, but is the game really good?) or a bunch of cutscenes with a dodgy/cliché story by wannabe film directors.
Not Pope. He really focuses on engrossing gameplay and novel ideas. His art is always in service to the game. Where else would I get a game about an immigration office stamping entry permits -- an engrossing, fascinating game?
He seems to have a really good sense of what games can do that is actually unique to the medium of games.