Hello, internaut!
I recently came across the idea of permacomputing. In short, it is to computing what permaculture is to agriculture: to use computers more sustainably, and not destroy our planet with them.
Since I want this blog to last, it's already kinda sustainable. However, I am mainly a game creator. Do my games fit in the permacomputing framework? If they don't, can they, and should they?
Video games built to last
The most durable games out there are physical/analog ones. Things like chess, sports, tabletop RPGs, choose-your-own-adventure books, will probably outlive computers. That doesn't mean they can't evolve. They're just harder to kill.
But video games either need a specific kind of computer to run, or for multiplatform ones like web games, specific software like a browser. A good idea is to remove as many dependencies as possible. What's left is called a bedrock platform by the permacomputing community.
No matter what's your strategy, making durable games also improves its accessibility right now. The other day, my PC's window manager crashed, but I was still able to play (and work on) text-based games. Not to mention blind people can play it, it's more lightweight, you can port it to another platform more easily including paper, etc.
Comparing game creation tools
Usually here I would compare game engines and frameworks, and find the most durable one. But this time, I won't do it. Here is why, from least to most important:
- I'd need to write a comparison table, but I'm lazy.
- It depends on the game creator's skills, so it would only help me (at present, maybe not even future me!)
- The right answer depends on the game's purpose: tell a story? Convey an experience? Be a private joke about the university mascot failing to park his car correctly?
- By using different engines, I can stop making a monoculture of games which is completely lost when technology marches on (or when I get a new computer). I'm looking at you, my early GameMaker games which can't play MIDI music in Wine.
I realized that last point in the middle of writing this post. I feel like I took way too much time searching for the one game engine that will support all of my games. Instead, maybe I should just go back to learning new things? I don't have professional projects cooking right now, so I can afford it.
Let's hope this lack of choice will diversify my skills. Let's also hope it won't make me abandon even more prototypes after spending too much time porting them from one tech to another out of curiosity.
Speaking of (or rather, writing of? typing of?), if you're curious, I mostly develop games in:
- Godot Engine, especially versions 3.x for small projects
- Standard web technologies (HTML, CSS etc)
- C and the terminal
And occasionally, I tinker in:
Let me know if there's a tiny tool you think I might be interested in.
Okay but for real,
what to use?
To tell an interactive story, I said in previous blog posts that the best choice for me is to stick to a state machine structure and develop in web technologies or lightweight languages like C. Keep it simple!
For more complex stories, or with more elaborate graphics, a mainstream game engine is also fine. Just make sure you know what you lose if you can't use the engine for some reason. If your story data is in plain text, it's perfect for the long term.
For "games that aren't stories" (with strong gameplay elements), it's more complicated, but I keep it free and open source. And lightweight as usual, even if as I type this, I can feel the ghost of premature optimization whispering.
For other resources like music, widespread open formats are great too. I like small file formats that are their own sources, like MIDI or MOD/XM. For baked-in audio, it's harder to keep the source at hand.
Finally, there is one metric in particular that I like: clarity.
It comes from non-permacomputing game design and is distinct from simplicity. If your game has a clear set of rules, it's easy to memorize, be it for our brains or for storage media. To repeat the header quote:
The games that can be fully described as sets of rulesPermacomputing wiki, games page
have the longest potential lifespans.
On that, happy holidays and see ya in the next one!