Board Thread:Off Topic/@comment-29646689-20180430203301/@comment-27790518-20180520134415

tdlr if planet has traitors kill it with bad stuff but if planet has good stuff just take the trators done

This game is a homage to a free game that came out in 2002, titled ‘Sexy Hiking’. The author of the game was Jazzuo, a mysterious Czech designer who was known at the time as the father of B-games. B-Games are rough assemblages of found objects. Designers slap them together very quickly and freely, and they’re often too rough and unfriendly to gain much of a following. They’re built more for the joy of building them than as polished products.

In a certain way Sexy Hiking is the perfect embodiment of a B-game. It’s built almost entirely of found and recycled parts, and it’s one of the most unusual and unfriendly games of its time. In it, your task is simply to drag yourself up a mountain with a hammer. The act of climbing, in the digital world or in real life, has certain essential properties that give the game it’s flavour. No amount of forward progress is guaranteed; some cliffs are too sheer or too slippery. And the player is constantly, unremittingly in danger of falling and losing everything.

Anyway when you start Sexy Hiking, you’re standing next to a tree, which blocks the way to the entire reset of the game. It might take you an hour to get over that tree. A lot of people never got past it. You prod and poke at it, exploring the limits of your reach and strength, trying to find a way up. There’s a sense of truth in that lack of compromise. Most obstacles in videogames are fake - you can be completely confident in your ability to get through them, once you have the correct method of the correct equipment, or just by spending enough time. In that sense, every pixellated obstacle in Sexy Hiking is real.

The obstacles in Sexy Hiking are unyielding, and that makes the game uniquely frustrating. But I’m not sure Jazzuo intended to make a frustrating game - the frustration is just essential to the act of climbing and it’s authentic to the process of building a game about climbing. A funny thing that happened to me as I was building this mountain: I’d have an idea for an obstacle, and I’d build it, test it, and… it would usually turn out to be unreasonably hard. But I couldn’t bring myself to make it easier. It already felt like my inability to get past the new obstacle was my fault as a player, rather than as the builder.

Imaginary mountains build themselves from our efforts to climb them, and it’s our repeated attempts to reach the summit that turns those mountains into something real. When you’re building a videogame world you’re building with ideas. And that can be like working with quick-cement. You mold your ideas into a certain shape that can be played with, And in the process of playing with them they begin to harden and set Until they are immutable, like rock. At that point you can’t change the world - not without breaking it into pieces and starting fresh with new ideas.

good luck, have fun.