mooonmagic

[mooonmagic]

mystery zome

before i started working on near my sins // awaken thy blood [newline] or, never feel pain x274 captured beast banana chalice (_frogdirection360 rancheros dream shareware vision) everlastic legacy of jazz, i quickly populated the rest of the bonus zomes with dummy objects so they would feel more finished to me. these objects don’t have any movement code, don’t fire on the player, but they blow up when a banana hits them and they give a bonus banana, so that if i couldn’t think of something fun for them to do they were at least functional and i could move on.

today i discovered that every single object i added to banana chalice from that time is missing a tiny bit of code so what happens is that it throws an error if a banana hits it. easy to fix but i have to fix it for all of them because when i started making this game i thought it would be really small and i would be done in a month so i didn’t bother to make proper parent objects.

next up: i will make it harder to move the cat infinitely far away from the center of each bonus zome, so that players have to try really hard to get lost in the chaotic edges of zome country or where ever it is that you are flying the cat.

[mooonmagic]

i just ate a lot of a sourdough bread

i just ate a lot of a sourdough bread that had gone stale and here is how i did it: i poured water on it and put it in the microwave at work and then i ate what i could and it was a delicious and gracious feeling but i also threw a lot away because it was too hard to eat. it's november 13 2018 and i am sitting down to write about banana chalice because i just started working on it again yesterday but also i am just writing about eating a bunch of bread because that's what is going on in my life. i took a long time to get to this point, where working on a computer game and eating a bread are having the same parity for me, it feels good and i feel good but also fragile.

i realize that for a long time i was worried about waste and determined not to edit banana chalice or anything i was making at all, just keep adding to them forever more and more ligaments until everything i did was connected or to be connected, but this burned me out so thoroughly that i did nothing after near my sins // awaken thy blood [newline] or, never feel pain x274 captured beast banana chalice (frogdirection360 rancheros dream shareware vision) everlastic legacy of jazz, nothing for an entire year. i am ok now with just sealing those efforts off and moving forward. it is a relief to walk away from that desert and to say, that existed once and will never exist again, it can be burned up and fulfilled and i don't owe it anything.

here is what i did yesterday: i changed the title screen to say "BANANA CHALICE" once again and it says "PRESS BUTTON" if you do not press a button for awhile.

here is what i am doing now: i am finishing the code that makes things move around in the bonus zomes. i am writing music and recording it to change our feelings as we fly through the zomes. i am recording myself as i speak the names of the zomes.

here is what i will be doing: i will make some drawings that are not For anything. i will make songs to throw away. i will tell the dog to do something thirty times, and the dog will mostly not do it. i will pour milk into cups for my kids.

[mooonmagic]

I created a small metroidvania in 72 hours for Ludum Dare 40. After much serious thought, I named it “Muldulamulom”. In about a week I’ll release an improved version, with cutscenes & more noises, but, if you wish to experience it in its raw game-jam form, you may play in your browser here: https://mason-lindroth.itch.io/muldulamulom

[mooonmagic]

the close analogy between “original indie games” and fan work, the ways both can be read as some correction of existing works or a re-investment of meaning into what’s always on the verge of becoming an empty economic form. what if this game didn’t suck? what if it could acknowledge certain different types of experience? what if the mysterious boundaries seperating art from audience (different levels of access to various productive means, whether tools or marketing, actors etc) were erased so that i could be friends with sonic. but where these problems would be solved on a purely aesthetic level, using the language provided by the artworks themselves, as if every form had buried within it the tools of its own transcendence (which they arguably do, but where it points is less out of the world than back into it- as a break from the circumscribed realm of the aesthetic into life as such). maybe a kind of vulgar aestheticism is always at play, and not entirely to be resented, as it necessarily involves a skewed kind of suspicion of “the way things are” which is implicitly at least proto-critical and possibly suggestive of the way things could be better. but i  think it comes with another tendency, that of withdrawal - where the issue is less the intrusion of specific kinds of material or societal constraints as the intrusion of material presence at all, seen as an alien body in the mix, stendhal’s gunshot at the concert. there is maybe a parallel here to what’s increasingly referred to as “technocratism” – the vision of government as a placid series of administrative tweaks, which could float happily free of the bitterly interest- and class-stricken sectarianism of party politics mostly by pretending that a genuine conflict in anyone’s interests doesn’t really exist. and which consequently even at its most high-minded finds more common cause with those who have satisfactory positions in the current order than any dispossessed who might want to topple it, which can’t but deplore the continual redirection of energies to secure those positions already considered as settled and signed-off. the cultural expression of technocratism is design - invisible, non-intrusive, drawing both from metric-based consensus and unassailable professional expertise, content to improve processes and leave the contexts wherein they’re used intact. and at risk of re-opening up old wounds, ha ha ha, it’s maybe time to consider again at this distance all those early and embarrassing struggles to formulate a “game design discipline” and the inexplicably, persistently political character this always took, no doubt to the exasperation of many of the original participants who just wanted to keep drawing flowcharts for the perfect super mario level and instead found themselves having to quash dissenters, tooth and claw. in general i think the fundamental logic of the renouncement of material is paranoid in nature; it identifies systematic faults and casts them as the work of interlopers, double agents, foreign elements, provocateurs, to be ever more frantically shaken away. so far i don’t think anyone’s detected the malign hand of the kremlin in those video trailers for no man’s sky but at this point i wouldn’t be surprised.

where does this leave what’s left of aesthetics and working within the format? i do think you can conceivably “change videogames” at least in some way by what you make, although i suspect it will always be in some awful monkey’s-paw-ish way where it will always take place through the worst possible implementation, like you issue a call for games to explore intimacy and end up with 500 about piloting a hovercraft around someone’s inner ear or something. the distortions are not themselves uninteresting and neither are the frantic circular motions of conscience moving around the sealed world of the art work like a goldfish in a little bowl. maybe what’s left is just the old modernist topos, once again, of enacting contradictions, or taking the mocking distortions themselves and relating them to an older model: goethe’s spirit that always denies, which always works evil, always does good.

[mooonmagic]

babel’s tower

[mooonmagic]

puf puf

Keep reading

[mooonmagic]

Crowtel Renovations is out now on Steam! New unlockable story mode, developer commentary, and controller support!

Buy it here! http://store.steampowered.com//app/573520?beta=0

[mooonmagic]

old game! i made DATING SIM a few years ago for droqen's VARIETY GAME JAM where you would try to make one game a day in a different genre each day for 11 days. i made three games during that time i think. https://mooonmagic.itch.io/dating-sim

[mooonmagic]

new game! MACAULAY DAD 2016. i made it with my daughter for the flatgame jam over on itch.io. https://mooonmagic.itch.io/macaulay-dad-2016

[mooonmagic]

[mooonmagic]

Start off 2017 with a dope, tiny roguelike ⊟ 

Released in the dying hours of 2016, Tiny Heist (no relation) is the latest simple but addictive game from Terry Cavanagh of VVVVVV and Super Hexagon fame.

Tine Heist has you playing a cute at-sign with yellow sneakers, dodging searchlights, patrol bots, and sleeping guard dogs while you loot the floor and look for the stairs to the next level. Along the way, you can pick up or buy tools and weapons that will help you survive. Pro-tip: press space to make time pass without actually moving – took me a lot of dying to figure that out!

The game is free and browser-based (a desktop version coming shortly), and I can’t stop playing it! More tiny games please, 2017!

SUPPORT TINY CARTRIDGE Join Club Tiny!

[mooonmagic]

Banner for my friends game http://store.steampowered.com//app/573520?beta=0

[mooonmagic]

💔

I’m playing a show for the first time in over 2 years.  Eleven new songs. 

Fri. Jan. 6th 2017, 5pm, FREE

at The Business, 216 Commercial Ave., Anacortes, Wash. U.S.A.

[mooonmagic]

Hariton Pushwagner

[mooonmagic]

one of my favorite childhood vidgames

[mooonmagic]

lunch break

1. before trying to determine or invent a central developmental tendency in videogames it’s worth considering if the value of this format is specifically that of a space for local encounters: encounters between the material life of persons, the development and distribution of technology, and the social fantasy of what that technology means. 2. such a conception would also allow additional focus not just on the format’s capacity to synthesise (“see how the new format allows x to do y!”) but also on its role as a place where tensions and inconsistencies between various tendencies of each aspect can be evaded, dramatised, disguised or worked through (“see how the new format symbolically solves problems resulting from the inability of y to do x!”). 3. what comes out of the subsequent idea of “videogames” as a fundamentally nebulous site of the symbolic interactions between existing tendencies? an image something like that of a witch’s cauldron, forever churning, where the most unlikely fragments of life and history bubble towards the surface before disappearing once more back into the murk: courtly epic, urban planning, pet care, caspar david friedrich, horror movies, stock management, skateboarding, questionaires… similar to the notion that the content of a dream is selected to allow the dreamer to remain asleep, we could say the content of a videogame is selected to allow the player to keep playing a videogame - which in part involves mediating ,obscuring, or dissolving the different contradictions and tensions that exist within the context where the videogame is played (for example the contexts of leisure, of consumption and usage). 4. similarly possible that the “game” part of videogame is just such content - that rather than an integral structural component it exists as a broad imagined paradigm used both to explore computer technology on the basis of a series of correspondances and also to enable a kind of fantasy identification through which those explorations can be concieved of in a certain light, as a delimited form of social experience. from this we can say the question is not so much “what are the unique properties of videogames” as “what are the unique problems that the category of videogames was invented to erase?”. what is the role of this term plays in mediating through the different aspects of culture that it must engage, what is the fantasy that the notion of game offers of the way we percieve and engage with the contemporary, what is the relation of this term to the concept of the virtual? 5. if “game” is one particularly durable notion of the imagined contemporary then surely “virtual” is as well, and the two are paired frequently enough to make me wonder if each one functions as a kind of implicit psychic complement to the other. f. jameson among others has speculated on the links between 1980s cyberpunk and contemporaneous developments in finance capital, which both required new conceptual models as it grew more expanded and diffuse and which also increasingly seemed, through the magic of globalized outsourcing, less and less connected to any form of material reality; such a model suggests both why the virtual became arguably the primary non-apocalytpic vision of futurity but also arguably identified with futurity per se, the futurity of speculation and of seemingly unhaltable expansion. and i’d argue that, if videogames orient themselves along one pole by relation to the figure of the game, the other pole is determined no less decisively by reference to the virtual and thus to the future. the historical development of the format would be difficult to map out from the perspective of game design alone: far more tenable to my mind is the notion of that history as a continuous struggle to synthesise these two categories. videogames make less sense as entertainment than they do as future entertainment, where the quality of futurity is used to compensate for any defects in structure, and where the fixed social form of computer manipulation that is the game is used to provide a safe and grounded structure through which that future could be integrated within normal life. this dual structure also contradicts itself as much as it aligns, as the closed structure of the game must struggle to accomodate the affective open-endedness that is the allure of the future, which in turn perpetually grinds against efforts to ground it in repetitive practice and which must constantly engage with and absorb fragments of the contemporary in order to retain a viable effect. 6. the failed nature of this synthesis and the eternally provisional status of the drives that would make it up are what make me wonder if the true space of videogames is less this endless, mindless back and forth than the hole opened up by the perpetual failure of same, where the hybrid objects that result can fall back and crash into the present day, like the alien garbage from roadside picnic. this is what i mean by “a space for local encounters”: a format where the very incapability and instability of efforts to finally achieve unproblematised tech singularity result in the abrupt re-emergence of the very abysses it exists to cover, and in a temporary irradiation of the everyday by imaginary futures.

[mooonmagic]

i love the leaning big foot friends

Which one do you like best