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silveradeptChallenge #14 says to abandon the familiar and follow the call of novelty to where it may lead.
It's not true that the older you get, the less things that are new to you, but it does sometimes mean that having to figure out where the novelty is can be harder. For example, I've been illustrating the signs for one of my programs with trying to draw things according to reference for several months now, which is new, in the sense that I haven't been trying to do it before, but isn't new in that I've been a dabbler in drawing for a significant amount of time now. (I haven't taken any pictures of them to share, because doing so suggests they might be something more than the ephemera that I need them to be so I can do them without having a complete freeze-up panic about how it has to be perfect if it's going to go where other people can see it for more than the few minutes it exists on the sign.) I occasionally think that I'd like to learn stenography, so much so that I have a keyboard and software that I can so that with, but I haven't actually put the effort-effort into doing it, even though it's something I'd like to do. (The keys are pretty close to each other, and I'm having a little trouble getting my brain to work with me to make the right chords. It'll come with practice, I'm sure.)
There's the new operating systems that I put my various machines on over the winter break which seem to be working excellently and well, even if they have the occasional hitch here and there, but that's computers for you. There's the new books that I'm reading and completing, several of which are in audiences or working on specific kinds of cultures and histories that I don't know much about. I did an entirely new set of December Days which could be new, but is also not new, because it's the latest iteration of the overarching concept. The works I'm creating for various exchanges and projects are all new, in that those words have not been put together in that form by me before. (Which, because exchange, cannot be snippeted or excerpted as their proof.)
There's a fair amount of new and unexpected in my personal life, as things I had thought about but not actually expected to come into existence are doing so with alarming regularity, even as other things remain out of reach at the moment. If I wanted to be philosophical, there's more than enough strains of thought that ask us to pay attention to this moment now, because it is unique and will not be replicated ever again, so being able to appreciate its newness, uniqueness, and full color of that moment, rather than thinking about the past or the future, unlocks all kinds of beauty and new ways of looking at the world, especially in those strains of thought that say the past and the future are illusions of mind compared to the experience of Now. So we could all be doing something new even as we do the things that we are used to doing, because we are doing them in this time, in this place, at this very moment.
But I think the challenge is asking for something a little more concrete than taking a Zen look at it. So I decided to grab one of the games at random from my list of many, many games, and go at it to see what I could do with it. I ended up choosing Patch Quest. (Because it had a small install size, and it looked like a game type that I hadn't played before.)
It turned out not to be a game type I was unfamiliar with, a roguelike-style game with twin-stick shooter capabilities, bullet hell possibilities, and a lot of hazards around. These are the kinds of games that can sometimes have too much visual information with them at any given time, especially from designers who believe the most effective way of working their games is to force the player's brain into either processing far too much information at once or having it shut down, and therefore having the player end up missing crucial details that get them damaged or killed. It's a great aggravation because the way that my brain works is that it wants to try and process everything, and that's not possible, especially in the early game scenarios where the player is slowly building up their capabilities through failure and unlocking the more permanent perks that allow them to progress further in the game and find more interesting things to their liking. But also to defeat more powerful things that scale up their difficulty to match the increased power available to the player character. And with everything shuffling after each run, of course, then it's never being played the same way twice and there's probably some hazards around that need to be incorporated as well. It'll probably occupy my brain for some amount of time, but I don't know whether this will be a game that gets finished, because a lot of roguelikes like to do achievements of the order of "do a complete run without taking a single point of damage!" and that's basically impossible unless you have some setting or artifact that allows you to do just that, tank everything without losing a hit point. Smart designers put those things in their games, so that every person can complete every achievement without having to have inhuman luck or inhuman skill. But most designers just assume that you're willing to sink that much time and effort into doing a run for the low-percentage chance that it might go well.
So, as usual, shout-out to Hades and God Mode, which steadily reduces the damage a character suffers with each failed run, up to a maximum. But also, no love to them for creating an achievement that is "take no damage from this many encounters, one of which is guaranteed to be a boss fight." If God Mode had gone all the way up to 100%, then it wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue, but Supergiant capped it at 80%, and therefore they force the player to keep track of basically everything, or find a build that basically allows them to melt their opponents, bosses included, in one or two shots so that there never has to be a worry about it. (Or something that allows them to basically never have to worry about getting damaged, which the shield is supposed to be useful for, but it never seems to work in my favor, yet.)
In any case, I tried something new, and if it can be bested in a relatively short amount of time, achievements-wise, then perhaps it will be excellent diversion to work with. Some of the small footprint games I've played, though, still take forever to make their achievements, looking at you, 10000000.
Challenge #14
Try something new.
[…]
Do you read fic? Then how about writing a little 'missing moment' scene, such as the day after Jedi Master Qui-Gon Junn describes his ever-eager Padawan Obi-Wan Kenobi as merely competent in Phantom Menace? Dip a toe into a community related to your interest to share insights, write a ship/fandom/character manifesto or just plain gab. If you listen to podcasts, explore one in a new fandom.
How about making icons or vids? Felling fannish broadens horizons, so remix your own fic, bake that Death Star cake, crochet an awesome Kermit The Frog cap or write an unpopular cjaracter/ You'll get creative juices flowing in cosplaying or planking to the tune of I'm Just Ken.
It's not true that the older you get, the less things that are new to you, but it does sometimes mean that having to figure out where the novelty is can be harder. For example, I've been illustrating the signs for one of my programs with trying to draw things according to reference for several months now, which is new, in the sense that I haven't been trying to do it before, but isn't new in that I've been a dabbler in drawing for a significant amount of time now. (I haven't taken any pictures of them to share, because doing so suggests they might be something more than the ephemera that I need them to be so I can do them without having a complete freeze-up panic about how it has to be perfect if it's going to go where other people can see it for more than the few minutes it exists on the sign.) I occasionally think that I'd like to learn stenography, so much so that I have a keyboard and software that I can so that with, but I haven't actually put the effort-effort into doing it, even though it's something I'd like to do. (The keys are pretty close to each other, and I'm having a little trouble getting my brain to work with me to make the right chords. It'll come with practice, I'm sure.)
There's the new operating systems that I put my various machines on over the winter break which seem to be working excellently and well, even if they have the occasional hitch here and there, but that's computers for you. There's the new books that I'm reading and completing, several of which are in audiences or working on specific kinds of cultures and histories that I don't know much about. I did an entirely new set of December Days which could be new, but is also not new, because it's the latest iteration of the overarching concept. The works I'm creating for various exchanges and projects are all new, in that those words have not been put together in that form by me before. (Which, because exchange, cannot be snippeted or excerpted as their proof.)
There's a fair amount of new and unexpected in my personal life, as things I had thought about but not actually expected to come into existence are doing so with alarming regularity, even as other things remain out of reach at the moment. If I wanted to be philosophical, there's more than enough strains of thought that ask us to pay attention to this moment now, because it is unique and will not be replicated ever again, so being able to appreciate its newness, uniqueness, and full color of that moment, rather than thinking about the past or the future, unlocks all kinds of beauty and new ways of looking at the world, especially in those strains of thought that say the past and the future are illusions of mind compared to the experience of Now. So we could all be doing something new even as we do the things that we are used to doing, because we are doing them in this time, in this place, at this very moment.
But I think the challenge is asking for something a little more concrete than taking a Zen look at it. So I decided to grab one of the games at random from my list of many, many games, and go at it to see what I could do with it. I ended up choosing Patch Quest. (Because it had a small install size, and it looked like a game type that I hadn't played before.)
It turned out not to be a game type I was unfamiliar with, a roguelike-style game with twin-stick shooter capabilities, bullet hell possibilities, and a lot of hazards around. These are the kinds of games that can sometimes have too much visual information with them at any given time, especially from designers who believe the most effective way of working their games is to force the player's brain into either processing far too much information at once or having it shut down, and therefore having the player end up missing crucial details that get them damaged or killed. It's a great aggravation because the way that my brain works is that it wants to try and process everything, and that's not possible, especially in the early game scenarios where the player is slowly building up their capabilities through failure and unlocking the more permanent perks that allow them to progress further in the game and find more interesting things to their liking. But also to defeat more powerful things that scale up their difficulty to match the increased power available to the player character. And with everything shuffling after each run, of course, then it's never being played the same way twice and there's probably some hazards around that need to be incorporated as well. It'll probably occupy my brain for some amount of time, but I don't know whether this will be a game that gets finished, because a lot of roguelikes like to do achievements of the order of "do a complete run without taking a single point of damage!" and that's basically impossible unless you have some setting or artifact that allows you to do just that, tank everything without losing a hit point. Smart designers put those things in their games, so that every person can complete every achievement without having to have inhuman luck or inhuman skill. But most designers just assume that you're willing to sink that much time and effort into doing a run for the low-percentage chance that it might go well.
So, as usual, shout-out to Hades and God Mode, which steadily reduces the damage a character suffers with each failed run, up to a maximum. But also, no love to them for creating an achievement that is "take no damage from this many encounters, one of which is guaranteed to be a boss fight." If God Mode had gone all the way up to 100%, then it wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue, but Supergiant capped it at 80%, and therefore they force the player to keep track of basically everything, or find a build that basically allows them to melt their opponents, bosses included, in one or two shots so that there never has to be a worry about it. (Or something that allows them to basically never have to worry about getting damaged, which the shield is supposed to be useful for, but it never seems to work in my favor, yet.)
In any case, I tried something new, and if it can be bested in a relatively short amount of time, achievements-wise, then perhaps it will be excellent diversion to work with. Some of the small footprint games I've played, though, still take forever to make their achievements, looking at you, 10000000.
