Original tags were: gamedev, gamedesign, programming, rant

every 6-8 months i’m possessed by the desire to try and make something akin to 0x10c and considering A) how many games there already are about programming and B) how many failed attempts there have been to remake 0x10c (one reddit post counted 21), i feel like it has to be an instinct certain kinds of game developers just innately have, similar to how certain kinds of dev just really want to make their own dwarf-fortress/imsim style magnum opus.

“i think programming is fun and fictional consoles like pico-8 are cool, what if i made a game where you program a fictional computer to control other stuff, that’d be fun AND cool!”

and like, sometimes it works! there’s absolutely an audience for games about programming (your audience is basically just other devs but if your intent isn’t to make money off of it thats probably fine) but even then it seems like making something where the programming gameplay is actually fun is really hard

“its just not fun to play” was one of the main reasons 0x10c died in the first place and i think its pretty clear thats why a lot of the clones suffer the same fate. its the biggest issue i come up against when trying to draft out this idea each time it comes to me, how do you incorporate “a virtual computer you program” with an actually enjoyable gameplay loop, lean too hard on the programming being crucial and you risk a game that’s basically programming for programming sake, lean too hard on other gameplay aspects and the programming becomes kind of vestigial, why engage with it? is there a failure state? what happens to the code you wrote if you fail? if you just return to a save state, can you have stakes? if there ARE stakes are people going to accept losing their code in the failure state? how much breadth is there for solutions? is every player going to end up writing basically the same solutions? what reasons are there for players to improve their solutions after their first one works? are the game’s systems just initially impenetrable until the player commits to writing code for the first 30 minutes? how do you tutorialise? etc etc

its a huge mess! if you look for other games doing something similar you realise its often best just not to. most other games in the same vein just ditch fully fledged programming for something more akin to a CLI as that way you don’t grow committed to anything you write (see: duskers, quadrilateral cowboy) and games that DO lean into proper programming will often be pretty low stakes (see: autonauts, bitburner)

each time the desire to make a game like this comes over me it always dies out in the mental drafting stage because i inevitably hit all these questions and go “nah, i don’t see this working out”, but because i’m not giving it a go and getting it out of my system i think thats why it keeps coming back to me

i guess at some point i just need to dedicate some time to trying to make it, if for no other reason than to prove to myself that yeah, in practice its not fun so i stop getting the urge to make it lmao