On David Lynch

David Lynch died recently, and I'm at the age that it really threw me for a loop. I don't need to sell anyone on the creative tour de force that Lynch was, I don't need to tell anyone about how his work was often medium defining. Twin Peaks is still one of the best TV series ever made, it's influence creeps into so much contemporary art across genres and medium. He was an inimitable master of his craft. I hope he's doing some fishing.

I'll circle back to Lynch, but I want to take a moment to tell a story about serendipity. A few weeks ago at work the audio book version of Dave Rubin's 'The Creative Act' floated through my youtube recommendations. I didn't really know who Rubin was (and I still don't for all intents and purposes), so I ignored it. It fell out of my recommendations for a week or so before popping up again. When it came back around I said "Alright fine".  I still need to finish it but I found no shortage of interesting ideas in it. Rubin talks about the universe sort of willing things to be, and the quality of an artists creative output is a direct relationship between a person's "sensitivity" to that universal will.  He even goes on to suggest that this sensitivity also tends to wreak havoc on the artist unprepared to channel that sensitivity(see addiction, oblivion seeking behaviors). One example of that 'universal will' Rubin identifies early on, is that if an idea or a concept appears to you twice in a brief period of time, Rubin says that at the very least that's an idea worth investigating, if not a direct message from the universe, there are no coincidences. Not even algorithmic ones.

In a lot of ways Rubin's book rhymes with Alexander's 'Timeless Way', both use metaphors for creative works unfolding or emerging, or otherwise making themselves known to us rather than being crafted and constructed by us.  Rubin approaches the matter from a more magical perspective which itself rhymes with Lynch's creative process.  Lynch in his book on creative work, styles ideas as fish. Small surface level fish being available to us most of the time, but bigger more significant and more impactful fish are caught by opening yourself up to that sea of human consciousness.  I've certainly felt that in my design work, when I try to 'summon' or 'produce' ideas they're often thin, shallow, reiterations of familiar tropes, a rock tumbling of ideas and concepts that I'm familiar with. The good ideas aren't so easy to come by. 

On new additions

While I'm very satisfied with the core gameplay loop there are still more experiments I want to do most of these are inspired by what Alexander might would call forces. Basically forces are the things that happen in a place. Alexander says it's important to simply see and respond to forces that exist, designing for the way things 'ought' to be is designing for a thing that will never exist, because the design fails to acknowledge or respond to extant forces. In the spirit of resolving those forces I'm looking for things that people say that they want to do be able to do, one of things that I see is that I want to be able to slide placed tiles around on the grid like you would a slider puzzle. So placed Tiles could be moved to empty squares or the tiles that have been placed could be rearranged to a certain extent, but without allowing the player 'unlimited' attempts to get things right. Another thing that I've been working on are blocking tiles, tiles that either completely or conditionally make a player unable to place a tile in a given space, the challenge with those is that I don't know when to introduce the

On player experience

Playtest's have provided a lot of useful feedback. One of the things I've heard a lot is a low level of confusion around how the operators are going to change, and how a given tile will affect the score in a given collection. The next QOL feature I'm going to be working on is testing a highlight system so that the player will be able to see those changes before they place a tile, another change in a similar vein to that one was disabling the cursor when the player is dragging a tile, previously there was a good chance that the cursor would hide some valuable information. Not completely certain how I can manage that on mobile but We'll figure something out. 

Another change the players requested, and which I'm still uncertain about are auto updating scores. They're in the current Build (0.0.41) however they are also having unexpected implementation issues. As you can see in the picture below the eight isn't properly updating the scores it's a part of, it will however update properly when there is at least one other tile in the row.

The primary cause of my hesitancy to update the scores on the fly is based on comments from the creator of Balatro. He purposefully didn't add a reliable score calculation because that surprise and the inherent drama of watching a number rise toward another without the certainty that you'll move on in the run was something that he found players enjoying.  The other side of that coin is that players have created third party tools do just calculate your score for you. Maybe the happy medium is a player directed toggle.