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What a horrible hateful spiteful character controller, I love it <3 <3 <3 <3 (the way your shadow doesn't even really help with seeing where you're going to land...)

I've never eaten at Denny's though and now I definitely won't.

I hope Alex loved the game you've made for them!!! (underutilized social functionality of game-crafting honestly <3)

It brought me great furious joy to get vicariously angry alongside you - it was worded in such a relatable, yet very dramatic way; this anger against a question that seems so innocuous, yet really acts as a symptom of the sadness of the disease that capitalism has infected our minds with, and this great, seething, scathing monologue against that simple carefree question that carries in its heart all the consumerism, contentification of industry-product-games. And then a hearty chuckle at the end. Fuck that question. Very tasty read, thank you <3

(Also I'm guilty of having asked that question in seeking how to relate my own experiences of the process of making games to the other person's experience, projecting my own struggles onto them. I do think it may have value when discussing craft and sharing insight about the making of things as painters might discuss canvas and brush roughness and painting techniques. It's an opening question that leads into many others, right? So many manifestos deride craft but I can't help but care about it, not to make better products, but because almost all of my personal experience of game-making is trying to improve at the craft aspect. The craft is part of what brings me joy I think?)

really yeah... Death always wins in the end, let's never ever make the work easier for her

lovely that you found anything of worth in here <3

corrivality engine type shit but make it heart aspect

I think I love you? I teared up reading this and I don't really know why. But the words are so beautiful?

<3

(I lied. I know why and it's not just because the "words are beautiful." What a lackluster way to put it. It's powerful, and personal, and good advice, and it's said so thoughtfully and softly, it feels like someone gently taking my hand to walk together through a hedge maze full of thorns)

Beautifully put. I agree. I think something i kind of failed to communicate is the idea that other people giving a shit is not a good measure of "success," whatever that might mean. 

My father is an artist and has struggled all his life with an absence of recognition of any of his work, and thus considers his life and work as an artist a failure; he considers that this brands him talentless and "without a spark." Somehow this has never stopped him from making shit and from taking up new mediums; music production at 40, painting at 50, writing novels at 60. As I have found myself engaged onto a somewhat similar road albeit within different mediums and have experienced a similar and constant struggle with obscurity, this is my answer to that, in a way.

The fact that i might both never attain the artistic skill required to make the works that I'd want to make (in the sense that I compare them to the works of other artists and find them to be technically inferior and lacking, which might make my works redundant or worthless in some senses of those words) and that i will most likely remain in obscurity regardless and throughout - both of these things do not mean that I am a failure as a person, nor as an artist, and neither means that what I am making is pointless or that I should stop.

Because I'm not fighting against obscurity; I am fighting against the void, against death, and every game that I make before I lose that battle is my personal victory. Regardless of quality, regardless of skill, regardless of human connection or obscurity: I win. Every time. I just can't stop winning.

The title is true but the game fails to demonstrate the point by being very good. <3 Wonderful way to become actually aware of your work <3

Thank you I really needed the chuckles this gave me. The need for main characters might be debatable but the need for creatures cannot be disputed.

Lovely lovely lovely writing. Hits on a lot of ideas that were rattling in my head as well. 

Tangentially, I think there's something magical to earnestness, to taking seriously, very seriously, in a fully genuine and sincere way, an absolutely dogshit fully stupid idiot idea or concept and follow it to its conclusion and yet farther still. My favorite genre of any form of media are medias that do this with their premises or worldbuilding, but it works for everything else in a work as well I think. It's like... Don't chicken out just because what you're making doesn't fit in with what has already been made, don't try to make it more palatable, really, absolutely commit to the bit.

Fuck yeah go make those games, fight fight fight fight fight

Wonderful sort of game system, sort of manifesto, full invitation to game design and expression through art and The Conversation. I think it's sort of a generalization/extrapolation from the aspects from FATE and everything else that has you pull the index cards to create situation-based game components on the fly, giving rules-weight to fiction-elements.

For the cards like Nicole the Big Mole is plotting against you... You could make a clock. (I would) Maybe tick it when it feels right, when things go wrong or when you get a golden opportunity. When it's full, destroy the card and make a new one to show the next step in Nicole's big plan.

I love this thing that you wrote <3

no you're underrated

Good and important and full of excellently squiggly shapes <3 Let us all make many things right this moment!!!! <3

Thank you very much, my friend, for taking the time to read it

Thank you velvet for reaching out across the stars, you are very kind <3

Unfortunately, this is, in fact, very good art. (Hard agree with everything.) 

You rule. Love yourself. 

Congratulations on making art, and having made this today, and still making art, and still being there. I hope you sleep well tonight <3 (Also I'm dehydrated so I'm going to drink some water)

Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes the "if it sucks, hit da bricks! YOU CAN LEAVE (clothe shoppi, cops if ur quick)" meme is one of my favorite FAVORITE piece of media ever made by human hands. (I don't think it's normal 1. to have a favorite meme and 2. for that meme to be about a skeleton saying "YOU CAN LEAVE!! REAL WINNERS QUIT" but here we are)

But like I think it's genuinely lifechanging advice. Words to live by. 

Taking the pain slowly out of the process of making until it's effort that you can enjoy (and not the corporate/commercial type of work, but some sort of idea of labor), and once you can't enjoy it, you find a way to enjoy something else, and maybe time can make that specific project new and enjoyable again.

I've been letting my ADHD demon take me by the hand lately - paying extra attention to whenever I stop having fun on a project and start like really really struggling - and lead me to where it wants to go and making whatever game I find over there. 

And fuck if it isn't a finished commercial product, fuck if i don't finish it and just move on, fuck if it's half-baked but I call it done earlier than I would have because I'm not enjoying making it anymore...

However, sometimes you don't want to have made a game, you want to have made that one specific fucking game that doesn't exist yet and that you're the only one that knows how you want it to be and... I feel like there's some form of weird pleasure in pushing yourself through to finish a project like that, pushing against your own limits for a while (without hurting yourself) and getting a result that the process to reach felt some degree of gruesome. I think it kind of has a specific quaity to it sometimes, some works just show a bit of gruesomeness to how they've been made, they feel sweaty in a good way. 

And I feel like you should first learn to enjoy that specific aspect of making a game before you attempt to make "that one game." Otherwise you should just try making "a game", a game being a work that has fluidity, and just has to exist to be a success to yourself, without being measured against some sort of ethereal vision of a specific thing you want to make. Making specific games feels like a trap, almost always, I think, but especially when you're a beginner and you have no idea what you're doing, but you want to make that game, and you're chasing that.

Anyways I love your manifesto and I love chopping vegetables and I love videotome (and I do the point at the screen and smile thing whenever I play a videotome).

Happy game-making <3

I feel like this beautiful essays ties into the current trend of seeing games as services, as implicitly bound-to-be forever games; the authors shackled to their creations that never release but ever update; always needing to grow, to accrue more value for the shareholder-players that did not pay to support an artist and a work of art, but made an investment into promises of future all-consuming CONTENT. 

The authors, the artists should be grateful that the CUSTOMER graces them with their munificent time. But the time of the artist, their life that feeds their art, does not belong to the artist anymore. As soon as the work becomes successful, as soon as it reaches the dreadful audience and the global market and the top of the charts and wishlist and sales. They want to buy our humanity, I think.

And should the creator defy the AUDIENCE, make decisions that doesn't sit right with them, immediately it is followed by review bombing. People with hundreds of hours playing the game leaving negative reviews; taking the holy review score hostage as leverage in a power-struggle with the artist so that the game becomes their vicarious game, satisfying their specific pleasures, as if the ability to be curious, to listen, to observe art as something that stands on its own and that you build a relationship with, warts and all, has been lost between the wallet and the storefront. It feels like they're at war with art and with us.

Fuck the audience. Fuck players. Fuck the market, fuck the retailers, fuck the cascades of sandpaper trying to grind down every game into the smoothest marketability and RETURN ON INVESTMENTS for absolutely everyone except the artists. And in particular fuck anyone that said "dead game" about a work of art that was released and had stopped receiving the updates they're so entitled to. Them, I'll bite clean (not clean) through the whole skull.

Thank you for the manifesto and thank you for the jam.

Fun bag-building game! Really like this fusion between Luck be a Landlord-type item/synergy designs + core loop, with a little balatro-inspired shop, and the Quacks of Quedlinburg / Living Forest type of push your luck bag-building gameplay. (Always a sort of delightful dynamic.)

 Although I do feel like the fact that you can very very easily get to a place where your capacity exceeds your items' values. So that specific tension gets resolved by the mid-game, and then you barely have to ever think about it, so that's slightly unfortunate.

Well-executed and a joy to play, although it lacks an end-point and it has some first-order optimal strategies that runs will very likely gravitate towards. (Juicebox/Monocles exponential scaling with some other things like Cats + Scarecrows or Vampires to eat the scaled-up value then serve as monocle targets.) 

So for me it very much lacks a little replayability right now, but with tighter balancing/content design and a bit more flesh around the bones, I'd happily support this with money.

Exceptionnel, comme d'habitude <3 C'est parfait parce qu'en repérant Patamon, j'étais comme, "PATAMON!!" et je me suis sentie très validée par les dialogues.

https://www.ilovepdf.com -> compresser <3 

(Mon lecteur de pdf met environ soixante-dix (70) ans à charger chaque page sans ça personnellement <3 )

Trop trop cool comme ptit Zine!! Le layout et le design graphique sont dingos, très agréable à lire, très inventif, rigolo, et tout mimsou ! (J'aime trop les choix de fonts !) Bravo !! :D :D

So simple, yet brilliant. There's a sort of purity, touching something close to perfection in game design with this; I'm not sure why it's so stupid, yet instantly captivating - because of how committed to the bit it is, in such a way that it stops being a bit and turns back into a game. There are thousands of ways to make this exact game about recreating deformed pictures using various lenses, but it's THIS specific way that worked. Congrats <3

Damn. Lovely concept, lovely execution, just like with Trevosa. I love your work, it's just so pleasant to navigate this and put the pieces together while getting to live the story vicariously. Great combination of puzzle and narrative, great presentation, very clean.

Holy shit?????????????????????????????????????????????? This is so good??????????????????????????????????????????????? You nailed ALL OF IT????????????????

Very cool! Nice tool, and nice game-poem made with it! Very expressive. Cool if the meds can help a bit, being unable to focus is a bitch!!

Ooohh!! Thank you SO much for the super kind comment! 🥰🥰🥰

• About the Back Entrance, damn i forgot to finish typing that sentence lmao, nice catch. I think it was:

You may move any card from anywhere (except the closed tables areas) on top of the back entrance pile. Whenever you do, if the bunker deck isn’t empty, add one card from the top of the bunker deck to the top of the back entrance pile, above the card you just moved there.

Because you move the card to the back entrance, then it gets "buried" under a card from the deck. 

(That's basically the cost of moving it there. PANIC 6 makes it a bit more punishing by adding 3 cards on top of the card you moved there instead of 1.)

• You're never forced to close the table. You can start by adding several customers, not fulfilling anyone's requirement, then fulfill each of their requirements later on.
  
  You can also add a customer, fulfill her requirement, then add say, a pastry, then add a customer that wants a pastry, and you're not required to close the table at any point during the process. You can add yet another customer, etc.
  
  Each customer wants one card of the correct type, but they don't have to be adjacent in the pile.

On ne peut pas sortir ! C'est généré procéduralement, il n'y a pas de sortie et le labyrinthe "n'existe pas vraiment". (Et il est différent à chaque fois) On meurt forcément !

Oh trop mimsou, merci beaucouppppppp, je vais sortir beaucoup de trucs (+/-claqués) cette année, j'espere que tu y trouveras des choses sympa !!

Thank you so muchhhhhh aaaaahhhh this makes me so happy 💖💖💖💖💖 I hope you'll like the upcoming chapters then if you find the time to play them!!! 💞

Oh that makes so much sense, vg'f ybpny rkgerzn! Of course, it's obvious in retrospect. Thank you kindly! Damn, figuring that out is basically the main puzzle of the book, I should have mulled it over a bit more. Excellent work!

Lovely, lovely visual design as always, love that paint on textured black paper look, love the visual of that striking white footprint, love the lighting in the water on page 6.

I have a question; rot13 to avoid spoilers, as you did below. 

Gur svefg 4 chmmyrf frrzrq gb rfgnoyvfu n ehyr, va zl zvaq, gung gur 5gu chmmyr nccrnef gb oernx. (Gur guveq gvyr sebz gur obggbz frrzf ba gur "jebat fvqr" gb zr..?) What am I missing here? (I don't really see how you can guarantee unique solutions without that non-existant "rule" that actually the last 3 puzzles don't really seem to follow, so I'm surely missing something important)

(Thanks for all the cool art (games/puzzles/etc) you make, I've done LOK & LOK digital but I need to get into your other books <3 )

Wishing you all the best too!! I love your games and other art!!!

poetry for the modern age.

you're awesome <3

The very visceral atmosphere, the visual flare, and the refined simplicity of it made for a very engaging 20 minutes, even with just 2 types of enemies. Just kept going downward, almost mesmerized. Achieving so much with seemingly so few elements is quite a feat. Very impressive game, especially for something made in just 7 days!

Would love to see where you'd take this next (if you ever did), but super cool game as is! Congratulations!

For sure, that's a bunch of guys! Just some lil' guys! Also got to eat an egg.

This was brought you by: "You're not immune to manglerfish death ray."

Comedy as rules-text is an artform, and Grant Howitt, a master. This is so fucking peak.

Yes, exactly, those are the two endings I was talking about! Sorry if that wasn't clear! Thank you so much for your kind words :D

i mean, you know? yeah

Let's fucking go, thank you so much! The world needs more weird books I think!