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Showing posts from June, 2021

Nested Risk and Noita

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Been a while since posting, but that's because I've been cooking up a fairly in-depth one.  Randomness as it works in games generally, and in particular in ttrpgs, has an interesting feature to do with buying into different layers of the gameplay. This basically means that you construct games within a game. This has implications not just for good game design, but also for perceived fairness. The old-school style (if it's coherent enough to call it that) is often criticised for being unfair or confrontational, or at least overly blasé about killing off characters. Hopefully this will explain how the approach is a) justified and b) actually a valuable thing to bring to games . 🕷 Allow me to explain. At length, I'm afraid. Recently, I’ve been playing the excellent indie videogame Noita. Noita is a roguelike, meaning the environment you explore is generated randomly each playthrough. At each level, you get to a shrine, where you can heal up. If you somehow bring a mo