Reshares: Eggs, unification, ateliers
Laura Michet: Played Arctic Eggs
I am late to the party on this, but Arctic Eggs is extremely good. It is a perfect example of people making a game only out of things they are extremely good at. I adore the way they've hung the entire game on a single physics minigame, and I'm so impressed at the ways they stretch that minigame in weirder and weirder directions. This game takes something that seems very simple and finds about exactly 3 hours' worth of depth in it. Delightful.
I encountered the dystopian cooking game Arctic Eggs myself when I played it in a race at Kusogrande Live, and that was an experience. Have you ever had an audience of people cheering for you when you successfully flip an egg?
There was also an excellent race of it at Big Bad Game-a-thon.
But wait, you say. Should the game really be in these "bad game events", when it's enjoyable and Laura is describing it as "extremely good"?
It can be both. Arctic Eggs is not a polished or even an expected experience. It is a celebration of jank. It has one big idea of the thing you're supposed to do, and also it wants you to fail at that thing a lot. It's an enjoyable example of the "bad game experience", and Laura's post goes into detail about what makes it so perversely good.
Witch of Light: Syntactic unification is easy!
Syntactic unification is the process of trying to find an assignment of variables that makes two terms the same. For example, attempting to unify the terms in the equation
(X, Y) = (1, 2)would give the substitution{X: 1, Y: 2}, but if we tried to unify(X, X) = (1, 2)it would fail since one variable can’t be equal to two different values. Unification is used to implement two things I’m very interested in: type systems, and logic programming languages.
This post is from 2020 but I must have discovered it recently while browsing around blog links.
When I was a computer science TA around 2006, a big part of my job was translating old assignment code written in LISP to work with the new curriculum in Python. At some point I had to translate a function called "unify" that did some cool things. After that, I kept running into it in more contexts, and eventually learned that "syntactic unification" is a whole thing.
A literal translation of the LISP code would never have worked. The data types of LISP and Python are just too different, and nobody would want to use it through some sort of "S-expression emulator". So I had to figure out, with trial and error, how to remake it out of Python-shaped pieces -- and luckily it might be the most figure-out-able by trial and error algorithm there is. The experience was a lot like what Cassie has described.
Aura's Guide to the Modern Atelier
The Atelier series of crafting games are a whole genre that I might never have heard about if I hadn't followed Aura on Twitter back in the day, but I heard a lot about from Aura. Which left me wondering: how do I, you know, actually play one of these games? Fortunately, Aura has written this comprehensive guide to the series and kept it updated.
I previously played Atelier Rorona, on a 12-hour plane flight, and it was a great way to pass the time up until I reached the point where I hit a wall because I was not good enough at manipulating the alchemy system to craft things that were "good". A pretty literal wall: there was a wall in a cave I needed to bomb open, and the bombs I could make were just too dogshit to do anything to it. Then the plane landed and I didn't think about it again. But re-reading this document makes me curious about trying Atelier Ryza sometime.