random rants

Update Q2 2026: I'm [still] extremely low on energy, so I don't have the energy to hang out outside. Hanging out at my place is possible on days when I don't have migraines.

I'm up for parallel "play" and by play I mean I can provide you with my instruments, art supplies, a small working desk in a separate room and you can bring your laptop and do work.

We don't even need to do anything, just parallel co-existence is fine. Also I'm a solo [unemployed] game developer now. Feel free to DM if our hobbies match. Old post continues:

This is as much a reminder for myself as it is an invitation for friends - existing, new, and potential, to join me on activities:

Real life: - Nõmme walks - photoshoots / photo walks - other trips - making art (mostly acrylics and watercolors, but I'd love to explore new media, within a sensible budget) - just dinner or pancakes sometimes in smaller groups - making music, whether just for fun, or to finish something - just quiet tea & book reading hangouts - ERSO/TKO/EMTA/MUBA concerts! - programming, music production, composition, color grading, video editing knowledge sharing / workshops / projects

Online - Zoom, Discord, Google Meet: - knowledge sharing (same as above) - music production

Other that I haven't thought through but accepting proposals: - game development (Rust, Bevy, Tauri, Vue, Phaser) - other art projects I could contribute to - video essays - demoscene / sizecoding

Things I wouldn't mind learning but they're not a priority: - other art forms like sculpting, papier-mâché, engraving, etc - almost any craft or practical trade like woodworking, gardening, renovating, etc <- invite me over if you need a shed painted or sth - 2D and 3D animation, Blender, etc - cooking baking etc - eesti keel lol sorry maybe in the _next_ 13 years I'll learn it.

(so much for "it will just be 3 sentences this week)

So my game mechanics are inspired by three main things: Progress Quest, in that most of the game should "play itself", The Sims, in that I want rich interactions and a pretense of life, and an obscure web game called Adventure Fame. Player should be able to play this while they're high on medication in a hospital after a car crash.

At the same time, I don't want the game to be just a bunch of RNGs in a trenchcoat. While I will use procgen, the world should feel specific, not generic. But the lore and stories should be optional most of the time. Again: disability-friendly clicking.

There should be three or four levels of interaction and their respective cognitive demands: - (0) game plays itself. story events are not progressing - (1) only 1-button clicking. story will not progress until player chooses to - (2) very trivial "action", possibly 4-directional or mouse-drag or one-stick movement, exploring a cave, sewers, possibly simple mazes, no failure mode - (3) engaged - story beats, decisions, leveling up, managing inventory, talking to NPCs, potentially dating sim elements, RPG elements, etc

Player should be able to play in engagement level 0-2 while watching youtube, without losing attention. (Realistically 0-1 but you know people will be overly optimistic about their cognitive capacity.)

Player should enter mode (3) voluntarily and explicitly, and not ever be forced into it. The game shouldn't distract the player more than explicitly agreed on.

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Anyway so. Exploration. I've decided that the first game world will have hierarchy Quadrant > Area > Location.

Quadrant will be the game world, split into voronoi-ish Areas (hardcoded at first). Moving between Areas will require some travel time, and it will collapse/expand a list of possible activities. Areas contain 1~n Locations. An example of a Location is "your house", "your garden", "village center", "abandoned mine". Current Location determines the possible automated actions, e.g. "picking berries" "picking fruit" "petting cats" when you're in your garden.

Areas like abandoned mines, sewers, beach, forest, will have exploration features.

[1] "Infinite" type exploration is just boring old RNG. In case of hitting some special events (Encounters? no name yet), these should be queued so player can view them / make decisions about the encounters when in active play mode. The design/development challenge is balancing the RNG and creating the content, both repeatable (items to find?) and unique (story beats, decisions, NPC dialogue?)

[2] "Limited" would be similar, just with a clearly defined limit. Eg. you might see a house falling apart that's beyond salvaging, so you "explore" i.e. clean up the house, demolish it, sort the rubble, burn what can be burned, move items to recycling, give out or take what's good. The Location will then transform into another location, e.g. someone might build a house on the same foundation, or it can become a public space (gazebo, dining/picnic area, building material storage).

(I haven't actually even thought about locations having their own history, but I guess we're gonna be doing that eventually, since it goes along with my themes of rebuilding and transformation.)

[3] other types of explorable Locations will be basically a mix of PCG and hand-crafted algorithms and hand-crafted maps, e.g. exploring caves or sewers will have a map that will be vaguely maze-like, and exploration to 100% will happen only once the actual map is traversed (either automatically or by player controls)