Tag: creativity

Would You Search Through The Lonely Earth For Me? – Yes.

Posted on by in Gaming, Other TTRPG's, tabletop

One of the main problems with tabletop roleplaying games, is that you need a group of friends to play them with. Not only that, but you need all your schedules to line up – which is a herculean task of its own. The more players you have, the more complicated organising a session becomes. Sometimes, you just want to flex your creative muscles without having to go through the hassle of setting up a session with your friends. Single player TTRPGs are where we can get that tabletop fix, which has become more powerful now that we’re all playing remotely.

Would You Search Through The Lonely Earth For Me is a single player, single page TTRPG, that can be played in one sitting or over a long period of time. For example, I completed my first playthrough over the bank holiday weekend in between the various chores that I needed to get done. Finally, a way to make laundry and video rendering interesting! Created by Michael Whelan, video team member at Dicebreaker and Zoe Delahunty-Light, video team member at Eurogamer, all you need to play WYSTTLEFM (not the smoothest of acronyms, I must admit) is something to write on, the rules and a ten sided dice. Easy to set up, easy to play, easy to enjoy.

We all feel lost sometimes. So this final entry feels poignant.

Playing the game, requires four rolls of the d10. These rolls correspond to four key details that form the framework of each stage of your story:

  1. Where – This column tells you where your journey is taking you e.g. whether you end up on a battlefield or in a museum. Whether you are on the way there or have already reached your destination, is entirely up to you.
  2. Who – Who carried you to this place? Who found you and decided to bring you along for the ride? Did they treat you like a treasure or were you stuffed to the bottom of a bag, to be forgotten?
  3. How Long – For what length of time will you remain in this place? Are you merely stopping by briefly, are you left behind to rust in the darkness until you are unearthed again?
  4. Tone – This defines what you are feeling in this place. Are you hopeful? Are you proud of how far you’ve come?

Let me explain the concept of this TTRPG. You take the role of a precious treasure, that is passed from person to person, location to location, over the course of millennia. The treasure in question is up to you, the only real restrictions being that you cannot affect the world around you – only observe and experience. Regardless of how those who come across you act; you are powerless to do anything about it. It makes for a rather unique experience, as instead of having to think in character about what you *can* do in a situation, you are forced into the role of an observer. Each journal entry tells a tale of its own, as short, or as lengthy as you choose it to be.

This game is something that I recommend you play through on your own, as it is unique for everyone. However, to give you an idea of where your journey can go – I’ll walk you through my very first session. I decided that my treasure would be a golden amulet, like those you see in fantasy stories around the necks of the “totally not related to all-powerful beings” protagonists.

I’ll let you see one of my entries 🙂

I began in a place of history, brought there by the prophet, abandoned there for an unknowable amount of time, with a crestfallen tone. As vague as the prompts are deliberately phrased, I had a clear vision in my mind of where my story would begin. My amulet lay in the depths of a cavern, near an underground river that flowed to the sea. I’d be thrown out of a bag, onto the dusty stone floor, an offering to a god that never answered prayers.

From there, a scholar uncovered my amulet under the rocks and debris that had built up over the years. Overjoyed at the care and effort that this professor put into rejuvenating the golden surface, my amulet settled into its new home in a museum with great content. Millenia passed and the amulet witnessed the development of the world around it, eventually lying in the possession of a young blacksmith called Corinth, who was forced to work for the war lords that controlled his home.

Travelling from the iron forges to the cusp of a war, my amulet witnessed the downfall of empires and the massacres of the battlefield, terrified that it’d be lost to the bloodshed that surrounded it. The chaos of the battlefield was a stark contrast to the collector’s basement that it spent the next few years in, forever cursed to watch every other precious object be prized and adored by him, but not the amulet. Eventually, the amulet was left as an offering to a local miracle worker, by a craftsman who desperately needed a miracle to save her son.

My story came to an end when the wanderer that carried me on her chest, was crushed in a cave in. The rubble tumbled from above and buried us both in an endless pile of boulders and rocks that weighed down on us. Helpless and alone in the darkness, my amulet’s main wish in the end was that the wanderer would be found one day, to give her family closure. It hoped that if found, it would be buried with her, finally at peace and no longer alone.

Considering how much time I spend playing multiplayer TTRPGs such as D&D, CoC etc, its nice to play alone for once.

Despite my journal entries only covering seven pages of A5 paper, I felt that my tale had come to a satisfactory end. I had weaved a tale of a world that grew and changed, with its triumphs and failures. I got to flex that creative muscle that I haven’t gotten to use in a long time. I used to do a lot of creative writing when I was younger, including the summer where I actually took part in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), which involved writing a 50,000 word novel in the span of a month. An intense but enjoyable experience.

A lot of my life has been spent weaving stories in my mind, some of which were put down on paper or turned into the worlds that my players now explore in our campaigns. The chance to create my own worlds again, to step back and make something entirely new, has been a real treat. There’s something remarkable about making a game that can create so much from so little and has such massive replayability value, so I tip my hat to Wheels and Zoe, this is a game that I think a lot of people will come back to.

Buy the game here! https://wheelsrpgs.itch.io/throughthelonelyearth

Anyways, I hope everyone is having a good day and I recommend you keep an eye on MindGames’s Twitter this week, especially on the 3rd as I have a pretty cool announcement to make! Keep an eye out for that and be sure to let me know what you want me to talk about next.

Ciao,

CaitlinRC.

Baba Is You – Thankfully Less Stressful Than Coding:

Posted on by in Gaming

For those who follow my Twitter (@CaitlinRC), you’ll know that I am in my final year of university and am studying Computer Science. So programming, logic and technology are a major part of my life – academically and recreationally. Despite all the programming languages that my studies have taught me, at its core – logic statements are what will make or break a program. You can have the most sophisticated interface on the planet but that does nothing if the assumptions you’ve based it all on are incorrect.

When I spotted Baba Is You on the Nintendo Switch Shop, I was intrigued. Normally, gaming doesn’t always have the most accurate grasp on the pillars of computing as an industry – focusing more on the science fiction fantasies. These are great and all, some of which forming stellar gameplay ideas and storylines but to really understand programming, you need to understand logical thinking. My university got us to do a series of logic puzzles and problems, like those you’d find in a Professor Layton game, as tutorial work for our first module. So, a game based around logical statements, gradually growing more complex and adding new variables as you progress? Right up my alley.

Can confirm this is what my speech devolves into after too long programming.

Before I get into the meat of Baba Is You, I want to talk a bit about logical thinking and its influence on our lives. Growing up, I was always told that people tend to either be logical or creative, and that the two rarely crossed over. Those who were more creative, would go on to study drama, art and humanities whilst the logical kids would be the scientists of the future. Nowadays, we all know that’s a bunch of horse shit but as a kid it really stuck with me. I was clearly logical, excelling more at maths and science than at drawing a picture of a bunch of bananas or taking on the role of Reno in a production of Anything Goes. Art, writing and drama seemed out of reach for me.

However, logic and creativity are so strongly interlinked that one cannot feasibly exist without the other. Some of the greatest accomplishments in human history have come from the combination of logical thinking and creative ideas – such as Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machine sketches, drawn over four hundred years before the Wright brothers had their first successful flight. Any problem can be broke down and overcome with a little imagination and logic. It’s an incredible feat of humanity, that has persisted across our evolution.

2nd best duo in AC, just behind Evie and Jacob (fight me world i love them)

For me, logic rules my thinking most of the time. I am an incredibly logical person, to the point where there’s a running joke that I’m secretly an android infiltrating humanity. I can neither confirm nor deny it! When it comes to emotions, relationships and social interaction, I struggle to apply this logic to other people. I’ll examine body language, tone of voice and any other cues I can find, in order to draw a conclusion from a situation. This does lead to some apparently “insightful” and “wise” observations on my part (according to my friends anyways), but it also leads to a lot of stress on my mental state.

For logic to be successful, you need all the details. You must understand every facet of the situation in order to build your set of rules. Much like an android, I strive to analyse and understand everything and everyone around me, like a ridiculously elaborate game of spot the difference. Building the rulesets is hard. You’re terrified of being wrong but the anxiety that comes from not having those rules in place to help navigate the situation can be even worse. It’s part of the reason I love programming so much. It’s the joy of finding a solution that works, solving a complex problem and knowing that the rules are set in stone for you to follow.

YOU. SHALL NOT. PASS

Baba Is You is a cute little puzzle game, that applies logical thinking and the basics of programming to create a unique world with challenges that you genuinely wish to solve. It uses “blocks” of writing to establish three different parameters that you must play with – Actions, Objects/States and Connectives. Your aim is to win each level, by touching whatever object has been defined as “win”. Each connected series of “Object -> Connective -> Action” establishes a rule that must be adhered to as long as the rule is active. However, you can change the rules! Switching out one object for another, “deactivating” the rule as a whole or finding a sneaky loophole that allows you to skip over a seemingly unbeatable section of the level, is what Baba Is You is about.

With over 200 levels, a ridiculous amount of adorable characters and creative solutions, I think it’s a game that I will come back to a lot. If you like logic puzzles and cute little characters, I’d highly recommend trying it out.

Slightly concerned that the ocean seems to end in a light blue abyss.

2019 has been a great year for Mind Games. We launched in April and have been growing from week to week, with each amazing supporter of the site being a huge inspiration for me to keep working as hard as I can. In 2020, I am planning on upgrading the site a bit, so it looks a bit more professional and you can read some of my older posts without having to scroll through nearly a years-worth of content!

Thank you all once more and I hope you had a good festive period! Keep an eye out on the site’s Twitter for announcements, updates and ideas for new content – @OurMindGames.

Till next year,

CaitlinRC.