Caves, and the "Weirdly Shaped Game" (Patreon)

Once again I have been watching videos about cave diving, deep diving, and dry cave exploration. I guess it's interesting because #1. I like watching people be experts at things I would never do. And #2. Caves and the ocean are some of the most inhospitable places, clearly not meant for us to be in or see. We've climbed Mount Everest many times, but deep water still feels like the out-of-bounds of the world.

This might sound silly, but the "shitpost" nature of Roblox games often gives me a sense of wonder. Real talent and creativity is sometimes hidden behind people messing around and making whatever they want with no expectations for quality or satisfying an audience. This results in games that have what I call "weird shapes" to them, where sometimes it feels like the game wasn't even designed for me. It sometimes feels like I'm exploring someone else's dream. 

It's like when you think you have the game figured out, thinking it's a simple tycoon or wave survival game, with all its self-contained gameplay loops and difficulty curves--that is until you find a way out of the "game area" and discover lots of stuff out there. It was never hinted at, it was never revealed as some kind of reward, it was never once spoken of within the standard "game area". But there are actual landscapes and buildings out there. The game has transcended itself; there is now the old game and some kind of world. What else is hidden out there in some cave or in the middle of some labyrinth? How deep does it go? 

How does this happen? Games aren't like this! They are supposed to be focused, they are supposed to have a purpose and a structure. The answer is that the developer was just making something because it was fun, so what reason did they have to stop? It's like they started drawing off the canvas onto the wall.

I can remember some games that have done this to me. Spoilers for Noita, A Boy And His Blob, and Zork. (I recommend Noita and Zork for sure)

When I was a kid my brother opened up Zork on some website and left me to play it. I don't know, but I think I never got very far; it's difficult to say, because I'm not sure which direction was the actual game in Zork. There is the house you start at, with the terrifying grue in the attic and the vast underground dungeon. But there is also the forest all around you where you can find stunning landscapes and items hidden up in trees. And if you find a knife you can choose to stab yourself and get sent to Hell, which is an actual place of its own to explore. The aimlessness of this world really is like exploring a dream. It's the reason I remember Zork.

Around the same time of my life, while I was online I found an emulator of an NES game called A Boy And His Blob. I don't think I understood that it was an NES game; I was just looking for flash games. I remember finding my way up to the surface and finding out how to rocket myself over a fence which I thought was the limit of the world. I watched as my character flew from right to left over and over, quickly flipping through screens I had never seen before, trees whizzing by. It suddenly changed my perspective of this game. Sure, there probably wasn't much detail to find in the world. But I wasn't thinking about that--I was just testing what I could explore.

Noita. With some determination I was able to dig my way through a large wall on the surface of the world, which took quite some effort. Then I eventually broke out through the other side. It dumbfounded me to find that the surface of the world is probably more like Terraria in size. I haven't finished Noita or explored all there is, so I don't know if this is really much of a secret, but what matters is that I tested what I thought were the limits of the world and then broke through. For a moment it makes that world seem real and limitless. To me it felt like if at the start of Downwell, you could just walk away from the well and go explore forever.

If you could jump to the right here and find mountains with cave systems and valleys with cities and skyscrapers to climb, how many people would know? That would be the most stupid thing ever to spend development time on. But I would never forget it.

The real world is not designed for you like a theme park attraction. When caves are formed, there is no cost-benefit analysis taking into consideration how few people will ever see their complexity. So a crushingly small tunnel can zig-zag for a mile until it opens up into the most vast, beautiful cavern. And it's all in pitch darkness.

When I think back to all my all-time favorite games, at least half of them had some moment that made me feel like I had stumbled upon a cavern like that. So what am I saying? Should we be designing our game worlds more inefficiently or making them deeper for no reason? I don't know. I'd rather just say it's at least fun to recognize what the true boundary of your world is and put something outside it, past the fence.