While he doesn’t have regrets over the job, there is one thing Ghignola does regret: letting fans down. "I do remember promising several times that I would finish Noctis V and, still after all these years, I’ve never gone back. I’m sorry; I wish I had the strength to go back and finish what I started more than ten years ago."
Its nice that there was a community around the game and that Alessandro felt part of it. But I'm sad that he felt pressure to finish the next version and that that might have weighed on him. Because its very easy for fans to ask for something, but actually very hard to be the person that has to do all the work to meet their expectations. The fans are free to drift off and find something else to enjoy, but the feeling of unfinished projects and broken promises can stay with the creator for a long time.
In short: As a creator its easy to get wrapped up in fans demands but in reality you need to have boundaries. Perhaps you dont want to spent the next four years making something for them. Perhaps you've got other things you want to do with your life.
I think this genre of "space exploration" games, in particular, is likely to have communities containing people who have no other life at all, and who become unreasonably emotional about "their" game that they have instead. Can lead to absolutely toxic communities.
Source: steam says i have 2k hr into X4 foundations
I recently bought X4:F on sale from a small recommendation. I like it so far after about 8 hours. But already I am wondering how deep the galaxy actually is - like, what will I actually do, other than keep getting more money and more ships for their own sake?
What goals do you pursue? What drives you to keep going back?
When my hands dont hurt; im quite fond of the dog fighting in S and M ships. Go out in something small and try to peel the pointy bits off a Xen K.
More often now I'm hacking mods as much as playing the game; working out a "perfect game" system of going from a (customized) start to a billionaire empire and no remaining Xen (or anyone else you care to take offense at) in say, 24hr or less.
I don't play the way anyone else does, apparently. I never do "missions" and on my todo list is a mod to hack out the one they've apparently added recently that appears to happen regardless of player input. In that respect, the creators notion of the game gets in my way; I'm cheerfully distorting the universe here, got no time for the individuals in it.
heh, also at that time, there was little else to scratch that itch, other than going back to Frontier: Elite 2 on an emulator or something. That's how I got into Noctis all those years ago.
The article didn't mention it, as far as I could see, but the source is available[1] at the author's site with an interesting and fairly permissive license.
it's fascinating me that all of HSP's articles are manually justified monospace text. Pages and pages of it. That's quite hard to do? There's not a lot of double-spaces or unusual punctuation so it's mostly achieved by word choice. I did wonder if there was some subtle css justification going on but apparently not; and you can see in articles from other authors on the site that the style is ragged right, but HSP never writes like that.
This is a classic textfiles thing to do, yeah. It's one of the few ways to really be a virtuous with the typography.
In part, it's because it's a proof-of-work - there's no way to automatically do it. I've been musing about using word embeddings + dynamic programming to do just that, however: you take a list of all possible synonyms with their embeddings, and calculate every rewrite that results in lining up exactly, and then choose the ones with the minimum cumulative embedding distance between the original words & their replacement.
However I have noticed that when he is posting as USER, in the context of conversing with chatgpt, he does not make an attempt to do this. or perhaps more accurately there is no way to do it without going back and editing text that had already been fed to the bot and thereby misrepresenting the prompts it was responding to.
I adored Noctis back in the day. There was something very lonely and alien about it. Something No Man's Sky never quite captured. The lofi graphics just helped to make it more haunting and isolated. But the community was nice. I would regularly download the updated encyclopedia.
I didn't know about his depression, but I could sort of feel it through his game world. He mentioned, a long time ago, that the game was partially a product of a painful breakup. The game, especially the backstory, reflected that loss.
I think L.in.oleum was the first language I was ever comfortable with. Everything else was abstractions on top of abstractions. Lino was just platform agnostic assembly, and I loved that.
Fascinating, really, but it’s counter intuitive to me: reading the article I pictured linoleum to be a script oriented modding / building tool like Lua provide.
Since graduating college I have basically only ever been a commercial software developer. Reading about programmers who, usually but not always through games, treat code as a canvas on which to paint their thoughts, dreams, desires, and struggles is an inspiration even when they themselves feel like they’ve let someone down.
Noctis was an amazing experience. It had no right being as immersive as it was. If you liked the idea of NMS, give it a go; it nails the alone-on-the-frontier mood a lot better.
As NMS "improved" and fleshed out the game world, it lost a certain poetry that it had earlier on. There was something really unsettling about the earlier universes that felt - dare I say? - liminal.
Well - kinda? Liminal implies a particular mood or feeling - which is what the Back Rooms stuff was also aiming for. I think some of it succeeds remarkably well and some of it doesn't.
I have always called this mood lonely exploration, or melancholic curiosity. It has liminal qualities in that you feel between encounters or between spaces of meaning.
It sounds bad but indeed, early NMS did feel kind of meaningless, which as you said had a certain poetic quality.
Melancholic curiosity, or loneley exploration, are two things I am trying to capture in games I make. There is a game called Infra that I highly recommend if you enjoy that mood, and city infrastructure.
Taking of immersion I loved how all the ui is integrated into the geometry of the ship. Makes it feel coherent like a real object. Not enough (non-sim) games do this.
Noctis! I loved this game.
Up until a few years ago I kept visiting his website, in the hopes something would come up again about Noctis V, lol.
He used the term "Home sweet pixel" too back then I believe, but also "The web territory of Fottifoh" or something. It was al very interesting.
To me it wasn't really a precursor to NMS, but more to Minecraft.
The "infinite" terrain on worlds is what kept me interested.
It is very much a game influenced by depression, I recall you played a solo alien with a destroyed planet and no knowledge if any of his kind was left or where they would be.
It was a really magical game from the pre-iPhone era of the web, so experimental it barely made sense. It's sad to hear of the creator's struggles, I hope he focuses on himself instead of worrying about letting anyone down.
DOSEMU or FreeDOS in a VM (e.g. Virtualbox) typically gives the best performance with decent ease-of-use. Otherwise, you'll want to run it natively on Windows XP or earlier, or FreeDOS. For running in a VM, you'll need to have an x86 processor with hardware-assisted virtualization enabled. DosBOX might work and is worth trying due to its ease of setup, but you really need a very powerful machine.
This is one of those games where I have to wonder why I never knew about it at the time. It looks like the sort of thing I'd just have lost weeks at a time to.
I spent so many hours in Noctis! The graphics were amazing when compared with other games I could run on my P133, and it was developed by just one guy.
Noctis was a big deal to a small audience. The game and this story here remind me of outsider art, the term of respect for paintings and sculptures and the like made by non-traditional artists. It's a whole genre of art, well studied and represented.
We have outsider art in software too, like Noctis. Not just games: TempleOS is a well known example. I'd call Dwarf Fortress outsider art too, an unusually successful example that has had a lot of influence on mainstream games.
I have always found his games fascinating since I first discovered Cryxels probably in the early 00s. There's something about the beautiful chunky graphics and silent exploration which just draws you in for hours.
Its nice that there was a community around the game and that Alessandro felt part of it. But I'm sad that he felt pressure to finish the next version and that that might have weighed on him. Because its very easy for fans to ask for something, but actually very hard to be the person that has to do all the work to meet their expectations. The fans are free to drift off and find something else to enjoy, but the feeling of unfinished projects and broken promises can stay with the creator for a long time.
In short: As a creator its easy to get wrapped up in fans demands but in reality you need to have boundaries. Perhaps you dont want to spent the next four years making something for them. Perhaps you've got other things you want to do with your life.