The first month of 2021 is just about over, and I’m doing a little retrospective/postmortem/whatever on what I got up to this month!
I made and released this small project that got a bunch of nice comments (both on the itch page and on twitter). It was a very satisfying expression and exploration of using the videogame form to express personalities.
Writing code to make videogames has been a part of my life for a ridiculously long time, an absurdly large portion of it. I learned Visual Basic when my age was in the single digits and I like math; programming is second nature to me.
I had a conversation with a non-programmer lead game designer a couple years ago and asked point-blank “how do you design games?”
I wrote this thought for January’s upcoming droqen was here (#20!), and immediately felt dubious about my usage of the word addict. It seemed to have the right gravity about it, I wanted to take this problem seriously, but I didn’t (and still don’t) think it was quite appropriate — for me or for the word.
I tweeted this mockup last month.
It seems so easy to imagine and even implement some dreamy mechanics, but so hard to really put them together and make a genuine game out of them.
What do you call a word that was invented expressly for individual use? The perfectly ironic thing is I couldn’t find a word for this; a neologism is at least etymologically defined by its new-ness, so an established piece of personal language need not apply, and a protologism is even more explicit about being a word that aspires to become a part of common use.
