Reflections on of randomness and repetition

Hello, how are you? I hope you're doing well. I used this jam with the goal of experimenting with the tool, and I'll share some reflections that might be useful for those interested in discussing this brief experience I created here.

Firstly, I want to talk about the challenge. Well, the challenge is quite interesting, and I tend to be descriptive when I intend to create. The fact that it's something short combined with gameplay and a very friendly community made me register, I believe, 1 week before the Jam started and finish 2 drafts for the challenge. The first one would be about a robbery at a small bank, where the protagonist would have exactly 4 minutes to act, and each action would consume a unit of time, inevitably failing even before reaching the safe. The other one is exactly what is published here, a story about you being rationally on top but emotionally disconnected with element x. During the drafts, this was my sequence of thoughts; a wizard specializing in fixing teleportation spells, a bumpy forgotten road in a prosperous city, and a top athlete who fell from grace due to cheating/involvement with the underworld.

The first proposal was quite objective, but I had difficulty expressing it only with dialogues because I like introspective action scenes, and unfortunately, I didn't find a way to put that on paper in a way that pleased me in my current trains of thought. By philosophy, I generally like to create what I would buy if I found it somewhere. 

The second proposal was a bit more complex. The wizard ended up becoming a psychedelic experience that escaped what I wanted to talk about; the player being a road is a concept that fascinated me, but I found many difficulties in conveying fun with that to other people, and it's something I kept. The athlete was something that matured in the preparation weeks, and I saw that something caught my attention for high-performance sports. Hard to explain exactly what, but I'm fascinated when athletes talk about their achievements because... it's never enough. Became a champion? Alright, now I want to be again. Won a gold medal? I want two. Have two? I want 3. Have 3? I want 4! It's truly crazy, and I admire this universe a lot. Within contact sports, like boxing and MMA, what makes me tense the most is the struggle against the balance because the extremes these athletes go through to fight against the most primal things we need, like drinking water, eating, sleeping, etc., are taken to a limit and... TO THEN FIGHT AFTERWARDS! Haha, I find this concept, when you stop to think, crazy, it's weakening oneself by becoming strong. Obviously, there are weight categories, and some things are less dramatic than others, but it's something that always catches attention. 

Eventually, I was watching ESPN because, in case you don't know, the biggest content machine is undoubtedly the sports one; there are long philosophical, historical, sociological, technical, social, and comparative discussions of plays/comments/segments of, at most, 8 seconds. To then, the next day, say completely the opposite and have to bend over backwards to be right or prove that I was right. As I got older, I understood the popular pleasure of sports and that made me see the mundane yet satisfying pleasure of this common place. There was a call for the report of Ayrton Senna's death, a Brazilian Formula 1 driver three-time champion, who transcended the tracks and became a symbol for a nation. Whether it's because of populism or not, it's really irrelevant; Senna was a remarkable personality. My mind seeing that call and an interviewer who had a romantic involvement commenting on how he was someone playful yet quarrelsome because of being an Aries sign, thought the following; "What if, this driver, had never reached this point but had done exactly the same things? What would be said?" So I went to watch historic races, people explaining deeply about Formula 1, relevant track details, the routine that drivers have, and the premise of "Off the Podium — One Last Lap" was born not as an athlete who fell from grace, but simply someone who isn't brilliant enough to be a champion and nor below average to have to fight for the right to be on the main stage, it's the story of someone average in a scope where the extraordinary is sought individually.

Well, then, I went to the most important thing about sports; randomness. Unlike a game where you can advance from one point to another, and even if you return, the context changes, and new opportunities arise, sports games change where that specific action stands out on the spectrum. You're intentionally doing something repetitive, and even though it's rewarding in a first experience, promptly that is trivialized because it requires a monumental effort so that in any sport, whether swimming, racing, basketball, boxing, etc., repetition becomes enjoyable.

So my idea was to slice things into degrees, from worst to best; accident (a critical error that goes beyond the field of skill, being circumstantial), error in fundamentals (failure in what is basic for every athlete), common errors (failure in competitive practice), opponent's imposition (mechanically an error but interpretively not), duel (interpretively a tie and mechanically a re-roll of attributes to confirm success or failure), and the opposite of errors following the same logic, fundamental hit, common hit, and miracle (critical hit that is an exceptionality of the player, not being circumstantial).

The mechanical mess of 26,966 words for a SINGLE race. An absolute hell to test variables when something changed because choicescript was not really made to keep going back and forth with random data that has already been defined. Using temporary things is also problematic because you can't lose the perspective where they were placed, and depending on the routines used, this makes testing difficult because they need to be in the same scene, and if for any reason, you need to migrate to another scene, you need to have changed a previously established value. A simple example of this is trying to use a single attribute to establish multiple interconnected values without leaving as intermediaries boolean variables to regulate repetition and another of redundancy to ensure that repetition is different even though it uses the same things.

As I polished things, thinking, meditating, even scribbling in a notebook I bought when I went shopping on how to make all this more concise, I managed to reduce this monstrosity to 8,300 words in a clean code that I will use as a model from now on when trying to do something sporty but that burned a few years of my life in the process due to stress.

The problem is that it took me a long time, and I was developing formulas, methods, learning, and refining these redundancies that the first version was absurdly convoluted while taming what the tool can do. The mental exhaustion comparable only to making things bilingual. In the future, I will present this in something that allows it to shine in all its splendor, in a football game, where I can let this madness generate and interact with 22 players + coaches, just as I did with 24 drivers + teams in the GP. This jam was very beneficial for me in this sense because I understood a lot about the tool, the nature of sports games, and thinking about the application of randomness as something that derives from the fixed.

The problem is that at the end of this, I didn't have a story. I had a mechanically sequence, there in the bones of things, very cool, but playing, being extremely optimistic, you can say "Cute. is that all?" haha And it was absolutely terrible, the fact that it was something predetermined to respond by the sectors of the track according to the attributes, which is very cool there manipulating the numbers, from the player's perspective, it's quite... trivial. This broke me a lot because it's the first experience that sticks. 

So I thought about approaching events individually and felt that it improved a lot on the player's side and got worse for me because sports without numbers, comparisons, constant climbing of positions, counting time, becomes empty. I understood that the joy of playing a sports game is much more about breaking a record, whatever it may be, than exactly performing well. The thing is, for you to break a record, they need to exist. To have records in a game, you need a database, and that database most of the time is absolutely useless, it's something added solely to generate flavor, sometimes, at most, two lines in a scene.

Escaping from the sports scenario, I am convinced that no other genre has such prior demand. Honestly, I didn't know how to solve this dilemma in 30 days. Some days I spent just thinking about the following dynamics: The preset needs to adapt to the player. The player needs prior knowledge of what is required for glory and ruin. Glory and ruin are related to performance. Performance is related to attributes. Attributes are related to degrees of success. Degrees of success are related to the preset. There are some sports games on choice, and whoever had the best idea was The Fielder Choice, which is based on a sport that is number on top of other numbers, which is baseball. Very fun by the way! I had fun playing and replaying more than once.  But nothing really gave me any insight into the method I was using. It wouldn't be wrong to think that this methodology is simply impractical and if I'm encountering sequential barriers, it's because the way I'm doing it is probably not effective. The point is that I spent too much time on this mechanical hell and now I want to use it haha That will be for another opportunity.

Now, about adaptation between my native language (Brazilian Portuguese) and English. I made things painfully more complex with 0 necessity, and I'll share here a scene composition solution to avoid wasting time formatting from one language to another just to, in fact, translate.

Variables need to be established in a neutral language. Characters need to be associated with an actor. Ideally with nametags, eliminating the need to format names, to just define who will be what at the beginning of the scene. So instead of being:

${name}, Richard and Louise, simply be ${actor1}, ${actor2}, ${actor3}. This means that if you use nametags or are worried about how the scene turned out in each language, at the top, with the actors defined, it's just a matter of adjusting verb tenses and pronouns. It's a very silly trick but unfortunately, I only thought about it after I was quite advanced, especially when it comes to NPCs named with roles that differ completely between languages. The actor dynamics break the language transition a lot whenever there is a language barrier because it makes it necessary to consult only the beginning of the scene.

And that's just it. This was my little adventure with my first project, the first time I tried to create something artistic and use English for something other than playing video games.