Getting out of the magic circle

Making art, and especially video games, is what I find to be the closest to doing magic in real life. It may not be an universal experience but let me try to show you how magic comes into play in my game development endeavors.

The Midnight Tram in its current form is a puzzle game. In trying to expand it into a full game, I started by adding more levels but it quickly showed its limits. What I really want to add to the game is a dungeon crawler rogue like. I know I know, roguelikes are so cliché by this point. But have you heard of the original Rogue? This is what I am aiming for. My inspiration comes from the hundreds of hours I poured into Dungeon Crawl : Stone Soup, check it out, it's pretty good.

In order to turn the game into a dungeon crawler, I have to change quite a lot. I have to add a fog of war, optimize the computation for larger levels, make a level generator, add a lot of actions. But I have to do this while keeping the puzzle levels working.

To be honest, trying to make a game system that accounts for time travel paradoxes already feels like some obscure arcane art. However, I'd argue that changing the rules of the game without breaking any of the current puzzles is even more of a witchery. I am fascinated by the idea that games are magic circles, that their rules are nothing more than arbitrary lines that were drawn on the floor. The player willingly steps in knowing they can step out at any time. The magic circle can only exist as long as the participants make it exist. Video games are kind of an exception, the rules are hard coded and not made to be stepped out of. The players don't have a say in the rules, the circle is not drawn by them.

My goal would be to give the illusion to the player that they are somewhat in control, that the circle is more of a suggestion, to encourage them to go beyond it and become wizards themselves. I have never succeeded in that but I think I might have experienced what it would feel like from a developer perspective. Outside of the narrow bounds I had previously made up for The Midnight Tram, I discovered a world outside what I had intended. A magical world in a sense. One that doesn't follow the game's rules.

I think it's pretty neat and ultimately what I wanted to do is share some of the things I've seen outside the bounds of the possible before I draw a bigger circle to include all of it into the known.

I guess these two examples aren't much but they're the most visually understandable. The rest of it is a lot of timeline anomalies that are hard to explain. I hope it's still a little enjoyable to watch. I liked discovering the inverted fish and the corrupted memory world. It was a fun time.