Tildes Gaming Club, January 2024: Tinkering
Meta: This is a new post series I'm trying out. I've planned a trial run for three months to see if it catches on. If it does, I'll continue it. If not, I'll phase it out.
Tildes Gaming Club is a space to play and discuss games that fit a loosely defined theme. I see it like a Book Club, or similar to our current Album of the Week and Movie of the Week series. Instead of everyone focusing everyone on the same game, however, we're all focused on the same core theme, and we independently choose a game (or games) that fit the theme. I'll also be posting the topics monthly instead of weekly, especially because many games take much longer to appreciate than a movie or an album.
To participate, play at least one game that fits the monthly theme, and talk about it here. You can make one post summarizing your game(s), or you can make multiple posts as you make your way through the game(s).
This month's theme is: Tinkering
In the future, I plan to simply give the theme with no additional clarification, because I like the idea of people interpreting it as they wish, but I feel like giving some examples for the first go-around might help people better understand what I'm trying to get at:
You might choose to play:
- a game in which one of the characters is a mechanic
- a game that lets you build things and take them apart
- a game in which you have to fiddle with the graphics settings to get it to run
- a game that you've modded
- a DOOM WAD you have to set up yourself
- a Windows game on Linux that doesn't "just run" through Proton/Wine
- a game that has "tinker" somewhere in the title
- a game you pirated back on your Dreamcast that you had to burn six different times with different settings before it would actually boot
- and so on...
"Tinkering" is an open-ended theme, not a closed task. Anything that you can personally fit underneath it counts, even if it's an absurd interpretation! Part of the fun is figuring out how the theme can work best for you.
My goals for this are the following:
- I'm hoping this can be a fun way of choosing something to play.
- I'm hoping this can bring a group/community aspect to people independently enjoying their hobby.
- I'm hoping this can yield some interesting discussions about different themes.
You can't talk game tinkering without talking modding, and you can't talk modding without talking Skyrim, so here I am talking about Skyrim.
Skyrim has probably the most dedicated modding community of any game ever, with the exception of (maybe) gmod. I can't imagine any game will surpass it in terms of sheer number, complexity and quality of mods - certainly not any other bethesda game. From fundamental engine fixes to entire new games, almost everything has been touched in some way by someone.
It's interesting how - despite the game being so open and accessible, due to the engine tools provided - the actual engine is incredibly hostile to modders. Many parts of the game are baked into game saves, meaning that if you get something wrong and make a save with a broken mod - any save from that point is either broken, or doomed to fail at some point. Attempts have been made to mitigate this issue, but so far nobody has attempted to completely work around this issue. I'm not even sure it's possible.
From a non-technical standpoint, the quality of mods is also incredible. From ~2020-2022, there was basically a game-changing mod being released every week. IMO, honourable mentions include True Directional Movement, TrueHUD, Happy Little Trees and anything Jayserpa has ever touched. Things have slowed down on account of some atrocious decisions thanks to Bethesda, but I have no doubt that the scene is going to remain strong for the next 5 years at least.
Of course, with any large enough online community (gaming and tech combined, too), there's going to be a fair share of toxicity and controversy. Easy to ignore for modders not involved in the scene, but my god is it everywhere. The two largest issues right now are the use of AI voice cloning (especially in relation to NSFW mods), and conduct among some of the larger modders (link is only one example, there are so many that the list would be as long as this post). I personally don't think that AI generated SFW content is a problem in the modding scene, as long as the content is non-commercial, and that the fight against AI should be more concerned about corporate exploitation, but it's still a relatively heated debate among modders.
There's also the issue of Creations, a new microtransaction system integrated by bethesda, not unlike their old Creation Club content. The addition of this system required with an update to Skyrim, which broke Skyrim Script Extender, a foundational mod that is relied on by many modders. Here's a link to information about both the update and the microtransactions, should anyone want to know more.
Modding skyrim is such a different beast to any other modding scene I've ever experienced, and - if you're able to work around the occasional bad actor, and handle the occasional NSFW jumpscare when clicking on a mod that really doesn't need to have NSFW stuff in it's screenshots (regardless of whether or not the mod itself is NSFW) - then it's a great hobby supported by some amazing and creative people.
Here's some resources for those looking to get into modding Skyrim:
For those who just want to play modded skyrim without doing any of the modding themselves, check out Wabbajack, or Nexus Collections for (mostly) high quality modlists, with (mostly) hands off installers!
Love this idea, @kfwyre. Iām on mobile so my formatting will leave something to be desired, but Iād like to touch on one of your suggested starter topics: the world of DOOM WADs and mods. Iām far from an expert in them, but have really been enjoying the resurgence of the āboomer shooterā genre over the last couple of years, and digging into the WAD scene has been a great way to explore the space for (nearly) free, save the cost of buying DOOM II / any other classic games for which a given WAD is built.
For those who may not be familiar, an oversimplified definition of a WAD is a custom level or level pack built within the DOOM engine, most often to be run on top of DOOM II specifically. The more modern / self-contained ones will handle a lot of the configuration and setup for youāmany developers have even built standalone versions of their WADs so itās as simple as clicking the executable they include with their downloadābut sometimes some extra tinkering is involved wherein you might have to configure a script to start DOOM II at a specific level (single-level WADs are often, but not always, dropped on top of DOOM IIās E1M1 as a full replacement, for example).
I held off on getting into WADs for the longest time because they felt intimidating to me. The thought of tinkering with configurations and scripts just to get a game to run scared me. Plus, it is easy to fall into the lull of having everything in a nice list on Steam. That said, if one is willing to take the plunge into the WAD / modding scene, the sheer simplicity of running these older games is a reward by itself. Gone are the long spin-up sequences, developer splash screens, and Bethesda.net login screens when I want to just play through a few levels of the Plutonia Experiment. Now, I just click on the (very simple one-line) .bat file I wrote, and Iāve got eyes on the main menu in 2-3 seconds.
Iād love to talk WADs and mods with folks in this space, with the caveat Iāve really just started to dip my toes into them myself. I built a list of about 100 WADs/mods that I want to try, and Iām working my way through them chronologically tor the most part. Iāve played through about 20 of the most popular / well-known ones so far, usually not straying too far from any given yearās Cacowards winners, and Iām up to 2001ās winners at this point. Iāve tried plenty that end up as DNFs, but itās mainly because I have so many that I want to play that I canāt justify the hours needed to get through 32-pack MegaWADs at this point in my life.
A few highlights so far, both from a gameplay and a tinkering perspective:
I still have plenty of WADs left on my list that Iāve yet to get to, but Iāll try to add more to this post over the month if I hit any more real highlights, especially from a tinkering / setup perspective. If anyone wants to talk shop on these or needs help getting into WADs, feel free to hit me up!
I'm a living under a rock non DOOM player but even I have heard of MyHouse.wad (2023) - I really appreciate the simplicity of the engine and the ingenious degree to which someone made their own game on top of it.
It's really something to see the variety that's out there. There are some total conversion mods that are barely recognizable as games built on top of DOOM, ranging from "this plays like DOOM, but the visuals and some mechanics are totally overhauled," such as Ashes 2063 and Chex Quest, all the way to "I would have no idea this is a DOOM conversion unless explicitly told as much," like Total Chaos or the more well-known Selaco (all links go to YouTube videos of gameplay footage).
I think this is a great idea. For tinkering, what came to my mind was the Create mod for Minecraft. I suppose redstone would also fit, but I'm not good at that.
The Create mod has diagrams explaining how each component works, which makes it way easier to use. I have it in combination with like 300 or so mods, one of which being Cobblemon, so I've been focusing on my Pokemon team and finding a place to settle down before I start actually tinkering with Create. One if the mods is terralith and another is WWOO, which both change and add biomes to the game.
Idk what kinds of contraptions to make first though. I've got a small island to myself (assuming I don't change my mind on where to stay) so maybe I'll use the mainland across the river for my factory. Maybe I'll make a contraption to create building materials first. Veridium is really pretty. It's a block added by the Create mod, and it's green and has a cobbled deepslate/dark prismarine kind of texture.
Actually, now that I think about it, building materials (the pretty ones) should probably be second, and instead I should make an auto food farm/apricorn farm first.
Update 1: As expected, I completely forgot about the food and apricorn farms lol. But I have over 9 stacks (of 127 instead of 64) of veridium and also limestone. Limestone will be the walls, and veridium will be the roof most likely. I will have a spruce decorative block from the Chipped mod to be a moulding? kind of thing, and furniture from the Adorn mod in cherry pink. So... it's looking like a pale yellow, brown and pink... aka Neapolitan on the inside. Lol. Not sure about the floor yet, but there are TONS of options... maybe crimson wood or a white wool pattern from Chipped...
I haven't started on the tinkering part yet though.
I really love this thread idea so I'll submit a humble post even if it's not super on topic.
It's about Hempuli's Baba Is You franchise (again.)
I wanted o sing more praises for these kinds of puzzle games, where the solutions are not obvious, but which one can think about "offline" and come to sudden "ah-ha!" moments.
There's no twitch reflex, no execution of grand strategies, nothing to master, nothing to grind. One can pick up a puzzle for five minutes or stare at it for an hour. There's nothing to memorize, nothing to look up, no quest you must first complete, no darn time of day when something unlocks as an event, no darn microtransactions......
It's just the puzzle, so simple once cracked, and you. All the conditions are laid out from the beginning for your mind to tinker with: not just to employ but to turn over, turn upside down and inside out, to take apart and reassemble into something usable to solve the riddle.
As an old person, I find it more and more difficult to play a game due to limited time and attention. I appreciate these types of games because they're still playable at my age.
Baba is You is amazing. Occasionally a puzzle beats me, and it's usually because of a mechanic I hadn't thought of because it sounded impossible.
I love logic puzzle games too. Most of the time I do a lot of solving in my head, but Baba is You really encourages me to tinker and just mess around. Especially for later puzzles, many times I'm trying to see what behaviours I can program, and then expanding/adjusting/debugging those programs.
Here's some epic tinkering and programming that folks have done using level creation:
Baba is You is Turing-complete.
Snakebird level implemented in Baba is You
I've been tinkering for a few years on a custom universal game launcher system for macOS. At its core is BetterTouchTool, the misleadingly named power user's swiss army knife util for Mac automation. My project's a bit strange but I'll describe it...
Scenario: I have a wide variety of environments I use to play my diverse game collection, including the following:
Goal: Every game in my collection has its own Mac executable launcher, with a modern 512x512 Mac-style icon (this site has been a great resource but for more obscure games I have been designing my own). Running the launcher will open the game in its ideal environment, resolution, etc., with no additional clicks or user interaction required, directly from the Finder.
Implementation details: Every launcher is an AppleScript, exported as a run-only application signed to run locally. This application does the following:
game_idvariableFrom there, the named triggers do all the work. There's a different one for each environment, but they're all similar in that they run some AppleScript to do whatever's necessary to get the requested
game_idrunning. Here are a few highlights:SheepShaver trigger
There's no way to pass information between the host OS and emulated Mac, but you can share a folder from the host filesystem, which mounts in SheepShaver as a network drive. So this named trigger serializes the requested application path and desired resolution + color depth, and saves it as a text file in that directory.Then, inside the emulated Mac's System Folder > Startup Items, I have another AppleScript compiled as a Mac (OS 9) application, which waits for the virtual drive to be mounted, then parses the file to figure out what to launch and how. I actually keep this alive in the background; it waits until the launched application is no longer running (indicating the user quit the program) and then prompts "do you want to shutdown SheepShaver now?" So the emulated environment doesn't need to keep running after I'm done with the game, it can clean itself up immediately.
Extra: One of my old Mac games, The Incredible Machine 3, has a fun CD-audio soundtrack that isn't available when running this way, and an inferior MIDI version is used instead. So I created a SoundJam MP playlist containing all the songs as MP3s in my emulated Mac, and added a special rule that whenever I launch TIM, that starts up first and plays in shuffle mode before launching the game proper.
Mini vMac trigger
I had to make some compromises with this method because of the way Mini vMac uses disk images. There's no persistent HD I can save startup items in, and AppleScript wasn't introduced until System 7 anyway, so my hands are fairly tied.All of the games I run in this environment have their own disk images, and my launcher chooses which to boot the emulated Mac with. This opens the disk image window automatically on startup, but I still have to manually double-click the icon inside it to start the game, and manually shut down the system afterward.
Windows 11 via Parallels Desktop trigger
Parallels doesn't document this very well, but they do have a CLI util called `prlctl` which accepts an `enter` command along with a string-formatted Windows command to evaluate inside the VM. So this trigger does the following:prlctluntil it succeeds (indicating the VM has completed starting up)The whole thing is kind of an unnecessary convoluted mess but it works and I really like the experience it creates. And it's been a fun way to learn new stuff. There's a lot of detail I've omitted on the Windows automation side but that has got me diving into PowerShell, VBScript, and AutoIt. Seemed like breaking the general system down here for you folks qualifies for the "tinkering" topic.
I love the concept and am experiencing this week's sort of right now. Hopefully I can score us a couple SEO points as well.
I'm playing Starfield with a character that is going to be a jacked dupe of Sarah Morgan, using my current character for NG+. I found that in the game save name there are three sections: Save##_HASH1_HASH2. Copy these three sections from a new character's save to the character you want to fork, and you've got a new character. This is allowing me to keep my original character who has a bunch of loose ends I want to tie up, and allow me to go forward into NG+. This is also allowing me to experience my 2023 GOTY anew.
I feel like I'm stretching things a bit but my save got kind of boring, so this tweak was a way for me to get back into it.
Tinkering with the save file definitely sounds like tinkering to me. That's a neat choice. Along those lines, there are a lot of RPGs I can imagine enjoying a ton more if I flipped on some quadruple EXP, quadruple money cheat codes. I'm still unsure if I have time to participate, but on the other hand this might be a perfect way to speed up a game to fit into a tighter schedule.
I actually cheesed the hell out of Morrowind in that vein. I modded the mudcrab merchant to have more gold so I could sell expensive armor for its full value.
Well I'm glad this is the theme while I'm in the middle of an Oxygen Not Included kick! Currently trying to go for the Super Sustainable achievement for the first time (which requires you to generate AND USE a hefty amount of power without using any coal, methane, or petroleum/ethanol) and attempting to manage a small plug slug farm until I can get to solar and steam power. Managed to find a handy hydrogen vent that I'll probably use to load-balance things in the midgame. I started on a different starting asteroid than usual for the novelty this time (Quagmiris instead of Terrania) and I'm enjoying it so far -- oxygen is definitely easier to handle early game with everything off-gassing polluted oxygen from the start, but I ran into a troubling "layer of water on top of my pool of polluted water" problem earlier that is definitely incentivizing me to get a self-powered electrolyzer set up as soon as possible. Will probably also help accelerate my power usage for the achievement too.
Inspired by @Shevanel and their awesome post, my "tinkering" for the month has been focused on DOOM WADs.
I, like many I'm sure, had heard rumblings of "MyHouse.WAD" as being something significant, but I avoided learning anything directly about it since it seemed like the kind of thing that was easily spoiled.
I wanted to experience it on my own first-hand, so my tinkering was getting it running. Doing this put me in a bit of a bind, because I wanted conflicting things. For one, I wanted it to run through my Steam copy of DOOM II, because I wanted my playtime in the mod to count towards my overall playtime for DOOM II. On the other hand, I wanted the quality of life improvements that a DOOM source port could offer, instead of running it through the original game. This would mean running it through something like GZDoom instead.
The solution is tricking Steam into making it think it's running the original, when instead it's actually loading the source port. This is actually pretty easy. When you run DOOM II in Steam, it launches an executable from the game's local files. You cannot change that target, but you can swap out the actual executable file itself and Steam will simply launch that instead as long as it has the same name.
So, I dumped the files for GZDoom into the same folder and renamed the GZDoom executable so that it overwrote the default one. Now, when I click on DOOM II on Steam, it launches GZDoom instead. I then dropped in the
myhouse.wadfile (which is actuallymyhouse.pk3-- a distinction that I don't fully understand) and told Steam to pass the launch arguments-file myhouse.pk3to the executable (which is, of course, now going to GZDoom).Now, when I launch GZDoom and select DOOM II, it loads MyHouse instead. Tinkering complete!
I'm going to put the rest of my comment in a details block for spoilers about the game itself:
MyHouse.WAD spoilers
On my first playthrough, I got all three keys pretty quickly and exited the level. Nothing seemed too noteworthy. This then dumped me out into Underhalls, the second level of DOOM II. Ending back up in a regular DOOM II level made me think I'd set up the mod wrong, so I looked up a video and spoiled a bit of the beginning discovery process for myself. Turns out the mod was working right, and I just hadn't been paying attention to details as I played.
So, I returned to the game and started to play through it in earnest -- thinking of it less as a DOOM level and more as a sort of adventure game with occasional combat. This made things much more interesting.
I appreciate the game's slow and subtle changes over time -- doors appearing where they didn't use to be. Things in the mirror that aren't actually there (until you then realize that they actually are, just not how you first thought). The beginning unfolds quite nicely and is quite compelling. I then started to get to entirely other places that were a bit unexpected. I haven't finished the game yet, and I don't really have a full grasp on the lore. I need to go back and read all of the associated materials that the dev put out as part of the almost ARG-like nature of the game's release.
I'm currently in a place where I had to climb an outdoor staircase into a big, emptyish concrete house/apartment. I've avoided looking up outside information so I have no idea how far along into the game that is, but I'll keep playing because the game keeps doing interesting things.
Iām choosing not to read the second part of your comment because I havenāt played MyHouse.WAD yet, but Iām glad I helped inspire the journey! And nice thinking on updating Steamās launch parameters for DOOM II. I have a separate GZDOOM folder in which I have a bunch of .bat files written to launch separate WADs at my convenience, but I do love the thought of rewiring a longer-form game through the library to reflect my playtime. Iāll have to give it a shot!
I recently decided it wasn't in my budget to buy a steam deck (despite thinking they are very cool). But I came across my old Nintendo ds lite with R4 card while doing some organizing, and honestly I haven't thought about the steam deck since. I have come to realize that most of the portable games I lean toward are classic RPGs, and the ds had some of the best examples (including some re-releases of favorites like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy).
The R4 card is such a cool little piece of tech, and compared to hacks and mods for other consoles, its so polished and easy to use. I don't even mind that it only supports max 2GB micro sd cards, because it incentivizes me to carefully choose which games are in the current spotlight.
Oh I had a DS with an R4 way long ago :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteos
This was one of my favorite on the console, aside from Pokemon games.
My old R4 stopped working, same with a GBA flash cart I had. I think maybe the batteries die in them eventually.
Anyway, on a similar note I hacked my 3DS with a custom firmware and have been checking out 8 bit emulated games on it. Retro Arch supports retro achievements on it, and I played through Super Mario Land on the Game Boy. The achievement thing adds an extra spice. Barely lost a life until world 4 then it all went wrong haha. I have a whole load of old games I plan to play now.
ZXDS is the best way to play something like Head Over Heels, it works beautifully. And Vice 64 for C64 games too. The only one that was too tricky for me was ScummVM, I couldn't get anything to run on it. I fancied trying Eye Of The Beholder again, a portable version of that would be sweet.
I was thinking that nothing on my radar this month fits this category ā I even scrolled through my steam library, but didnāt find anythingā¦ but I was thinking too small!
I got myself a Quest 3 late last year, and so far I love it, but Iāve only been using it in standalone mode. But also Iāve been wanting to play Rumble (and some other PCVR games) for a while now, so I think my Tinkering project will be to figure out how the wireless connection works to play PCVR games on my quest!
Itās liking to be tricky because the computer is cabled directly into the router on the other side of the house, but Iāve heard that the best option is to have the quest connected to the wireless network via 5GHz wifi, so I might need to play around with an extra router or maybe get a wifi dongle for my PC?
Either way, Iām looking forward to it! Thanks for the inspiration!
I did an absurd thing. I've got a Thrust master T.Flight HOTAS X or some such. A throttle and flight stick. I hooked it up to Final Fantasy XIV, swapped to machinist (gunner), then played in first person mode (generally a terrible idea for MMOs).
On top of figuring out what button mapping to use and how to configure hotkeys for it (the latter of which can turn into a whole project all its own), it took a little extra tinkering since I'm on Linux. Wine didn't pick it up out of the box. I configured a SDL mapping and set it as an environment variable, then FFXIV picked it up no problem.
I raid with a static (hard content with a regular group), I plan to keep pushing this absurd setup and see how far I can go. The machinist controls felt far more comfortable than I had anticipated, I'm not sure other jobs would've translated as well. I usually use mouse and keyboard, so it's a pretty substantial adjustment beyond the obvious.
This is such a good idea, ive wanted to play teardown for a while and it popped into my head immediately upon reading the theme. Its not on sale so im going to have to wait till i get paid this week but i may as well put my foot in this figurative door of conversation
Meta: Feel free to respond here if you have any thoughts/suggestions on the idea of Tildes Gaming Club itself: how it'll can be run, what future themes should be, etc. This is all an experiment, and I'm completely open to feedback and want it to be something people like.
Also, please mark this comment off-topic to move it down the topic so that actual posts about games are above it.
Personally, I don't mind the added suggestions below the theme name itself, though I know you said you'd leave it more open-ended in the future. But I don't know that I would have thought to begin a thread on DOOM WADs had you not called it out as an example of tinkering. Maybe that's more a sign that I need to think outside of the box. At any rate, I love the idea and I'll pass along any themes should I think of some.
My worry was that listing things out for a theme would prime people to those suggestions and they'd have a hard time thinking of other things?
Between your feedback and seeing it written out like this though, I think I've actually changed my mind: giving some examples gives a lot more of a jumping off point than just the word "tinkering" on its own.
A possible compromise between both of these points is to have each of your examples inside spoiler tags? That way, the default view if people look at the post is the idea you were wanting to trend towards (just the theme and what the game club is). But for those who get stuck, they can check the spoilers for inspiration?
Brilliant! Thatās a great solution.
Totally valid concern. Maybe meeting in the middle - giving just one or two off-the-wall examples (if you can think of one) that would help folks think outside the box? That way, youāre building the scaffolding while still allowing plenty of natural divergence. Itās not nothing, but not a huge list either.