a blog about #video games

Unfair Flips is a game about flipping a coin to get 10 Heads flips in a row.

Unfair Flips is a game about how humans interact with variable probability.

Unfair Flips is a game about how people interpret the information presented to them, relative to the seemingly random outcomes they experience.

Unfair Flips is a game about why people play games at all, when there’s only a finite amount of time to experience them.

Unfair Flips is a game with a speedrunning community. The rules of the speedrun say that time starts when the first coin is flipped and ends when one of the various endings occurs and then number of total flips is displayed. The current world-record strategy routeing seems like an optimal series of upgrades to minimize time played, along with a lot of luck. Statistically speaking, the variance in flips will eventally produce a relatively fast run. The minimum required number of flips per run is 10 Heads and no Tails. With enough time across enough runners, it’s possible that someone will even get this lucky. Other speedruns tend to rely on memorization, dexterity, and endurance. While the orders of upgrades could land in those former…

This weekend, I was overcome by the urge to make this extremely specific fanart.

I recently watched Austin and Jack from Friends at the Table play Hthrflwrs’s extremely good new video game Unfair Flips by streaming it on Twitch

Over the course of the roughly three hour stream, Austin and Jack — among other things¹ — invented a pair of delightfully frustrating fictional oligarchs named The Red Duke and The Blue Baron, who alternated between jabs at their subjects (the streamers) and talking to each other about the rousing match of coin flips the were playing vicariously through them.

Footnotes

1. Austin also read a long excerpt about how wine and milk are two ends of a spectrum among drinks. I forget which book excerpt it came from, but it was a great time. In my headcannon, The Blue Baron is a milk-drinker, while The Red Duke drinks wine. ↩

As part of the thinky puzzle games discord, some folks began running the Confounding Calendar project, which I got to experience for the first time this past year (2024). My favorite entry from those was a game called “Alphabet Soup for Picky Eaters” which is a combination of a code-breaking word-guessing game and a bunch of absolutely delightful little guys of different colors to make use of the yearly Confounding Calendar chosen color palette. If you haven’t played it, I highly recommend doing so.

After playing it, I felt a similar feeling to how I felt when I first played Wordle. Here was a game that was a delightful 10-15 minute puzzle, it didn’t overstay its welcome, and it also happened to have a handful of solutions that could all suffice. I began imagining trying to make a version that could handle the “new word every day” and more importantly “new set of rules every day.”

This weekend, I had some free time and needed a distraction for a handful of reasons, and so I finally decided to dive into making a prototype. I’ve been building UI-heavy browser-focused games in…

Slay the Spire is the best roguelike deckbuilder of all time. I remember seeing it released in early access in 2017 and it took over all sorts of Twitch streams that I watched at the time. Despite loving card games and despite having enjoyed playing other hybrid-roguelikes¹ of the era², I didn’t buy and play Slay the Spire until it officially launched on the Nintendo Switch in June of 2019 as a game for plane rides across the country for work and visiting friends.

Ever since, Slay the Spire has been a game that I play almost exclusively while traveling, whether while in transit or at my destination. I play each character’s new ascension level in order before I move onto the next level. I have not beaten A20 on any character yet, but I’m at A10 on all of them, and the game hasn’t lost its magic for me. In 2024, I began a completely different relationship with the game: one where I play it for hours at home and with friends.

Modded Slay the Spire

Over the years since its launch, I had learned about the Downfall mod from its original trailer and its updated…

I like reading about what other folks find interesting, but I often forget to write down what I myself have found. I’ve been meaning to talk about this first link ever since I came across it, but I kept forgetting to make time until now. I figure a new month is a good a time as any to make a link-retrospective post.

Video Games

This video is not only impressive on a technical level for being able to accomplish what it set out to do, but the animations and ways that the information is conveyed is on par with a pannenkoek video in terms of making complex ideas become understable.

• Beating every possible game of Pokemon Platinum at the same time

Movies

I had never heard of this and it became the first RSS feed post that I’ve bookmarked since making the transition over from cohost to inoreader as my means of internet browsing.

• Laura linked to a well-creafted treasure trove of (especially Lucasfilm) behind-the-scenes info

Fashion

I had meant to share this CJ video because I think it does an incredible job of explaining fashion through the lens of “conversation with community identity,” and I was reminded that I…

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion came out for the Xbox 360 on March 20, 2006 — almost two decades ago. It launched during an era when there weren’t really game wikis to google, which meant that most of the bugs and strange discoveries in the game for me came from word of mouth in my social circle.

Beyond the more widely-known “horse-armor” DLC launched in April of 2006, there was a number of other DLC items. The only relevant one to this story was the Frostcrag Spire quest for the “Wizard’s Tower”. I did not buy it, but my friend did and we would regularly hang out. We found that if my friend logged in while he was at my house, then I was able to download and play the DLC on my console. However, either because of limitation in the storage of our hard-drives or because you could only associate your Xbox Live account with so many Xbox 360s at once, we got into this mess where I kept having to re-download the DLC every time he visited if I wanted to play it.

This went on for a few weeks until one of us accidentally tried to load…

Today, my friend and I launched another new version of our puzzle game named Wizard Sokoban (working title). You can play it on itch.io for free, though it works best on a computer using firefox:

I wanted to take some time to discuss the journey we’ve been through getting here because I’m proud of what we’ve made so far and I’m excited for what it’ll be after we’ve applied another few rounds of polish.

Our second time game developing

In May of 2024, my friend Jules and I found ourselves simultaneously unemployed for the first time in our professional careers. With no structure to our days, we talked about some side projects that we’d been meaning to try out when we had more time. He mentioned wanting to try out Godot, and I mentioned that I had an idea for a puzzle game that could be pretty fun and simple to make.

We’ve been playing video games together for over a decade, and we most recently took on the idea of making our own when we went on a vacation to take part in Indie Train Jam 2017 from Chicago to Emeryville.¹ Surrounded by…