Hey all, Argo here
//I've been a bit out of being active in the community for a while. The busy season at work, wrapped up in a nice little bow with the holiday season in tow has been kicking my ass. This weekend should be my last huge workload for a while, so hopefully I'll have more time to write up my ideas. Fortunately for us though, the design process and ideas never stop coming--
Its finally time to put them on (digital) paper.
Since my last post, we have seen a good amount of updates. First and foremost, the teach mode alpha/beta have started! Generative UI has taken a breath of air, and vision mode continuously improves! LAM playground is a pretty decent solution to my personal gripe with the lack of terminal mode functionality, so all in all I’m pretty happy.
As with most of my posts, I feel its necessary to link to my Game Design for the r1 Superthread. I take pride in the ideas I wrote about, and still feel strongly towards many of them. If its at all interesting to you, it also sets a good precedent for the types of ideas I like to indulge in. More specifically I’d also like to focus on my ideas for UI. Generative UI is a really neat idea for aesthetics, but in the context of game UI, might not be the best choice… without a solid framework in place.
This weeks OTA add the r-cade. One of my favorite ideas, as well as a community favorite has finally launched! With the r-cade, we have a currency (carrots), a basic “gameplay” loop (gacha), and a way to customize individual devices. In essence, we have the basics of the rabbigotchi. A standard tamagotchi has some very basic functions-- Eat, Sleep, and Play. The rabbit expresses these things in a similar way, though we can always expand the possible gameplay features in future updates.
Eat and Play are currently wrapped up in the same function, you spend (feed) the currency (carrots) to play with your rabbit (spin the gacha). The device “sleeps” during charging, not the most elegant comparison but a comparison nonetheless.
We earn currency by interacting with the r1, and overtime we will naturally have the means to play the gacha.
To access the r-cade, you scroll down once to begin a transition, and again to confirm. If a Music player is currently running, the transition is delayed until the music player screen. We are essentially navigating a verticle line of applications, though with the r-cade we have a transition that feels like we enter a new environment. For the sake of conversation and mutual understanding, I am going to call these environments “spaces”. The drag transition (orange transition for settings and r-cade) currently marks the barrier between spaces.
When in the Home space – if terminal mode is enabled – turning the device landscape will always open terminal mode. It does not matter if we are on the main screen or the music player screen, terminal mode overrides the space.
Opposed to this, in the settings space and the r-cade space, turning the device on its side does not open terminal mode. The transition between spaces opens up an variable for us to use.
I’d also like to mention that the current spaces relate in a vertical line. The r-cade and settings space only contain one navigable screen.
Oops, its been a while again, and I’m pretty sure I can finally let you know I was part of the beta testing! Yippie!
In the meantime, I’ve been continuing to design my GPS game idea. For this one, we’re actually going way back to Nautilus Systems, one of my early designs for virtual pets.