Maps, Systems, and Creativity

Last week we had WWDC and a Nintendo Direct, two events I like to make time for.

WWDC is Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, and I usually look forward to seeing what is coming next for Apple devices. Unfortunately, this year was largely about AI and not particularly exciting. The two things I was most interested in were the improvements to macOS design, which is currently a bit of a mess, and the improved child controls, which I’m surprised they didn’t have before.

The Nintendo Direct, on the other hand, was a much more interesting presentation. A lot of the games they showed were Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs), which I don’t play much, but there were still a few announcements that caught my eye.

The biggest was a remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, one of my favourite games of all time. They also announced a return to Wuhu Island in Switch Sports Resort. I played the original Wii Sports Resort a lot with my then-girlfriend (now wife), so I have good memories of it. The new game has more sports and looks like a lot of fun.

They also showed Piku Niku 2 and Final Fantasy Resonance, which is one of the few JRPGs from the presentation that tempted me.

In my own world of development, I’ve been working on more fixes for Brush Ninja. It seems I still haven’t cracked the speed issues, but hopefully I’ll get there one day.

I’ve also been working on a 3D editor for BeepMini, a tool for building little worlds of my own. It’s probably an ambitious project for a retro 2D game library, but I’m also building a retro 3D engine alongside it. I started work on the engine over a year ago as a hand-coded renderer, but it quickly became clear that 3D maths is hard. Since then I’ve switched to using three.js, which has sped things up enormously.

So now I have a working engine and the beginnings of an editor that still needs a lot of work before it’s usable. You can see a few screenshots on Bluesky.

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The Man Who’s Spent a Lifetime Making One, Giant Map

This is beautiful, and it ended up tying together a lot of what I’ve been thinking about lately. It’s the story of an 84-year-old man who has been designing a detailed world since he was small. He draws map elements on sheets of paper and, when laid out, they form a huge make-believe world with a rich history.

To decide how the world evolves, he has made a simple card game using a customised deck of playing cards (it’s actually about 100 cards). These cards tell him what to draw, edit, change, grow, or improve. I find the whole thing fascinating.

In fact, the whole project boils down to processes and systems, which really calls to me. A lot of the things I make these days are system-based, whether that’s tools that improve a process or projects where different parts interact in interesting ways.

What I love here is that those systems are being used to build an entire world. Over decades, the map has developed its own history. Cities have risen and fallen, rivers have changed course, and the world has been shaped by the people who live in it. It reminds me a little of a town-building game like SimCity, except there’s no goal and no loss condition. It’s simply a world that exists and evolves.

The documentary film team, who make a lot of content about games of all types, found out about this and made a short documentary about it. Even better, they were able to spend three days with him laying out this world so he could see it in its entirety for the first time in 14 years! It’s a lovely story about creativity and the pleasure of making things for the sake of it, rather than for profit or an audience.

I find it really inspiring because it reminds me why I keep making things. Most of the time, it’s simply because I want the thing to exist. Unfortunately, I also need to pay the bills, so I always have this thing in the back of my mind about how I will make money from the project, and I wonder how much this affects what and how I make.

I would love the freedom to just make things for the joy of making them.

Watch the video

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Entering Gerudo Fortress

Watch the announcement video

With the announcement of a remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, I’ve been thinking it’s time to buy a Nintendo Switch 2. I played Ocarina of Time when it first came out, and I’m hoping this will be a good opportunity to play it with my son. I am hoping that they make some quality-of-life improvements such as the ones in the 3DS version that make it a bit more accessible. I’d also love to see the world become one seamless experience without loading screens by making the most of the considerably more powerful hardware. It looks like a total remake, not just a remaster or upscale, so I’m looking forward to seeing what they do.

Watch the fan animation

Anyone who has played Ocarina of Time will recognise Gerudo Fortress and Link’s escape from prison. This fan-made animation recreates that sequence and then gives a tour of the world that was built around it. The animation was made in Unreal Engine and is a huge upgrade on the original N64 graphics, but it captures the feel of the game really nicely.

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Piku Niku 2

The other big announcement for me was Piku Niku 2, a sequel to the original Piku Niku. Piku Niku is a 2D game where you are a small red blob with long legs that has to take on the might of capitalism. It’s very quirky and very strange, but also a lot of fun. Like the original, it looks as though it’s building a strange little world with its own rules and sense of humour. The original managed to be funny, odd, and surprisingly sharp all at once. It also built a strange little world with its own rules and sense of humour. This looks like more of the same, but in 3D, and I’m here for it.

Watch the trailer

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Sparked Discoveries

Here’s a handful of links I found intriguing recently:

Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration

A new museum in London dedicated to the work of Quentin Blake, the beloved illustrator known for his collaborations with Roald Dahl. I grew up with Roald Dahl’s books and Quentin Blake’s illustrations, so this feels like a lovely celebration of the worlds they helped create and I’m looking forward to visiting it.

Elias Thorne’s Chatbots and LLMs

This amused me when I read it, but then I tested it and, well, it is spot on. The article talks about how chatbots and LLMs (like ChatGPT) often use the same small pool of names and themes when you ask them to tell a story.

I even tried it myself and it wrote a story about a lady called Eliza and her grandfather. I asked what the grandfather’s name was and it suggested Elias.

I feel very conflicted by AI. The environmental harms are real, but I also feel like there are genuine uses for it. At the same time, anyone actually using it for creative work (story writing, image and video creation) is, I think, missing the point of creativity. I use it for things like proofreading and rubber ducking, but I don’t want it building the worlds for me. I’m currently looking at local AI tools that run on my computer so I can rely less on big tech and hopefully have fewer environmental impacts.

Hallucinate

I’ve never been into clubbing, but this is a fun little browser-based world where you can dance with others whilst watching live music. It’s a virtual festival, complete with its own little world to explore. There are controls scattered all over the screen for different movements and customisations. There’s a main stage, but there are also smaller stages and a chill-out area.

My computer is fairly powerful and rarely makes much noise, but every time I’ve visited this site the fans have spun up almost immediately.