A Game of Hikikomori: Flying Cities Edition

One of my story projects is this odd drama-adventure thing about freightship’s drivers in a world where humans have abandoned the ground and created numerous floating cities in the sky. About a month ago I was having problem solidifying one of its characters. I don’t have a lot of ideas on how to work with her, and for some reason I was also thinking, “Hey, it’s been a while since I last played that weird solo RPG thing.” I figured, what the heck, kill two birds with one stone.

So I started up the game with the character and world from my project. It went out pretty well. The end result is definitely not what I was expecting, and it actually built up more things to write the actual story project on.

I didn’t intend to show this to anyone at first, so wording might be slightly wonky, confusing, et cetera. And it contains some half-assed lore details, because I was basically writing by the seat of my pants. But either way, here’s the full game I ended up with. For a neater view, I made a Gingko tree out of it.

Stuck with some hardcore trigonometry

Mathematics is fun. It’s like a video game, a good one. The kind that strikes just the right balance of difficulty, depth, and interaction. You’re given a challenge to overcome, and a set of tools to do it. You can go out, guns blazing and counting every digit by hand, or you could set up some traps and go round and around it until you somehow stumble upon the right answer. It’s just so, so frustrating sometimes.

I mean sometimes you can look up the answer at the back of the book or something, but jumping straight to the answer of a mathematics puzzle is way lamer than looking up the walkthrough for a video game. You can always blame the game designer if a game is frustrating, but when a mathematics problem is frustrating it’s probably because you’re stupid. And people don’t like to feel stupid.