Blog - David Helkowski

0player? Oh no

 Recently I have been working on building a puzzle game. Well another one. I have actually been working on building a game called TentFires for some 5 years now. Well more to the point I have been playing TentFires and iterating on it for 4 years after I created a fully working version in the first year of that effort.

I have not yet published TentFires anywhere, because it has become extremely complex. It will be awesome when I finish it, but doing that is difficult.

So I decided to pivot in the last week and create a full working game that is simpler and easier for people to grasp and enjoy. Doing so gave me a sudden desire to look for and play whatever good new puzzle video games exist, so I searched around to find what new stuff there is.

The last new "puzzle game" I had bought and played was Blue Prince, and, well, I thought that sucked.

So I searched around and found the game "0player". If it can even be called a game that is. It's just an image. An image that looks like a block sliding puzzle game screenshot, but there is no game, there is only the screenshot. And they expect you to just "figure out for yourself how it works" and then "play it yourself by using an image editor."

As you probably now, I don't pull my punches on this blog. I think "use an image editor to imagine for yourself playing an conceived game" is fucking idiotic. It is pure laziness on the part of the developers. They position it as "this is genius" but I totally disagree. It's dumb. Why would I want to do that? I don't. There is zero reason.

But I do love block pushing puzzle games, and it immediately seemed obvious to me that people would make it into a real video game regardless of the dumbass beliefs of the creators of the thing.

So I looked for and found the two implementations of it so far. The first was a web rendition that was only halfway made into a proper video game. It only made it easier to yourself be the game engine.

The second thing I found was a thing called 0.5players. I tried to run the GitHub release of it, which was a Windows executable. It did not run. It just crashed. I made a GitHub issue noting that it just crashes, but I was impatient so I used AI to "fix it".

I don't know what was wrong. I didn't really pay attention or care what AI did to "fix it". I do know that I disliked that they were using a prebuilt copy of the library it uses, so I had AI pull that from upstream instead. It also changed a bunch of build process and built me a new version. I had it add a bunch of logging to give me something to go on as well if it crashed still. It didn't crashed and worked. So I now have a working fork of 0.5players.

The trouble is, my fork was in legal gray zone. Why? Because neither 0player nor 0.5players had any Copyright or License specified, making them both a legal limbo to fork, change, and repost.

So I made a GitHub issue for that, requesting MIT license, and also contacted one of the creators of 0player asking for a license to be applied.

Happily and amazingly both 0player and 0.5players agreed. 0player initially said MIT, but then changed their mind to CC with attribution. 0.5players agreed to MIT. So there are now actual licenses which enable me to fork and develop 0.5players further!

So I did. I worked further and fixed the excessive GPU usage, and also added a full save state system. It's on GitHub already but I still want to polish it all further. I will be releases native builds of it all not just for Windows but for MacOS and Linux also. Look forward to that soon!

Oh, and of course I also just played through the whole game. It's short but fun. I think certain video game mechanics of it should be simplified to be more appealing for players not intimately familiar with puzzle game trickery especially related to block pushing, but it does now function as a video game, and I can work from there.

As for my title, "Oh no", my point is that I reject the 0player creators principle of there being no "video game player". It's irrelevant to me what they think. It uses clear block pushes and circuit mechanics that are well understood in the video game community.

Saying "it's not that! This is pen and paper!" is just a gag and doesn't matter to me. It's a video game now buddies. The way software licenses work? No takebacks. You licensed it and now it will live on under those licenses as people ( including me ) see fit.

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