kaiakairos's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

5 Movie Reviews w/ Response

2025-02-15 23:07:01

as a kid i would make games and shitty little things on scratch, that website where you can use block coding to make whatever. It was an interesting feeling, searching though the menu of all the blocks you could use. I could get lost thinking of all the different things i could try doing with a particular block. And of top of that, if some one had posted a cool game on the site, you could open their project and see all the tricks and methods they were using to make their games. Similar to flash certain methods would be found to do certain things with the limited tools, and you'd start seeing it in a million different projects.
Now I use godot, and don't get me wrong its way more capable and better in everyway, but part of me misses that feeling of searching through the blocks, and digging into other peoples games. Godot is just TOO capable. There's few "tricks", you just go do what you need.

I saw this back when it was posted but I watched it again today and thought i should leave a thought or two. Its very good and not something that could be anything else.

Emrox responds:

Thanks!

I think about that kind of stuff a lot - how some of the limitations of the past resulted in different kinds of creative choices that you don't see today, or just had a different sort of creative spirit that is hard to preserve because no one at the time realized how unique and special that environment was. I guess that's how you get guys like Tarantino where he borrows a bunch of aesthetics from the b-movies and exploitation films from the 70s, as a way of preserving some of what was cool about that stuff, because you can write video essays all day but what ultimately keeps it alive is good work.
That and custom tools, I guess. Like how pico-8 is supposed to recreate the creative environment of an old game console - artificially and arbitrarily limited so you can see just how much you can do within those limitations. Lately I've been thinking a little bit about how I would make my own animation software that can recreate some of the immediacy of working in flash, but is very specifically tailored to doing wacky computery aesthetic stuff. I don't have the skills to make anything like that yet, but it might be a cool goal to work towards.

I wonder if maybe a thing like godot has just as many neat exploits, but because you can do so much with godot already, there's less incentive to push boundaries. And/or maybe, pushing boundaries in godot is much harder, because they did a much better job of covering all the bases of what you might want out of a game engine, and it's hard to even imagine stuff beyond the scope of what's intended, because that scope is already pretty all-encompassing.

I guess I should get back to work!

STEREO