itch.io

Ooh, I get to check “convince a skeptic that hypnosis is real” off my list of goals I had for this thing! Sounds like you had quite the experience with it, it’s great to hear you responded so strongly.

Hypnosis is a real, well-studied effect, although the details are up for a lot of debate. There are a lot of ways to get hypnotic responses out of folks; nothing is reliable because it’s very dependent on how each individual person processes communication and information they receive, but to me it also feels like everything works, at least for someone, at least some of the time. Which is pretty consistent with the general consensus of current research – insofar as there is a consensus – which can be summarized as “everyone is alarmingly suggestible most of the time”.

Vacation uses a lot of conventional (and unconventional) techniques of suggestion. The primary thing that inspired it was realizing I could use the basic structure of an endless runner game to produce a “pattern break” structure. I also started thinking of how a game tutorial is a structure for getting folks to interactively follow instructions with the intent of learning how to automatically perform a task (to control a character in a game, you want to not be thinking about the controls all the time), and voluntary compliance is an important basis for rapport – so I wanted to see what I could build up from there.

It sounds like I built up quite the thing for you! I’m pretty sure that getting so hypnotized you can’t play the game is how you actually win, score be damned. I wanted to implement something to actually detect that and comment on it at the end-of-game screen but ran out of space in the Pico-8 cartridge and time in the game jam, although I should probably revisit it to see if I can cram it in anyway now that I’m not under time pressure.

Hey, I’m glad to hear you had a good time with it! I love hearing when it’s effective for folks. Text hypnosis usually requires prior experience as a hypnotic subject to be effective; I wanted to see if I could use the participatory structure of a game to get stronger effects despite the medium, and it sounds like it worked for you.

I have ambitions to write a couple more things using the engine I developed for Vacation, but I’m still trying to work out more ways to adapt typical forms of suggestion to game mechanics. The arcade segments of Vacation were primarily an exercise in pattern breaking; still trying to figure out what else I can express within the constraints of Pico-8!

sure! my Mastodon account is linked in my profile, and my Telegram and Discord username is the same as here. (I use Discord more.) You can contact me in any of those places. You can also email me – same username, gmail.com. I can’t promise to have all the right answers for you but I can talk about what I’ve implemented here and the hypnotic theory behind it! And we can talk about how to get started with game development, too.

A mood booster when you just need to relax is absolutely one of the vibes I was going for. I’m glad you’ve had a good time with it!

Hey, I’m flattered! And I’m glad to hear you had fun with it. I do already have plans to do more like this – the biggest puzzle is figuring out mechanics for the arcade segment that would work reasonably well, I think I used the easiest one this time and I’ll have to get more creative in the future.

Glad you’ve been enjoying it! It seems like it just might have gotten in your head a little, though~

That’s something I was concerned about when developing the game, tbh – that the breathing rate would be wrong for someone to an extent that it makes them ill, especially if their breathing entrains to the breathing animation continuing after the explicit prompting has passed. (Which is an intended effect.)

In general, do you find yourself to run out of breath easily? Alternatively, do you have extraordinary cardiovascular endurance? I’m not sure if my implementation is more at risk for producing hyperventilation (in people who start taking very deep breaths) or hypoventilation (in people with restricted breathing, higher oxygen needs, or habitually shallow breathing).

since you’re asking if folks found Monogram useful…

so, this is probably not something you expected your font to be used for, but Monogram was the backbone of my Strawberry Jam 8 entry, Vacation. Strawberry Jam is an annual month-long game jam with the same theme every year, which is “whatever the devs are hot for”, explicitly inviting “adult-only” content.

Vacation is a Pico-8 game about being hypnotized into experiencing yourself as a pooltoy orca. “About” might be putting too much distance in there, it’s a text hypnosis session using a simple minigame as part of its schtick and mechanism. And the bulk of that text is in Monogram!

Monogram is the most legible Pico-8 font I found that had the friendliness and playfulness I needed for the concept I wanted to express. I had initially specifically wanted something “not-monospace” so it would feel less computer-y, but all other fonts I could find were substantially less legible or comfortable to read and I soon realized that it was much easier to get text placement right with a monospace font.

Out of 76 entries (74 after DQs), Vacation got 16th place overall, and 2nd place in the “Kink” category, the category which the game jam’s organizer describes as “Does it transcend the typical bounds of what is typically understood as sex?” in the judging criteria. I’m proud of that result, especially for my first game jam!

So, uh, a Pico-8 hypnokink Experience by a furry into inflatable toys may not have been what you were expecting Monogram would be used for, but here we are.

uh, sorry for the info dump, I’m like that sometimes

Different people experience different levels of response to hypnotic suggestion. Getting hypnotized is a skill that can improve with practice, but there’s wide variance in baseline experiences. Different “kinds” of suggestion work in different ways – some people experience vivid hallucination very easily (and would feel the sun and the waves quite directly!) while others might be more susceptible to identity-play, amnesia effects, etc.

Clinical hypnotherapy research suggests that it is possible to induce an REM state in someone hypnotized with their eyes closed. But I’m not going to get that when the eyes are busy reading text! Vivid, dreamlike sensory hallucination is definitely possible under hypnosis for some folks, but I’ve only experienced it myself on a couple of occasions, and never with a prerecorded file of any sort, only in a live session when I was unusually responsive and my friend hypnotizing me was especially on point. I typically get effects much closer to vivid daydreaming, from a sensory perspective. Bending my motivations, desires, behavior, cognition, and memory is all easier – but it’s taken a while to get to that level of experiential susceptibility. Behavior is the easiest thing to elicit but folks rarely subjectively “feel” particularly hypnotized – one technique that I used but needed to lean into more is that of using behavioral suggestions to produce something that a subject will recognize more directly as an altered state; that’s what the bit about “you can’t look away when you try, which you should do” was about.

“Zoned out” is a light trance state. People used to focused work (software engineering, including game dev, is a notable example) are typically familiar enough with a state of focus that it takes a bit more work to persuade them that they’re hypnotized, since “focus” and “hypnosis” are such closely related states that hypnosis doesn’t feel unfamiliar enough. I tried to lean into avolition – acting without experiencing intent to do so – but that’s hard to emphasize in a short session, since the subjective experience is of just going along with the suggestions. I can do more with it directly. It’s hard to convert skills I’ve built around noticing how someone is reacting to being hypnotized and using that into a “prerecorded” context like this. Which is pretty common, which goes back to why prerecorded things usually work poorly for less-experienced subjects. My ambition with this was to see if I could make it more participatory in ways that would help produce stronger effects for less-experienced subjects, as well as use hypnotic techniques not typically attempted in a text form, but overall I think I got a pretty “normal” level of response out of folks, reading the comments here.

Maybe I should still be pretty satisfied with that – I got a “normal” level of response out of folks from my first hypnosis software, which I did in Pico-8 (not known for its suitability for this use), in a shorter form with a non-traditional induction. I’d like to do more, and I already have ideas for what a rewritten script could do better – and I do plan to write an alternate version with a totally new script, aimed at slightly different kinks, pushing harder into them to an extent I wouldn’t put in a game jam because it’d be more than the other developers were signing up for when agreeing to rate games. (Which is part of why this was on the lower-key end.)

It’s reasonable to be vigiliant about whether a hypnotic thing is appropriate for you – “check out the file first without going into trance” is common advice in the hypnokink community. That internal hypervigilance can definitely be headache-inducing – I’ve been there – and I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all to have a hard time handing over that level of trust to, in this case, a computer program written by a complete stranger. Vacation is roughly the same every time – word spawning in the arcade stages is partially randomized, but the other text is constant. (The arcade stage text is structured to be suggestive in ways that might not be apparent at first, so it is suggestive, but its themes are constant.) You can also open up the source (vacation.p8) to review the script, including the word lists, in its entirety. But that only does so much; I guess what I’m saying with this long rambling comment is that I think you’re having a very normal experience for any prerecorded Hypnosis Thing. My writing in the game about how vivid the experience would be is, in a word, optimistic – if I don’t try for it I’ll never push anyone’s experience that far, but (like a lot of hypnotic suggestion) it is very exaggerated relative to a reasonable expectation.

thanks for the reminder! I finished rating all the games in the jam (!) and I’m going back and leaving a handful of comments now. I didn’t want to comment too early in voting while folks were still forming their first opinions, and for that matter I didn’t want to commit myself to a strong opinion only to revisit it later after seeing more of the stuff in the jam. I believe I was the 12th person to rate this game, several days ago.

This is my favorite game of the jam, by a long shot.

This is one of the strongest game designs of the jam. The graphics are a bit small – I think legibility is a weak point – but it’s a creative Sokoban-like that does genuinely new things. Creating satisfying puzzles is hard and I respect the ones you’ve built!

I also want to recognize the clever use of the theme. The “stimulation”/“pleasure” system works as an obstacle requiring unique motion planning. The way these systems interact is intuitive and thematic in context, but it would be very hard to present these mechanics in a comprehensible way without the “edging” theme attached to it! I think this is unique in the jam – I think it’s the only game here with mechanics that are substantial enough to enjoy as a game independently of Prurient Interest in its presentation, which cannot trivially be re-themed as a non-horny game because sexuality is core to making its mechanics comprehensible. I think that’s really interesting!

This is the first game I played in the jam, and I keep coming back and giving it higher and higher scores. It centers a lot of things that I have a great deal of anxiety and self-hatred around and it’s taken a lot of time for me to go back and recognize how strong the writing is to cause that – it’s not stumbling into this, it’s telling a story of a character with a lot of the same things going on as I have, and reminding me of how uncomfortably shallow most of my coping/masking mechanisms are. I’m going back to this now – I stopped early when I got too stressed out, but now that I have rated everything in the jam I feel like I can go back and give this the time it deserves – and give myself the time, patience, and compassion I wasn’t allowing for myself when I was feeling a lot of time pressure.

But yeah, I think this is excellent writing now. Maybe someday I’ll be more tolerant towards myself.

One thing that did throw me off early was getting distracted by a red herring in a very early puzzle – a reference to esolangs in the prose made me totally fail to recognize the answer right in front of me and instead feed the puzzle file into a Brainfuck interpreter which, if it skips unknown tokens, emits what looks like deliberately-engineered output in another “one character instruction” esolang that I couldn’t recognize! A friend and I spent a while trying to figure out which one it was, scouring the text for hints, before realizing and trying the obvious and discovering it to be correct. So, uh, that might not have helped my mood. And I’m still not quite convinced there isn’t some secondary solution in there, I suppose I’ll find out later on…

This is, hands down, by far, my favorite interactive fiction game of the jam. (By “interactive fiction” I am combining all visual novels, hypertext adventures, point-and-click adventures, and walking simulators (both first-person and top-down) into one meta-genre.) Excellent work, it gets so many different things right; I loved this!

There are only a few games in this jam that are solid enough to feel like a complete game that has “something to it” beyond its expression of the themes of the jam, and of them, this is by far the one that commits hardest to the sexual aspects of its design and presentation. Having played every game in the jam, this one stands out to me as one of the best overall, and it is (in my view) specifically the best at creating gameplay that is inextricably intertwined with its expression of its kink content – it’s not something that happens “on the side” of some conventional game, and it’s not somehow weak as a game to work in its sexual concepts. Excellent work!

Definitely early in development, but I really like the art you’ve put in this! I really like what you’ve done with Bitsy Color + Twine + Flicksy2 together here – combining these three engines in this way highlights the strengths of all of them, and they cover each others’ weaknesses: Bitsy creates a sense of space that Twine games typically lack, Twine creates a depth of content that Flicksy2 and Bitsy rarely achieve, and Flicksy2 creates interactive and animated graphics that neither other engine has a means of providing. I haven’t seen these used together before and I think it’s a real highlight to take these three notoriously limited game engines and jam them together in a way that feels perfectly natural, like they were designed to be used this way, and using them independently seems trite and silly now.

So I really like the concept, and I think it’s executed well as far as it goes! I’m definitely curious about the methods you used to staple these together.

I’ve discovered that the in-game cursor is flickery and keeps jumping to the upper left corner of my desktop (outside of the window!) for a few frames here and there. I had a hunch, so I dropped my refresh rate back down to 60FPS (from 120) and that fixed it.

so you have some display bugs at high refresh rates. Windows 11 Pro, Nvidia RTX 3090, Ryzen 8 5950X, 32GB RAM, native display resolution 5120x1440 (32:9 ultra-ultrawide monitor)

In writing the hypnotic script, I went out of my way to avoid referring to the Unseen Narrator as a character – no use of “I” or other reflexive pronouns – because I didn’t think I had space to develop a character people would feel connected to, but pointing it out like this makes it clear that was a straight-up error on my part; hypnosis depends on rapport and it’s easier to develop that rapport with someone.

I’m already planning a mod with a new script rewritten around different themes, based on the prior work of another regular participant in this jam, which would have a character-centric presentation, but it will also push harder into its kink themes. Writing for a game jam creates some odd constraints – I was leaning on “curiosity” and “openness to trying new things” as a core motivation to wanting to participate, because its content revolves around specific kinks I don’t expect the majority of folks to have! When writing a version that doesn’t need to be evaluated by 75 people who are, statistically, not likely to be into my specific thing, I can assume more personal interest and get much further into kink-related suggestions that, even with all the “only if it’s your thing” safeties in the world attached, I was unwilling to push into game jam content. I felt like going all the way to “this isn’t just about hypnosis abstractly or specific hypnokink aesthetics, this is literally designed to hypnotize you” was pushing the line far enough as it was; I was concerned (and still remain concerned, in all honesty) about consent issues with dragging people trying to just review 75 or 76 games into a more personal experience with hypnokink than they had intended to sign up for.

I’m sorry to hear about your cat – I hope they’re feeling better now.

I sincerely considered having no scoring mechanism and no accuracy percentage at the end because accuracy in the arcade segment really isn’t the point – it’s primarily a means to occupy attention. Ultimately I figured that would garner more complaints by people who expect games to have an opinion at how well they did at activities core to their concept, so I implemented it. FWIW, I think being so hypnotized that you wind up missing targets actually represents playing the game better than getting them all, but I couldn’t figure out any effective way to communicate this.

(And it was fun to implement silly text acknowledging the difficult achievement for getting 0% or near-0% accuracy, because avoiding 100% of the center-row targets is damn near impossible! I strictly limited word length in the center row to 5 or less to make it theoretically acheivable)

Oh, and an auditory breathing cue was kinda part of my plans but I never got a sound I was even remotely satisfied with and gave up on it. Okay, “gave up on” isn’t quite right, “literally forgot about” might be more accurate. But now Pico-8 updated and lets me do arbitrary waveforms for sound effects so maybe I can get something I like. It was hard enough to make the splashing stop sounding like gunshots, although it started out as a variation off an “enemy spaceship exploding” sound effect so I should not be surprised that “too explodey” was a problem I had with it

Does this have any content after the line “like what you see?” On runs that don’t crash before then, it freezes up there 100% of the time. I’m running this on a virtual machine under Parallels Desktop 19 running Windows 11 Pro (ARM64 build) on a MacBook Pro (M3 Max CPU), so there are multiple reasons it could be acting weird for me in ways it doesn’t act weird for other people.

(I don’t want to try to run game jam software outside of a VM or web browser, and Parallels works much better for running Windows games than Windows Sandbox on my actual PC does, thus this roundabout arrangement. I should probably divert this to a VM on my gaming PC though since a lot of Godot 4 games have trouble under Parallels ARM64.)

I think it’s difficult to make the primary hypnotic content in “a hypnosis game” feel like they fit into the rest of the game in most circumstances; it has the most natural presentation in an adventure game with a first-person viewpoint, and this is most definitely not that…

So I swung for the fences on writing suggestions to merge them into the same state of flow, and tried to use the “two distinct modes” structure as a strength rather than a weakness. When using hypnosis to express concepts and kink other than the literal process of hypnosis itself, a hypnotist needs to find room for playing with the suggestions and altered state of consciousness they’ve induced, after getting them established in the first place. I think that’s hard to do in anything prerecorded, including a game, because with no feedback, how do you match the “play” portion to your subject’s attention span and the parts of the suggestions that resonated with them the most? Permissive phrasing and vague insinuation are the traditional tools here (for good reason; they’re also important elements of hypnotic suggestion in general!), but Vacation represents my experiment with a different approach: abandoning the structure of language and using words as items in and of themselves that the subject is using in an activity that has, itself, been associated with the hypnotic effects I intended to elicit.

Association gets stronger through repetition, so it doesn’t surprise me that the modes feel better-integrated later on, when the interplay between them feels more familiar. I also expect the mode alternation to produce fractionation effects and generally increasing hypnotic susceptibility, so the arcade portions get longer as I expect time loss / time dilation and extension-of-attention-span effects to be intensifying. Glad to hear the interaction between them worked out for you!

Losing points because you lost awareness of what was going on and kinda passed out and it’s sort of a blur in your memory means you actually won the game, I think

Hey, thank you! Yeah, one of my friends on Mastodon a while back noted that hypnosis games are impractical to pull off in Pico-8 because it’s very difficult to get reasonable, legible text out of it, and I concluded she was right. then Pico-8 added custom fonts!

Pico-8 is still a challenging tool to use for this primarily because of the compressed code size limit; there’s only so much prose you can fit into an exportable .p8 cart, even with minification, because it just doesn’t compress the way code does, it has substantially more entropy than repeated keywords, repeated variable names, etc.

Defeat having interesting gameplay elements works okay if there’s no effective penalty for defeat. I can definitely see how it’s hard to fit content into a game in other contexts, especially if the “game over” screen is the only opportunity there is for action to pause in some way; I think that’s something that makes it easy to implement “sex as an obstacle”, too – obstacles are expected to disrupt the flow of a game.

I’m more impressed when games work their sexual content into the game rather than leaving it out of its flow. I think that’s much easier for adventure games, text-based games, visual-novel-style games, etc. than other genres, though; sexual content needs room to be fantasized about, since current computer equipment usually lacks appropriate interface devices to snuggle up to you more directly, Rez aside.

Most of the games here aren’t doing this, but it comes up in a few of them and in a lot of other Kink Games or outright Porn Games I have tried: sex/kink content exclusively as an obstacle or failure state. Why?

It makes thematic sense for vore and similar, and there’s a lot of kink tied up in power exchange, fear, helplessness, and force. But it comes up more frequently than that, and even when it’s “thematic” it still feels disappointing? Like, I’d rather play a game that wants me to engage with this content rather than one that tells me I’m doing it wrong if I do.

It’s hard to integrate sexuality into game design! But I feel like presenting it as an obstacle, without careful writing around it and further expressions of kink integrated into the game, borrows a lot from the intellectual tradition of “sex is a bad thing that bad people do and you are bad if you do a sex” and it gives me this weird contradictory sense that a game going out of its way to present itself in a sexual way is, nevertheless, embracing Puritan sex-negativity and not in any kind of fun way, just in an uncomfortable and unexamined way.

I think Mark Rosewater has it right in his oft-repeated point that games need to be designed to point players towards the fun thing and creating tension around “do the fun thing or do the right thing” usually feels bad. I think there is a lot of room to play with denial/avoidance themes in kink, but it takes careful attention to theming and presentation to make it not come off as the other thing.

so, this would be A While from now – my current project is rating all the Strawberry Jam 8 games, I’m not going back to tinkering with my own gamedev until that’s done – but would you be comfortable with the idea of a mod of https://kistaro.itch.io/vacation themed around your dronekink setting?

with my lack of sprite art skills the core game mechanics would be the same (but the player-character orca would get a visor), the color scheme would be modified, and the text would be completely 100% rewritten as the recently-uplifted player’s “orientation program”to their new role in CAT.

like the original version of Vacation, this would be actual hypnosis. your game writing makes me want cozy dronekink zonk scenes, which is not the traditional vibe of dronekink, so if I want that experience it looks like I’ll have to write it myself! so, in the future when I’m not busy trying to review everyone’s game jam games (yours is in the queue somewhere!), would it be okay with you if I dug into this?

Excellent musical work, especially for getting all this out in a month flat! It’s hard to figure out how to rate this on some of the categories, since this is not specifically a game with its own identity, but it’s absolutely worthy of recognition.

The game has landed its final version for the Jam (assuming nobody hits gamebreaking bugs) as of 2024-02-28 23:40:45 (in the time zone of the jam). I had almost 20 minutes to go, that’s plenty of time!

The game has been substantially improved over all prior versions – among other things, it now has clouds and fish. (not depicted in the cover image! although I think plainness suits a label better than it suits a title screen / gameplay screen.) If you ran through it before and didn’t hate it, but it did not have clouds, fish, and background music, I encourage you to give it another look before evaluating it.

CGB mode, using the .gbc file and not the .pocket file – I’m using a flash cart, not the GB Studio “.pocket” mode.

Note that shortly after I posted this I stopped reproducing the issue reliably. It’s like it only happens if the first level of story mode has never been beaten or something? I wish I had found a reliable repro…

On an Analogue Pocket, using an Everdrive GB X5 flash cart, the game often freezes after the AI makes the first move in a round. Sometimes the game continues on its own if I wait long enough but more often than not it is just frozen (or at least it exceeds my patience to wait).

hey! this is a really good port of the game, thank you! I downloaded this over on tic80.com and fixed the autoplay algorithm because I thought it would be an interesting puzzle. my fixed version is up at https://pastebin.com/5Pe41Pzn – if you don’t have the Pro version you can just copy and paste the code into the editor over what’s present in the .tic file.

the patched version moves any reachable value card (of rank x) to its foundation when:

• its own foundation contains the card at rank x-1
• the other two foundations contain at least their corresponding cards at rank x-2, if that card exists

this moves every card that never needs to be built upon. each value card can be the target for two other cards (rank x-1, different suit), except for value 1. so if both rank x-1 cards of other suits are on the foundations, the card is trivially safe to move because no cards remain available that could be put on it. (and the x-1 rank card of the same suit has to be in the foundation so card x can be put there!)

but that logic can be iterated! the two cards that could be put on top of a card that could be moved to a foundation can themselves be safely moved to a foundation if their x-1 cards are all on the foundations. so relative to our original rank, we can accept x-2 as the minimum rank of the foundations, except our own.

we can’t iterate this further, since then our reasoning would rely on being able to move cards straight to the foundation when the cards they’d need to stack on top of aren’t actually on the foundation yet, although auto-move might discover it’s valid after other auto-moves make the foundations catch up.

I’m pretty sure this is the same algorithm used in SHENZHEN I/O itself.

Awesome, I’m glad you’re enjoying the game! And don’t worry - the harder modes are eager to continue to beat your ass for a long time; every new record is something to be proud of. Best of luck on your journey to GM rank!

This one’s for you, the puzzle-action fans who love the challenge of a classic game pushed to the very limits of theoretical playability. This one’s for you, the TGM fans sad that Arika never published a North American release. This one’s for you, Pico-8 fans who want a no-compromises intense arcade experience. And this one’s for you, people who always wanted to get into very-high-speed Tetris-like gaming but never found an on-ramp.

This one is EXTREME TETROM.

EXTREME TETROM is a Pico-8 game inspired by Arika’s groundbreaking Tetris: The Grand Master series, a falling block puzzle designed to remain challenging to players who have exhausted the potential of every other Tetris-like game they have ever played. Far from a TGM clone, EXTREME TETROM invites players of all skill levels:

• It offers Marathon, Scoreathon, and Sprint modes for beginners just starting out,
• Intermediate and 20G Trainer for players who want to develop their skills,
• Grandmaster for players ready to prove themselves,
• Intense for experts ready to challenge themselves,
• and Extreme for masochists ready to hurt themselves.

…plus Infinite, Blitz, Lightning, Grandmaster Plus, Intense Plus, and, of course, Invisible.

EXTREME TETROM is free. It is released under the CC4-BY-NC-SA license, and the flexible, spreadsheet-based game engine (no, seriously) is ready for aspiring modders to write their own variations on the game.

Play it right in your browser, or download it free for Windows, Mac, Linux, Raspberry Pi, and Pico-8! https://kistaro.itch.io/extreme-tetrom

EXTREME TETROM is ready. Are you?

I've just run into this too - I'll email you this log.

oops, Fraction8 doesn't seem to like my super ultrawide monitor very well. It'd be fine if it displayed pillarboxed, but it's instead trying to fit my screen width and it sends content right off the bottom of the screen. Can the resizing be adjusted?