BØRK
In the Before Times, Corbin, Rix, Tor, and I were so energized by Roguelike Celebration, we swore a fool’s oath in the presence of Github’s Octocat that we would make a Roguelike and talk about it at a future Roguelike Celebration. To that end we have done much and achieved little. But, as we understand it, striving to make games that nobody in their right mind would willingly play is not only common but customary and arguably the unstated purpose of the endeavor.
The tentative notion was to build BØRK: Escape the Scandinavian Home Furnishings Labyrinth. The game would be about hunger and will-power in a vast, endless expanse of meandering procedurally generated show rooms, contemplating the will of a designer that created a space that people would willingly mill about, visiting absolutely every square with no prayer of summary or foreshortening, except tantalizing shortcuts that are as likely to send you forward or backward in your quest for the exit.
This is not that game.
We informally incorporated the BØRKSHOP and proceded to play a great deal of Minecraft.
Over the course of these many years, we made many other things. Most notably, Rix shipped a Roguelike for the 2024 Autumn Lisp Game Jam called Autumn Rally and we were joined by Joe who brought his Blaseball story to Roguelike Celebration.
Along the way, we wrote half of ANSI bindings for Go, at least twice. We discovered that terminals can’t do emojis reliably. We wrote half of Emoji Quest, at least twice. We discovered that doing 3D graphics and text layout with color emojis in the same app is nearly impossible. We contributed to OpenMoji including some fancy JISH build scripts. We even prototyped BØRK in Go.
What you see above and at BØRK is not a Roguelike game. It is Roguelike art. We never settled upon how to furnish BØRK’s bedazzling showrooms, but since I’ve been making bootlego building bløks for my kids on the 3D printer, and since OpenSCAD is a parametric 3D modeling language with a command-line toolchain, BØRK: The Scandinavian BLØK Labyrinth has been a small script diversion from my professional programming.
I will leave as a mystery for the reader how this maze wanders, how its halls are numbered, the variety and purposes of the bløks you will find, and the perverse dialect of its purported builders. It is not a game, but if it is an art, it is subjective. I can say that I have liberally and deliberately mocked every corner of Scandinavia except Finland.
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