7 Days of Nothing, #2

Today I thought about Manifold Garden and what makes infinity cool. (Sidenote: Manifold Garden’s website is super cool, go check it out!)
Manifold Garden is a 3D game about exploring infinity. I haven’t played it yet, but I love the concept and I thought about making a similar game in PICO-8. The problem is infinity. It’s just not as cool in 2D. There’s not an easy way to look out into space like in 3D. I could make the player traverse the same area several times to fake infinity, but I feel like it’d grow old fast.

Another option is to procedurally generate levels, but then I’d have to store previous areas so the player can go back. However, what if I could step backwards in the random number generator? Then I could run the generation stage in reverse to get previous areas. I’m pretty sure there’s no way to do this, but it’d be cool if I could. If I don’t procedurally generate levels, would they fit in PICO-8’s map? I’d need the start and end of the levels to repeat so that I could seamlessly wrap the player. I could save levels in code and hot swap them in the map, but then I’d probably run into issues positioning the next level.

Anyway, that’s some thoughts from this session. See you tomorrow!