Pathogenic and TerraTech Legion are two recent “vampsurvs”, games that Steam calls “bullet heavens” and I call “a lot like vampire survivors”.
\nOne change to the vampsurv formula that Pathogenic and TerraTech Legion both make is creating builds that physically change your avatar. In Pathogenic, you assemble a bacterium with defined external (weapon or movement) slots and internal (buffs, special abilities, and mitochondria to charge them) slots. In TerraTech, you are snapping together Lego bricks to make car with weapon and buff blocks. Both games change how you move, attack and receive buffs based on the physical placements made after levelling up.
\nI spent probably 30% of my time in a recent TerraTech run arranging blocks. I enjoyed it. I placed blocks for symmetry and appeal, even though it would be faster to slapp on things whenever I saw the first connection. I picked up pieces and rotated them around to attempt for the densest configuration with the most bonuses and sauciest looks. Progress through the game rewards with more parts and bigger platforms to fit them on. Seeing a preview of a well-shaped connector block or a massive megaweapon sets me planning my next truck. My experience of TerraTech is, in both time spent and joy received, mostly the joy of designing your perfect Mad Max Lego truck.
\nPathogenic’s builds are not as fine-grained. You only have slots to work with, not the ability to disassemble your avatar down to its frame and reform it arbitrarily. Each selectable avatar has a different initial configuration of internal utility slots, external weapon slots, and connections which carry buffs between the two. Every few levels you get an “evolution” choice, and you can swap around the shape of your germ to change the number of nodes for your internal slots, external slots, and their connections. If you have a single strong utility buff like triple attack, you might choose a form with a central utility slot connected to all of your weapons. If you’ve been collecting lots of weapons, you might choose a form which puts all those external slots in the front to allow your weapons a better angle of attack. Picking and choosing slot configurations, abilities and their ideal placements is a heady task and the game offers plenty of previews and UX hints to guide your choices. An ideal build stacks multiple bonuses together for absurd combinations, like adding bouncing lasers which split off additional lasers with triple attacks triggering at each hit.
\nI experience vampsurvs more as a checklist games than a shooter. Metaprogression unlockables promise new and novel combinations, and are gated behind conditions gated by constructing specific builds. Planning and executing to achieve those conditions is something I enjoy.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-02T20:17:32-07:00", "url": "https://icepotato.net/2026/09/02/playing-to-build.html", "tags": ["Longform"] }, { "id": "http://icepotato.micro.blog/2026/07/29/operating-at-scale.html", "title": "Operating At Scale", "content_html": "\n\nHow large is the set of every possible video game? What can express the magnitude of that number? Contemplating this for more than a brief moment is humiliating. You must try to articulate what it would mean to step incrementally through every permutation of every genre, every instantiation of every potential design, every variation on every arrangement of art and sound and letters. It is not enough to say a person could go mad attempting to make sense of this. Everyone here is long past that, swimming in signs and symbols, grasping at fragments.
\n
Matthew’s post is not particularly serious. It is turning The Library of Babel towards a different topic. However, the feeling of drowning in possible games is something I experience on a regular basis. Possibilities pour down and flood the earth. How can I choose one thing, one feeling to chase after?
\nLately, I’ve been playing a lot of incremental games. These are games mostly focused on obtaining a steady drip of resources that you marshal to increase the frequency and quantity of those resources. Eventually, you are producing absurd qualities of whatever. Numbers so large they don’t have names, only notations indicating their incredible scale. I find this steady progression into the incomprehensible relaxing. The universe might be vast, but I can alter and reap material benefits from it on equally vast scales.
\nPlaying these games can also feel empty. They are largely about clicking the same buttons over and over, increasing scale but not increasing your scope. Now I have 1e300 mana (Scientific notation: The “e” means “10 raised to the power of”, so a 1 followed by 3000 zeroes), but there’s nothing I accomplish with 1e300 mana I wasn’t accomplishing with 1e200 mana. Growth for growth’s sake.
\nSometimes all games feel empty. Open world games are checklists, multiplayer games are transient, narrative games feel like a worse version of a book I already read. This is normally a sign I need to take a break from gaming and do something else for a few weeks.
\n", "date_published": "2026-07-29T10:01:36-07:00", "url": "https://icepotato.net/2026/07/29/operating-at-scale.html", "tags": ["Longform"] }, { "id": "http://icepotato.micro.blog/2026/07/23/beware-microgenre-names-bearing-gifts.html", "title": "Beware Microgenre Names Bearing Gifts", "content_html": "I recently called a book series I was on book 7 of, “bad”. In response, my wife said, “I’ve tried to stop insulting things I enjoy”. She reads romance novels (and writes them! Buy her books!) and is sensitive to the ways her hobby and her profession are taken as a joke. She doesn’t want to contribute to the atmosphere of mistrust that comes with only enjoying something through validation of another’s conception of quality.
\nI struggle to get through dense, challenging books with the limited time and attention I have. Instead, I head towards easily digestible novels full of familiar tropes and imagery. I read maybe twenty Warhammer 40k novels (thanks to my local library!), full of things like Space Marines and their guns and their mechanized armor. I’ve read lots of books about dragons and magic. It’s not highbrow stuff. You could call it “genreslop”. However: I will not.
\nSlop is the stuff you feed to livestock. It is commercial, undifferentiated, and unappealing except to the most pressing needs. When generative AI images are used in posters, that’s slop. When LinkedIn posts using corporate buzzwords flood your feed, that’s slop. When you read a Warhammer 40k novel, there is sometimes an afterword from the author talking about how excited they were to participate, and the people they were thrilled to collaborate with. The novels tend to be filled with purple prose and repetitive plot elements, but there are ones that leave a lasting impression even as there are forgettable ones that I have accidentally re-read. If I called the various series I enjoyed “genreslop”, it would be an insult to the authors who wrote the books I read. It would also be an insult to myself. My tastes might not satisfy the most stringent gatekeepers, yet I am still capable of reading and evaluating a text for myself. The Horus Heresy still sits with me as a enjoyable tragedy full of blood and betrayal. It is corporate, but it is differentiated both from other books I have read and other books in the series. The care the authors put into the work comes through, and I enjoyed reading them and sometimes recommend them to others.
\n“Friendslop” is not supposed to be a derogatory term. It’s used to describe “disposable”, “cheap” multiplayer games that you play through with a friend a few times and then move on from. However, the fact that “slop” is at the end sits heavy with me. When I had time to play multiplayer games with my friends, they were games distributed for free on floppy disks. Doom, Descent, Duke Nukem 3d. If the world was around back then, would they have been called “friendslop”?
\nI don’t play multiplayer games anymore. I can’t even get to biweekly repair nights at my local pinball co-op. Trying to coordinate a single game with friends is not something in my wheelhouse right now, let alone a regular session that churns through different games. However, I have seen clips of games in this genre around social media. They seem fun, and the people playing them seem to be having fun. Streamers seem to like them, and people seem to enjoy watching streamers play them. Calling a good time “slop”, even if it’s used affectionately, seems like the unthinking arrogance of the young who think their domain (friends with free time) will last forever. Calling games “slop” because you only play them a few times seems like calling an ice cream cone or a cookie “sweetslop” because they’re gone after you eat them. The derogatory connotation of “slop” hangs over the entire thing.
\nI am aware of the futility of warring against silly category names. However, I will ask you to think about how the words used for your hobby shape the spaces you create. Is it good to refer to the people making you affordable games, which don’t try to occupy your entire life, purveyors of “slop”? Is it honoring the time they spent making something, and the time you spent consuming it?
\nIrony is a delicate tool. When used too often, it slowly dissolves into the literal. If you want to call games “slop” because they didn’t soak investors and pull out every trick in the Las Vegas playbook: pumping up your time on device, making you a reliable Monthly Average User, bleeding you dry by microtransactions, all in order to guarantee a return, well. I think you might be pointing your ironic apellation the exact wrong direction.
\n", "date_published": "2026-07-23T16:39:59-07:00", "url": "https://icepotato.net/2026/07/23/beware-microgenre-names-bearing-gifts.html", "tags": ["Longform"] } ] }