#PastebinMonday 12/09/2019

Comfy Chill Speedrun Edition

Hey guys, how’s it goin?

I’ve been engaging in hours-long processes to restore my speedrun videos on my external hard drive and the space on my computer’s hard drive is limited.  I’ve been passing the time with a quaint simulation game made for a 2015 game jam called Sort the Court! The competition it was made for was Ludum Dare 34. The theme of the competition was “growth and two-button controls” and Sort the Court! definitely has both. As a king (or a queen as of an update), your goal is to “grow” your kingdom’s population from 100 to 2,500 through a series of yes/no decisions (you literally press Y or N a whole bunch). The main way you make your kingdom grow is by raising the people’s happiness. You also accumulate wealth along the way.

The thing that makes the game interesting (and makes the speedrun interesting) is that a majority of the decisions you have to make come at you randomly. It’s the type of game that never plays the same way twice so it has way more replay value than a game of this scope has any business having. There are a lot of different decisions to make and, in a speedrun perspective, very little time to make them. Sometimes you want to say Yes to the vampire that would normally take away a person or 15. Sometimes you want to say No to the gardener who normally sells you happiness. You can never know with great certainty what is going to come up next—when you’re not running into a scripted event.

It also helps that, though the game only has one music track, it only needs one music track—it might be the most chill thing I’ve ever heard in a video game. The randomness keeps you from taking the game super seriously, making it a comfy game to play. It really is the most comfy chill speedrun I’ve ever done and it will continue this week. I’m within 40 seconds of WR. I have little incentive to stop now. Sort the Court! Check it out on the developer’s itch.io page.

That’s my life story for the week. Until next time, everyone, thanks for reading!

--Cards