[A Quick Note on *Chogue*](/blog/articles/chogueResponse)

Dr. Pippin Barr has put up a couple of posts on Chogue, his hybrid of Chess and Rogue. His work there feels in a very similar space to mine with The Quiet Sleep and so I wanted to add a little to it from my experience.

What I found from hybridizing a tower defense with the processes behind thinking, as I did with The Quiet Sleep, is that both halves put a lot of weight on the design process. I built a number of the features of The Quiet Sleep to make sure that enough of the process behind thinking came through in the game. This is what allowed the game to make more dynamic statements that came from the interaction between the pieces. There’s a difference between a translation and a theming and it’s the degree to which the various influences are integrated.

As a thought experiment, imagine a traditional wave-based tower defense that is flavored as emotions coming down a path and towers like those of The Quiet Sleep defending you from them with a CYOA on top of it that pushes a story and that influences the waves that appear. This sounds like it could have been a lot of fun too, but it wouldn’t have felt like a translation in the way of The Quiet Sleep. It would have felt more like a theming, and wouldn’t have been able to achieve much of what I was most proud of with the game.

It’s necessary when hybridizing to hybridize and not just cherry-pick parts from one to graft onto the other, at least if hybridization is the goal. It is important that the final product be recognizable as both of its parents if it is to speak on them both and not just one.