Ability-Gated Exploration Platformer

An ability-gated exploration platformer (AGEP) is a genre term for a video game that is heavily based around exploration and non-linearity, with certain areas generally inaccessible without upgrades or new unlockable abilities.

The game space is often open-world or semi-open, and involves encountering obstacles that the player cannot usually overcome without later backtracking. This is the generic term for the genre more popularly known as "Metroidvania" or "Zeldavania."

I'm working on a new game. It's an ability-gated exploration platformer inspired by Dead Cells and Guacamelee!

by ShadowDx64 November 5, 2024

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N-Dimensional Exploration

The mind-bending pursuit of understanding and potentially interacting with realities beyond our familiar 3D space + 1D time. In physics, it probes string theory's 11 dimensions. In data science, it means visualizing hyper-dimensional datasets. In consciousness studies, it's the idea that altered states or psychedelics might let us perceive more "dimensions" of existence. It’s the ultimate frontier, asking: what if our universe is just a slice of a much richer, weirder, multidimensional whole that we're biologically unequipped to perceive?

*Example: "The physicist talked about N-dimensional exploration in Calabi-Yau manifolds, the AI researcher used it to cluster data in 256D space, and the guy on DMT swore he visited them all. Same term, wildly different trips."*

by Dumuabzu January 29, 2026

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