Anonymous:

enough about cookie clicker, what inspires/inspired you to make NESTED 1 and 2? and also what inspired you to add certain things too like the cat thoughts or pasta butts and so on-

orteil42:

as much as Cookie Clicker draws from various sources i think Nested is probably the “purest” thing i’ve made! i toyed with the idea of a complex interconnected text-based world during a lunch break once and started coding it once i got home. after i got the basic recursion mechanic working the rest basically wrote itself! (it didn’t it took me a while) in the end due to design limitations i didn’t have much of the initially planned interconnectedness (ie. finding some person in an office thinking about their spouse and kids, then exploring the rest of the town and coming across said spouse and kids at home) but that would’ve been a lot of work for something that hardly anyone would notice anyway. in Nested 2 i try to suggest a bit more structure and cohesion ie. each planet procedurally generates its own set of recurring brands, famous authors, popular drinks etc.

each category of animal in Nested has its own set of thoughts based on whatever archetype i thought was funny at the time, ie. horses are very confused, worms go squirm squirm and cetaceans are insufferable. cats, along with some lolcat quotes of the era, quote the Time Cube conspiracy website, to reflect their wise and easy-going personalities.

as these were the far reaches of 2011 i was fairly big on “lolrandum” humor which is why among other things there’s a 0.01% chance the game will generate a random kind of pasta inside someone’s butt, and 0.2% of some crustacean spawning inside a black hole, for instance. this sort of infantile nonsense is something i still stand by and i will try my best to maintain it for the sequel