Hi folks -- I'm still kind of figuring out this whole Mastodon thing, so please pardon any clumsiness in my posting. I'm a former academic mathematician in graph theory, and while I'm no longer working in academia and publishing papers, it turns out I still have a strong drive to keep doing mathematics in some form or another.
Lately, the form that has taken has been creating small mathematically-inflected games in the #godotengine. Often my process is to work out a little theorem for myself and then to try and create a path through those ideas that might allow someone to arrive at the same theorem for themselves from first principles -- maybe encountering some of the same false-starts and little breakthroughs that make the research process so engaging.
When I hear professional game designers talking about game design I often hear them opining about how they are pleasantly surprised to lay down the basic rules of a game and then hear those rules "talking back" to them and leading to consequences they had not initially foreseen. What mathematician can hear that and not immediately recognize it as the thrill of mathematical discovery?