Cinco Paus - dev notes

Cinco Paus (iOS appstore)

The idea came out of a conversation with Zach Gage about item identification in roguelikes. Got me thinking about partially-identified items: how can you use a tool without finding out all of it's effects? Situational effects that don't happen every time, you have to try them in different conditions to discover them. Randomly generated so it's just not a matter of spoilers.

I have this approach to design of taking a few elements from a genre and giving them enough detail to carry a whole game, maybe eventually I'll have built a game about every element of Rogue. I've done single-use scrolls/potions (Zaga-33), reusable spells that cost resources (868-HACK), weapons/leveling (Imbroglio), what else? I want items that you can use more than once (with increasing degrees of identification), but probably a limited number of times so you can't spam them and learn everything; in Rogue these are magic wands, they shoot rays affecting every enemy in a straight line path. This fits well with the idea of multiple situational effects because different conditions could apply to different points on the path, let's use it.

Decided to work in Portuguese because everyone else in my Portuguese course was working here so they get more day-to-day practice than I was sitting at home working on English-language games. More of an immersive learning environment if it's my working language too; obviously I'm not at a level yet where I can use it for everything (I'm still blogging in English!) but I'll do what I can. And it worked, for expanding my vocabulary at least - I started by using words I know (the basic enemy is a shrimp because I've eaten them here so I know how to call them) but then later I was having to look up more and more words, and now often I run into words outside that I recognise because I looked them up for the game.

I've been interested for a while in making a game in an invented language but just using an existing one that's not English still invokes the kind of textural quality I was aiming for.. less so for people who speak it (the sixth biggest language in the world) but for them perhaps there will be the "all your base" kind of badly-translated flavour? (Because, yes, I'm just a beginner in the language so not everything is correct!) Also a lot of people who play my games are in the USA where Spanish is the second language so I expect they'll get some clues from the similarities there, and a lot of people speak some other Romance language and so will pick up something at least. There's a sense of relinquishing control here; in English I know exactly what I'm doing when I misuse the language, exactly what effect it has, here I have to accept more uncertainty (and at the same time realise that this diversity of understanding is there when I work in English too even though my own command of the language is strong).

Knowing that the majority of my audience won't be able to read everything made an interesting design constraint, gave me extra inspiration about how to make everything deducible through reason and experimentation - not a bad goal anyway (as every game designer learns - players do not read the instructions)! From a few reactions I've gotten it seems like for some people it is much more upsetting to encounter a genuine foreign language than gibberish symbols or no text at all; I don't quite understand this but I find it a valuable experience to spend time in an environment where things aren't made for people like me, and if I can share some of this to challenge others then I'm happy.

I had to pick some default numbers for the first prototype. How many charges should a wand have? At least 4; use them a couple of times experimentally to learn about them and still be able to use them in earnest a couple of times. No more than about 7 to keep it a challenging constraint to balance learning about them and using them. How many effects should they have? Maybe a couple that are easy to discover and a couple that are more obscure. How large should the grid be? There needs to be space for a ray to carry and meet a few different configurations; Imbroglio's 4x4 would be too small. So to go full numerology again I just set everything to 5 to see how it went. The name came straight away here too, "Cinco Paus", it felt like it had a good sound to it, I had this already before I committed anything to paper. A few months later I found the Tarot card I'd been using as a bookmark some time before this, I was spooked for a moment before I remembered that this was the direction that makes logical sense for time to work in - I'd been using this card, I didn't consciously remember it but then the words felt like they went. And I had known that the Tarot suits were where I'd gotten the idea to use the word "pau" (literally "stick") for the wands.

So we have 5 wands with 5 effects and 5 charges, 5x5 grid, 5 hit points, 5 enemy types, 5 zones with 5 enemies on each. The grid size matching the wand array lends itself to connections, but this started echoing Imbroglio too closely so it's only on a couple of minor things. There's a progression as you gain wands / information so it makes sense to face stronger enemies later, so we need a progression of enemy strengths instead of like 868-HACK where the enemy types are differently equal. As with Imbroglio I expected they'd have more abilities - jumping frogs - but hit points turned out to be sufficient to differentiate them. 1,2,3,4.. 5 hit points is too many because then you can't take it barehanded, so the fifth enemy needed to do something different; I went for another 1-hp enemy with an ambiguous ability (not strictly advantage or disadvantage). Effects to kill a specific type were obvious, but I didn't want effects that were strictly inferior to each other and killing a 1-hp enemy is worse than simply doing 1 damage to any type, so the kill effects for those needed an extra rider.

Starting with the full set of wands instead of collecting them as you go made for a powerful simplification, put the focus on acquiring information, neat feeling to have full capabilities from the start and be able to trigger powerful effects but not be able to use them wisely yet. But then having 5 charges from the start meant you had to think about how to ration them through the game, you'd never lose on the first levels because you could blow through all your charges but then have nothing left, or if you didn't have trouble on the first levels you'd save up all your charges for the end, either way it felt a bit off. So I tied charges to progress through the zones, the extra constraint makes each discrete zone a richer puzzle and losing the possible long-term resource management didn't hurt much.

Took some time filling out different ideas for wand effects, a lot of these were very natural, some standard Rogue wands (sleep, polymorph, teleport away). At first I had more negative effects but they weren't so important, all the negative-ish ones I've kept have some occasional positive value too. Thought about whether the same effects can apply both to the player and to enemies; Nethack goes into a lot of detail with this, you can zap enemies with polymorph to hopefully turn them into something easier to kill, or yourself to maybe become a dragon or something, or your items to have a chance at getting better stuff. It's neat but it really puts a lot of constraints on the whole design that everything has to work like this. For most simple effects there's little ambiguity who you want to use it on; heal me hurt them, and with each wand having several effects I wanted to keep the effects themselves very direct. So there's no self-zapping, that will have to be a different game.

For the levels I went with an idea I've used a few times before: getting the most out of a small space by making you cross it more than once from different directions. Started with a simple version from an early Imbroglio prototype: the exit door is locked, there's a key somewhere on the level, you have to get through to the key and then back through to the door. To add score variance there's also another treasure and maybe you cross the level an extra time to collect that too. But requiring the key to exit the level put a restriction on how wild the wand effects could be; no disintegration rays that destroy everything including treasure, no polymorph rays that would turn the key into another kind of treasure, no fun. Tried just opening the door when you destroy the key; boring. At one point I had a complicated set of rules to make sure you could get another key after you'd destroyed one - the next treasure created is a key so any treasure-creation wands will get you out, otherwise the next enemy spawned is a rooster so that will drop a key if you can kill it. It got really messy so in the end I simplified it: the exit is always open and you can just go through without any treasure, it's easier to survive and the system is more resilient to silly wand effects, it's better. I still liked the way the key forces extra traversal so I locked up the other treasure in a vault, maybe you have to backtrack for it.

Other treasures, of course there are 5 kinds (including keys); at first I made them each give 1 point and 1 of something else.
* Potions (healing) felt pretty weak, I was finding I usually had enough life unless I got into a really bad situation where one hit wouldn't make the difference, then I thought of removing the rule of "heal 1 when you reach a new zone" and suddenly they became super relevant, also made it a lot riskier to grab extra treasure, more of a tension between scoring and surviving rather than just being able to solve every level. I'd started using that rule in Zaga-33 as a simplification of Rogue's healing over time to account for the lack of bad timers in that game, it became more important in 868-HACK with fewer total hit points, then fundamental in Imbroglio where there's no way to avoid some damage so the whole game is about balancing damage taken with progress/healing. So I'd just included it out of habit, I had a blind spot about it for a while but once I properly examined it I realised it had no reason to be here.
* Tomes (identification) seemed basically fine all along, helpful but not essential.
* Gems (charge) were a bit much; recharging a wand that creates or duplicates treasure maybe lets you create another gem and recharge it again (similarly I had to ban wands that recharge + generate treasure). But other times you'd get a recharge after you'd cleared a level and it was now of no use to you. So I switched to them being saved up; 5 gems gives a recharge at a time of your choice, this seemed basically okay. Later I introduced artifacts (see this post) and instead 5 gems gives a lamp that can recharge a wand once per game - or something else of similar value; now gems feel like definitely the most important treasure but I think it's okay.
* Chests (point) felt unimpressive because points have no actual value in the game, everything else tangibly helps you survive and progress. So I just tried making them worth more points (5) and it felt like it solved the problem even though it's still just a number going up that doesn't do anything? Games.

(spoilers maybe?) For the artifacts, collecting many of them or having more than one copy of the same made them feel mundane, so I put a maximum of 5 and no duplicates. It felt appropriate to give some choice about artifact progression to help deal with all the random stuff that also happens. A choice means at least 2 options, so to choose 5 artifacts there must be a total of at least 10. Could be more but I think it's good to get a chance to pick up any given artifact; you might think that a particular one is essential and a streak is worthless if you don't get it, I don't know. You can't guarantee getting any two because they might be offered as a pair to choose between.

Thinking about what to prioritise working on next:

I've been saying i'll release Imbroglio on PC for a while. This hasn't been a high priority for me; 868-HACK has sold 11% as many copies on Steam as on iOS and Imbroglio has only sold half as many copies as 868-HACK in the first place; basically I don't know if it's worth spending much time on. Does anyone actually care? I could just skip this and save myself some time and an ongoing support burden. (p.s. don't talk to me about android; ratios there are even worse.)

I have more ideas for expanding Imbroglio, there's quite a bit of stuff that I started trying out during development but I didn't fully pursue because I needed to get some kind of finished version out. But the numbers are saying it's a lot more worth my time to make a new game than to add more content to an existing one; the Ossuary expansion for Imbroglio has sold 1600 copies and PLAN.B for 868-HACK has sold 900. So unless these take off a bit more somehow, expanding Imbroglio further is just selling to a diminishing fraction of really earnest players; I guess the question is whether I can charge a bit more to make this worth working on? This is something I actually really do want to do, I feel like the game isn't quite complete yet, there aren't enough options to make a really varied possibility space, and I know what to do to get there, again it's a question of whether anyone else cares.

Aside from these, I'm definitely starting on a new game soon and, well maybe there's not too much sense trying to plan that because I'll go ahead and make whatever I end up making regardless, but still I'm curious what people would want to see from me next? I know everyone thinks of me as tiny roguelike man now and hey I have sketches for a few more of those I could definitely try to build, but I'll make anything. Imbroglio selling less than 868-HACK makes me wonder if I shouldn't keep going in that direction right now, but I don't want to read too much into it and I'll have more information on that trend soon anyway. I think I'm going to try for at least a couple more smallish games next before getting stuck into a big project, we'll see. But yeah I'm interested in (non-trollish) thoughts on the matter!

streak scoring redux

Hard at work on new game! Sorry if I'm behind on other things but making new is good. It was meant to be a really quick project, under 3 months, but it grows. Now it looks like it'll take about 6 all up, that's not too bad, I'm quite determined to not let it sprawl out past that.

This is another entry in my roguelike series (YABR), I'm feeling better now about doing that and not pressuring myself to have to do something flashy and different every time (ref). But still when I encounter similar problems I try to take enough of a different path that I will be discovering different things along the way.

It's a very short and random game (what a surprise), it's quite successful at generating an entertaining variety of situations, but the luck element makes some scenarios easier than others. I already know how to solve this: give the option of increasing the difficulty by taking more risks in exchange for some kind of reward. 868-HACK's score walls that generate N enemies for N points are a very direct version of this, here it's a bit messier but the outcome is similar: getting to the exit is usually not too hard, figuring out how much treasure you can pick up along the way without dying is hard.

One problem solved, but it creates another one: how to meaningfully compare scores between games? Maybe I got 30 points because I correctly estimated that I could safely cast Duplicar on some treasure chests and still get to the exit, and you got 5 points because you correctly estimated that it wasn't safe to pick up the treasure and instead cast Teleporte to get straight to the exit - we might have both found the best solution to the scenario we faced but the first one gets a bigger number. One option would be to calculate the value of every path the player could have chosen and normalise their score appropriately - what percentage of possible points did they purloin? This is takes a lot of computation and I feel it is unintuitive, and still it's not necessarily "fair" because the distribution of difficulty can also differ - in one scenario it might be trivial to get 90% and very hard to get the last 10%, etc. My preferred solution is to take scores across multiple games and combine them into some kind of average.

I wrote at length here about how I arrived at the "streak scoring" mechanism for 868-HACK, striking a balance between the over-cautious play demanded by streaks and the over-risky play demanded by high scores. In a way it is less "perfect" than taking a simple average - it allows you to play throw-away games where you take silly risks and have them not be counted. But in exchange it creates some space for play in tuning the balance between average score and streak length to optimise the product; in HACK there have been substantial swings in opinion over time about where this balance lies. Also to me it feels more intuitive and fun; average score feels like a very technical statistic, "keep exploring caves and accumulating loot but try not to die!" fits naturally into game world. So my thought was that maybe I could simply slot this same mechanism into a new game? Basic survival is a bit more difficult than in HACK so maybe it could work without needing difficulty escalation (which HACK had with "bonus powerups" becoming more numerous across a streak), it could be a minimal proof-of-concept to explore how it worked to just tack this system on to any game without extra supporting infrastructure.

But once it was structured as a connected series of games, the natural thing to do was to use that connection. I had given up on a spell effect that affected the next level because it was undefined on the final level but now it could simply apply to the first level of the next game. There was one treasure effect that had turned out to be much too powerful, now I could balance it by making it require accumulating several before you can use it - possibly across multiple games. This became a resource you could save up to use in an emergency to save your streak, it made some bad luck feel more fair. This was a neat possibility for streaks that I hadn't really explored with HACK (there is just .SAVE in the PLAN.B expansion). But even with these small connections I realised it didn't feel right; even though each individual game could be very different to the last, each streak was a similar soup blended from the same random ingredients. Something changes in the first level of the next game but then you move on, you save something up but then you spend it all and you're back where you started, there's no sense of getting anywhere. It'd be better if each streak could somehow have its own distinctive flavour at a macro level, some sense of permanence or progress to your actions.

Thought about somehow leveling up the hero character. The resource that you accumulate across multiple games: instead of being spent for a one-off effect, maybe it's spent towards permanent upgrades. But it's not so interesting if you just get stronger and then the game is easier and it just snowballs - hence HACK's "bonus powerups" powering up the enemies and obstacles rather than the player, so in the end I've found myself going down much more of a similar path than I'd hoped to. I can still veer off in a different direction! The enemy powerups stay for the whole streak instead of changing each game (thanks Droqen for helpful discussion); one streak the lizards will level up and now all the time you're fighting LIZARD WIZARDS, another streak it might be QUICKENED CHICKENS instead, and then you'd make different choices in how you level up your character to deal with them.

So now I have two separate progression systems that span multiple plays of the game and I'm wondering how my simple quick project managed to increase in scope.

plan.b notes

nerdy detail / spoilers.

Since making 868-HACK I've kept a list of ability ideas that might fit if I was ever working on it again. (Some might fit in other games in the family too - I think I used some for Imbroglio.) At one point I started planning a parallel-universe version with alternate interpretations of all the progs - could rotate some of the enemy counters, .C_BOM instead of .D_BOM, .ANTI-G instead of .ANTI-V - but a lot of the other ones there weren't interesting alternatives for so it felt weak.

In April I had to update the game which got me thinking about it again, I also happened to revisit the village where I'd lived while making it which got me thinking about my process again. A few days later I woke from a dream in which I'd been playing a new version of the game which featured a prog called .PLAN.B and an upgrade tree where across a streak you can improve progs of your choice (e.g. .WAIT gets a shield to block attacks while you're waiting, .WARP damages adjacent enemies as well as killing the one you teleported onto). The prog idea at least seemed good so I started coding it up straight away, one thing led to another and I guess I made a whole expansion pack.

A central principle of 868-HACK's design was to fit in as many different interactions between abilities as I could. An idea I didn't get working was a prog that directly referenced your other progs - maybe double the effect of the next one you use, maybe trigger another one at random, I tried several ideas along these lines but none of them worked very well. What dream-PLAN.B did was trigger a random prog from the sector you're on, and on waking up I was shocked that I'd not thought of it four years ago - it's way more interesting to play an ability that's not even in your hand than to play something in your hand cheaply but unreliably. The dream version had a fixed price but this made for some horrible interactions; at 4 or less you're getting the big effects like .ATK+ and .SIPH+ far too cheaply and at 3 or more you're paying too much for the small effects like .WAIT and .PUSH. Simpler just to use the cost of the prog itself - you're still getting a discount on it by not having to fight its enemy spawns. Aside from that it was perfect. The limited pool on each sector is manageable but always varied, and restricting it from selecting something that has no effect right now gives you a lot of control (also using .CRASH to remove unwanted options is a very niche interaction but cute). Plus it gives a use for the prog-walls on later sectors which usually you're never going to siphon.

The idea of upgrading progs wasn't practical since it required designing and balancing new specific effects for every prog; I would have had to make them with this in mind in the first place. But I got to thinking more generally about building something across a streak. I tried simply having your credits and energy carry over to the next game, but that just made all of the openings less challenging. So I went to a prog effect: .SAVE transfers a siphon to the next game (less of a direct advantage than resources because you still need to use it). Cue everyone suggesting more such progs to save different types of resource, but this doesn't add anything distinct and they start to get in the way of the immediately useful abilities you need to survive the current game. It's a problem that .SAVE isn't very situational - you want to use it at the last possible moment, when you know how many resources you'll have left. I tried some different limitations to avoid this, mainly using the same trick as .SCORE to get more out of it the earlier you use it, but that created the exact same dynamic as .SCORE so it wasn't worth the complexity, eventually I just went with the simple version. Even though you want to actually use it at the end it still influences your earlier choices about what to hold onto, and there are a handful of situations where you might have to use it earlier because you'll lose access to it.

Implementing .SAVE meant allowing progs to have siphons in their cost, so then I started thinking about what else could use that. I could just make a big attack that's extra expensive but it seems more natural to try to do something actually related to the usual siphon effect. I tried .3X3, spending a siphon to access all 9 tiles around you instead of the usual 5 - this sometimes made for an interesting choice whether to spawn more enemies to get more stuff, but also often just allowed you to pick up silly amounts of resources. Making it expensive to obtain wasn't enough to balance this. I could give it a resource cost as well but then it becomes kind of bad in the situations where you'd be spawning extra enemies, and more balanced but not any more interesting when you're getting extra resources - you just look if you're getting more than you're spending, nbd. So I ended up with .X, conceptually an ordinary siphon rotated 45°. It's cheap to obtain because it's not giving you any extra tiles, but it can let you get more out of your siphons depending on the board setup. Somehow I'm really bad at counting how many resources it'll get me, I'm so used to automatically reading good spots for the regular siphon and I don't notice when .X would get me more.

.QUIT is a suggestion Leon made ages ago that didn't make it into the original game, but with trying to put a bit more focus on streaks here I tried it out and was happy with it. It got a siphon in its cost too for symmetry with .SAVE (they're different effects but they're both operating outside of the usual game boundaries), this worked nicely for making it kind of "hard" to quit, you have to hold onto a resource that you'd prefer to use to keep that option open. I know for some risk-averse players the "obvious" choice will be to always siphon .QUIT if you can and always keep the ability to use it, but usually you can get a higher score if you go against that.

At the top of my list of parallel-universe progs was a mirror to .EXCH, converting energy to credits, this was in the game for a while (back then .EXCH spent 4 credits for 3 energy and .CASH spent 3 energy for 2 credits) and I took it out to make room for more interesting things, there's only space for so many effects that aren't directly dealing with threats, but maybe an expansion could bring it back? It was hard to find a version that wasn't sometimes ridiculously strong, usually almost useless, or both, I tried tacking on various side-effects, but in the end gave up on it feeling like a boring-but-strong resource exchange didn't fit in a set of exciting weird new abilities.

The hacker's basic attack does one point of damage and stuns the enemy for one turn; this stun is really important for being able to deal with large numbers of enemies tactically. I tried a .STUN+ prog which increases the length of stuns (like a mirror of .ATK+), it was okay but not good enough. But then I was trying to find the right price for .TRAP, which marked a tile to kill or maybe hit the next enemy to move there - I wasn't sure whether to make it cheap so you could lay down a wall of them or a bit more expensive - some of the tactical uses seemed good enough to pay 3+ for. I also needed a more computer-y name for it and when I hit on "firewall" the idea came all in one piece to also rename .STUN to .ICE (from classic William Gibson cyberpunk), price them both at 1, and have .FIRE just do damage without a stun so they each have one element of the basic attack.

Tried a whole bunch of different ideas for medium-sized attack progs, ended up with .MOSH .CULL .SORT, I liked making new ways that different situations could matter - whether enemies are next to each other, whether enemies are already damaged, whether you have a variety of enemy types, and I was glad to fill some of the gaps in costs (now there's a prog for every combination of 5 resources). I changed .CALM's cost to be symmetric with .SORT at 6 resources even though their effects aren't related. I had wanted .CULL cheaper so that .ANTI-V/.CULL would cost less than just using .ANTI-V twice but that made it way too strong with other combinations, these three all have to quite expensive because they can affect all enemy types, but that means they don't need as many other progs to go with them so you can focus more on collecting resources - at least that's my theory.

The main "secret" in 868-HACK is the bonus powerups that show up in streaks, these end up being really important to keep the difficulty high enough to be interesting for expert players so I thought for the expansion it would make sense to include them from the start, loses the secret but most of the people playing will know about it already (and for those who don't I guess it means the expansion adds even more content). I thought about putting in more of a metagame, maybe a map of the network giving some choice about which powerups you'll be facing, coming back to those ideas about accumulating a currency between games - something you could spend to avoid a particular effect you dislike. But in the end I felt like .QUIT accomplished most of this - some portion of the time it allows you to quickly skip an unfavourable combination. Choosing a class at the start of each game helps too with smoothing out bad luck, and the end-of-streak stat screen with records of "most used prog" etc. ties things together conceptually. The idea of choosing your powerups still made it in in the form of "USER-SELECTED POWERUP!", a metapowerup which accesses other powerups the same way that .PLAN.B is a metaprog which accesses other progs. I wasn't planning on adding many new powerups but having them every game makes them feel more repetitious (somehow worse than repeatedly having no powerup) and I ended up with 8.

An effect I tried for viruses was for their attacks to damage your resources, but across a game you don't get hit many times anyway and only a quarter of those will be from any specific enemy type (or even less, since usually being hit means you've been flanked by two enemies and then you can pick which one to attack while the other hits you), so I'd have to make the damage really high for it to be relevant and then on the occasions it does happen it ruins your game. So I switched it to a general effect where any hit also drains resources; this still didn't feel important because you can often spend resources to not get hit. So I thought about what else it could cost you, came up with MEMORY LEAK! losing you a prog when hit. This was really exciting, made it really worthwhile to spend resources to avoid hits, and sometimes to siphon extra progs just so you could afford to lose some. But it was super difficult, especially when combined with some of the other powerups that make it hard to avoid damage; you'd get into a downward spiral where once you've lost a prog that was helping you avoid damage then you're bound to take some more hits; over a quarter of my total losses in this version came from this one powerup, it was terrifying. So I made it only trigger the first time you get hit on each sector, it's very much domesticated but it's still a bit challenging in combination with other powerups.

I did want something that affected your resources though. Back in the day I'd tried some kind of "resource scarcity" powerup but it was pretty terrible, removing your ability to do interesting things. Also finding the right effect for Cryptogs was very difficult, because CRYPTOG TELEPORTS! is already so terrible that anything else combining with it is just really really bad. For a while I was just going to not have new powerup for each enemy type (because why should I?) but people kept asking about the mising ones so then I thought about cheating by having a "Cryptog" effect that conceals something else instead - what about your resources? So CRYPTOGCURRENCY! was born. Eventually I dropped the G, it was silly, I wasn't going to get away with pretending this had anything to do with the enemy type, but it got me to the idea. Just credits because hiding both removes agency - picking between certainty and uncertainty is a real choice, but picking with no information is arbitrary. I wanted .SHOW to interact with it but it was too much to just give everything away at once so I made it local - you have to spend turns (risking enemy spawns) to reveal all the credit values on floor tiles. It's a bit of bookkeeping to keep track of your range of possible credit values but it felt way too friendly to have the UI handle that for you, I want hostile alien perils not a cosy spreadsheet.

Tried making Cryptogs immune to progs but it was too much of a grind. Thought about how their real strength is their movement avoiding lining up with the player to be attacked at a distance; the invisibility is just icing; so I tried strengthening them with AI improvements - making extra efforts to avoid being attacked, a "shy" version that avoids the player unless enough enemies are on-screen to flank them. These were challenging but they were kind of too smart so there's no solution where you can avoid damage, also with the invisibility you don't get to admire their clever tactics, you just don't see them for a while and then they show up in an annoying corner; the game is about being smarter than your enemies, it doesn't work if they're both clever and numerous. So eventually I thought about making the invisibility itself stronger and got the TRUE CRYPTOG! Tara claims she thought of the idea first but didn't tell me because I'd probably actually use it and she didn't want me to, well I got there anyway. They're super annoying.

A major part of the game is executing several progs in one turn to pull off a big combo, instantly clear the screen, so I thought about having a powerup that made this more difficult. Maybe you have a limited number of points ("CPU cycles"?) to spend on progs and then it takes several turns to build them back up. Tried a bunch of different numbers but eventually settled on the simplest: one and one. So the SINGLE-THREADING CPU! can only execute one prog per turn, this is much harsher than my first idea (where you could use a combo but then have to wait) but it seemed like the most interesting twist.

The other big secret is the secret level (now titled "root sector" in the stat screen), originally this was a bit of a throwaway thing that I didn't expect to matter much, mostly I had a graphical glitch I wanted to use somewhere. It did take quite a bit of thought to find a way that made sense to access a secret within such a tight game - there wasn't room to be like "oh there's a door behind that rubble" or something, but I found a way of embedding it in the mechanics that made sense. I thought people might find it a fun challenge to visit it, I put some points there but in my testing it was too expensive to reach to make much difference to scores. I was fairly wrong! Once people discovered it, and some extra hacks to reach it more cheaply, some really high scores were achieved, they're playing at a level I'd never anticipated when making the game. To me this is pretty interesting, it's added an extra layer of complexity over top of the game I intentionally designed, but still in a way that makes sense within it. I've been making little changes along the way to try to balance it - I'd like it to remain a risk/reward decision whether to try for it in any given run, not be something that can reliably and profitably be done every time. Some of the changes to progs making them not repeatedly trigger in the same turn to make them play nicer with .PLAN.B also make them harder to use in secret level trickery, this is a bonus. Also I dropped the maximum number of progs in hand to 8 which makes it a bit tougher too (it was only 10 in the first place because number keys, but that limited the number I could encode in 64 bits on the ios high score tables, dropping it to 8 was necessary to add the new progs in the expansion - arbitrary technical limitations are great).

868-HACK: PLAN.B

I have released an expansion for 868-HACK, get it on iOS as an in-app purchase or on Steam here.



It adds a new mode which introduces "bonus powerups" from the first game of a streak (these are difficulty modifiers that would previously only show up after winning a few games in a row), with 8 more powerups added to the 12 from the original, so there's more variety from the start. Also 9 new progs (for a total of 32).

These changes make the score of an individual run less meaningful - because it's always affected by random powerups and because some of the new progs interact with run streaks - so high scores in this mode are only for streaks (total score across a series of consecutive plays without dying).

The maximum number of progs held is dropped to 8 (from 10), which makes the choice of what to pick up a little tighter, and also adds a little more variety because you're less likely to be able to pick up the same combinations by the end of a game. The new mode also allows a choice of "character class" each game, which determines starting resources (previously this was randomly assigned); this choice gives an extra chance to respond to the random initial conditions so there are less "unfair" deaths at the start of a game.

There are a few minor changes to some of the original progs, mostly to clarify their interactions with the .PLAN.B metaprog which executes random other progs: it was annoying to have it repeatedly apply an unwanted effect when you were hoping to randomly trigger something specific. In particular .DELAY and .STEP can no longer be used repeatedly in the same turn - you can still .STEP across a distance by applying it after each move so it isn't any weaker; .DELAY is slightly weakened but it was very strong in the first place so that's okay. Some other progs could be used with no effect when there were invisible cryptogs around, on the grounds that you don't know where they are so maybe it's affecting them - even though in practice you often have enough information about their position that you might know; now these can only be used when they will definitely have an effect, so their availability might give a clue about a cryptog's position (e.g. .CRASH becoming available might tell you there's one diagonal to you). I think it's quite interesting to get these clues and I'm not at all sure why I ruled them out in the first place?

ok set a good score now. i should release this? pic.twitter.com/ftiqkRuFZD

— Michael Brough (@smestorp) June 13, 2017

old times

Not long after my previous post (in which I was updating 868-HACK) I went back to Scotland for a few days. As well as seeing friends and dancing we made time to visit Pittenweem, the little village where we used to live, where I hadn't been for a couple of years. It's a gentle, relaxing place; perfect environment for making art; I did a lot of good work there. Spent some time reflecting on the things I made there and how I haven't made any new games since leaving; I started Imbroglio towards the end of my time there. I want to recover some of what I had there, but at the same time I am in other ways healthier now, I wouldn't just jump back in time, but I can think about the things I was doing right then and try to find a way to have those as well as the other things I do better now.

A few days later I woke up with a solution to a problem I hadn't thought about for four years, an ability I'd tried while making 868-HACK which hadn't quite worked. Coded it up over breakfast, played with it, it fit perfectly. Opened up the file where I'd written down ideas for alternative progs that I'd had over the years and started trying those out too. Most of them were bad, but some of them had seeds that could be improved on.. one thing followed another and I guess I'm making an expansion now.

It's been refreshing working with this game again, feels very natural to be back. I like working in low-res, it's very quick to build things up, less inertia. Feeling inspired to do more of this, it good. Realising I'd been going through a bit of scope creep which was getting in the way of making new things, but now I'm remembering how to keep them contained.

868-hack update

Apple have imposed a new requirement that applications have "64-bit support" and are threatening to remove ones that don't from the store. So I'm forced to go through and update all of my older games, even though in reality they still work fine and there is no reason that Apple could not maintain backwards compatibility; they've deliberately chosen to put extra work on developers instead.

Isn't this just a matter of opening up the project, changing one line and recompiling? Should take five minutes, it's not really a big deal? Yes and no. The 64-bit change itself is small but they change enough other things every few months that recompiling against new versions of the libraries doesn't simply work. You get a few linker errors and have to look up the new names for a couple of functions. Or there's a new element in one of the libraries with the same name as one of my variables so I have to find+replace to change its name. And then you run it and find that it's in portrait mode, squished into half of the screen, so you have to look up what changes they've made to how screen orientation works and change a few more lines. Or the graphics are scrambled or just blank because they changed something in how shaders work. Then test everything to make sure nothing else has changed. Then upload it and it comes back with an error, you need to add two more lines to the info.plist file to say that no, you're not going to be using the device camera or location. Upload again, the build is accepted, you go onto the store backend and try to submit the update and it turns out now you need screenshots in three additional sizes. It adds up.

I made a few balance changes too since I was updating it anyway, so I've also updated the Windows build on Steam. I haven't updated the MacOS build because that is throwing me a completely different set of new errors from the iOS ones and forget it.

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A while after 868-HACK was first released, I updated it with some changes to how the scoring worked (see this post), mainly making the .SCORE prog worth one less point, which made it less dominant for single-run scores. Now the single-run scores are dominated by scores achieved with the secret level, much higher than what could be achieved with either version of .SCORE. Of course single-run scores are not very important and the game is about carefully surviving for multiple runs in a streak, but it turned out that also nobody wanted to use .SCORE in this context either now. A few months ago moabbe (who for a long time held the top score, and still holds the top single-run score) wrote to me saying "please go back to the original .SCORE, you had it right the first time". And he's probably right? So now I've switched back and hopefully the slightly higher reward for the risk will mean it gets used sometimes; I want every prog to have some practical use. The other changes I made in that update still hold; increasing the rate at which BONUS POWERUPS modify the difficulty was definitely the right choice.

A few other changes. I wrote in this post about how I was slightly dissatisfied with the .ROW and .COL effects; they had been more fun to play with when they only hit once and only cost 3 resources but they overshadowed everything else. Whenever I went back and played the game again I was feeling this more and more. The big silly combos where you .PULL all the enemies in towards one spot and then hit them all at once are a fun part of the game but I was feeling like they were possible a bit too often and so there weren't enough situations where you have to find more specific solutions. So I thought about putting .ROW and .COL back to just hitting once, which makes for more complex tactics; you think more about the fact that they stun as well as damage, and you less often want to use .PULL to set them up because it's too expensive so you're more looking for the right moment when enemies can be tricked into lining up through their own movement. This makes them much more situational abilities, their resource cost is quite expensive for the effect, so I reduced their acquisition cost to try to compensate. I'm not completely sure about this change but let's try it and see!

I found that .WAIT was an ability I almost never use, it's just not very good. Which is kind of funny given how often people are asking for a wait button in my games! So I dropped the acquisition cost to just 1 enemy; it's not a big difference but I didn't have anything at 1 before so it's maybe nice if there is one?

OK time to see if I can compile the rest of my games again.

imbroglio update 1.04

A bunch of little tweaks here. May take a few hours to show up in the appstore.

- Arcane Hourglass: now displays the number of turns until an enemy will reappear.

The previous update added a "telefrag" effect to Hourglass whereby the time-travelling enemy replaces other enemies in its space rather than waiting for them to leave. This made it a lot more important to keep track of when enemies will reappear so now the number of turns is displayed to make this less hassle to deal with. Should have had this all along really.

- Forged Sigil: extra rune per level, damage dropped to 11111.

Felt like the extra runes weren't significant enough, especially for heroes with a 2-cost power, so now there's heaps and it definitely makes a difference. Seemed pretty strong; dropped the damage to compensate. Now I've broken the rule that 1/4 of blue weapons get to 2 damage, might have to do something about that?

- Rusty Caltrops: damage profile to 11122, stun moved to IV.

The Caltrops/Rope/Wheel board turned out a bit too strong, I already dropped the Rope percentages to make it less reliable but it's still been dominating. Also I was noticing people often were surprised by Caltrops stun because it's a big effect that turned on at level 2, which is just somewhere in the middle of the progression, not a point people are keeping track of. It's more intuitive for a major effect to either be always on or to activate at level 4 when the weapon is fully leveled. Moving the stun to level 4 makes a Caltrops combo harder to get into play but doesn't change its strength once it is.

- Whetstone: now only affects adjacent weapons in the same row.

Whetstone has been showing up in almost every build; increasing damage is a very strong effect and its disadvantage of leaving a tile with 0 damage isn't significant enough to compensate for it. This nerf breaks a lot of existing boards, which is not ideal because they're still in the scoreboards and someone might get confused, but it leaves the weapon still very usable just hopefully a little less dominant.

- Brainspoon: controlled enemies may use Skeleton Key to move through walls.
- Brainspoon: fixed crash when controlled enemies attempt to attack through a wall.

Surprisingly many people reported the bug of Brainspoon-controlled enemies crashing the game when attempting an invalid move (towards a wall the other side of which is occupied). I didn't think it was a priority to fix because it's not preventing any actual moves in the game, but the reports just kept coming in. Why is everyone trying invalid moves?

- Dream Wheel: changed interaction with Simon Rainbow Jester's second gem; now neither gem will move further away.

Wheel is quite effective at dealing with Simon's disadvantage because it moves both gems. Because they can't move into the same spot there were some odd interactions; sometimes one would move into a chokepoint and then the other one would avoid that spot in its path-finding and start taking the long way around, or if there was only one route then both gems would refuse to move. This latter case seemed like a nice balancing effect to Wheel's extra effectiveness - the gems get stuck and you have to leave your Wheel more often to fetch them - but it didn't come up very often. Now that gems refuse to take a longer route it will occur more often.

- Jeska Nomad Witch: power changed to "curse a random enemy" (was "curse nearest enemy").

I oscillated between these in development but ended up feeling she needed the slightly stronger "nearest" - gives more control over the outcome and sometimes gives extra curses when multiple enemies are equidistant. But then she was the first hero to ascend, with a very reliable board. Being able to reliably curse attacking enemies combines very favourably with Confusion Cloud. So I no longer feel she needs the extra strength.

- Chaos Oracle Molly: enemies are now more likely to spawn at their usual gate.

I just kept feeling disappointed that board orientation didn't matter. Now it selects a random gate and there's a 50% chance it produces its usual enemy, 50% chance it'll be random. (So actually a 62.5% chance of the usual enemy, because that could be the random one too.) Feels okay to me; it gives you slightly more to work with but still throws plenty of surprises. I may end up tweaking these percentages later on.

- swapped unlock order of Dice of Omens and Arcane Hourglass.

Several people found the final set of weapons jarring because it added a lot of complexity all at once, so I've spread it out a bit more. Dice add variety to possible curse builds by giving an alternative source but that's a fairly subtle decision so it makes sense to reserve it for more advanced players; at the same time the text on the card is very simple. Hourglass has a lot of text but is a simple enough concept.

- Amulet of Immortals: with multiple instances, a random one is triggered (Chaos Oracle Molly can spend a rune to choose).
- Bonesnare: multiple instances trigger in random order (affects Masina Rebel Queen; Chaos Oracle Molly doesn't choose).
- Wicked Thorns, Ixxthl's Ring: percentages adjusted to 12/25/37/50 (were 10/20/30/50 and 15/25/35/50).
- Dominic Twice-Bitten: no longer stuns friendly ghosts or enemies controlled by the Brainspoon.
- Ossuary title image displayed sometimes on startup not just when purchased.
- arrows displayed for controlled ghosts's ability to move through walls.
- fixed a bug in scrolling weapons at bottom of screen.
- hit effects say "after" to clarify some interactions.

Just a bunch of things coming up between working on PC release and another expansion.

self expectation

over the last few years i have worked at making some changes to my lifestyle. spending more time with other people. getting more exercise & generally having a better relationship with my body. spending less hours in front of a screen, remembering to take regular breaks when i'm working to stretch & avoid rsi. learning new things. i am just in a way better place now in terms of physical and mental health.

i make games more slowly than i did a few years ago. seriously like in 2012 i released Game Title, Lost Levels, Zaga-33, Kompendium, VESPER.5, O, Corrypt, various smaller jam games. in 2015-16 i released Imbroglio. sometimes i feel pretty bad about this, i miss being more productive and i feel inadequate for not making a dozen more games at the same time and also porting to more platforms. i feel confused about why i am less productive. plus i feel bad about not keeping up with other game makers, like i never played all the latest games everyone talked about (half of them are console exclusives anyway) but i used to at least follow all the work of people i know personally and now i don't.

i just put these trends together and went "ohhhhhhhh". it is obvious when i think about it but as these have been slow trends and changes of habits it is not always easy to see. i am spending less time sitting at a computer, so i am getting less done in that time. i think somehow i expected to be so magically productive that i could do a bunch of extra things without anything else diminishing. but i actually have limitations and i have to make choices about how to allocate my time. i have to recognise that while i enjoyed being so productive back then, part of what enabled that level of productivity was constantly overworking myself, lifestyle habits i've realised were unhealthy for me and that anyway were unsustainable. i could still just sit down and jam out a game in a few days i just can't expect to do that while also doing what's best for my body. i still am able to make things now, it's not like i am unproductive, i am just comparing myself to a standard that i feel like i can achieve but is not realistic over the long-term. & if game-making time is a more scarce resource than i thought then i guess it's reasonable that i am not spending it on the little jam games?

ok moving forward i try to have more realistic expectations for myself. keep working on all of life and also games. really important to keep learning and trying new things, i don't want to be stuck in a loop of only making the kind of art i was capable of making five years ago (but integrating new ideas takes time too, i shouldn't expect to be able to express them straight away). accept making games at a sensible pace. not sure what this means for the equation of "can i continue to make a living from this", but i try. next game when it's ready, no rush, ok.