I love playing games with people. I have ended up mostly making singleplayer games because they're easier to sell. Here's a game with a construction phase inspired by TCGs; a common way to play those card games is draft, which adds an initial phase of play to distribute cards. Could we draft Imbroglio? I can't make the main game multiplayer, but we could add a multiplayer phase where we pick weapons for our board, and then play them out to see who did better. At the time I was playing async card games like Ascension online: we'd typically start a game and take several turns quickly while our play times overlapped, and then it would slow down and finish over a few days; this could work like that - a synchronous phase of drafting and then do the solo part in our own time. I implemented this pass-and-play on one device and never got as far as networking because it wasn't great for a bunch of reasons. I think the draft mechanism was: you're offered four cards / take turns picking one each / alternate who starts each hand. Some iterations had the last card being thrown away, or like "pick one to draw and one to throw away" but that just got more complicated.
A problem is that Imbroglio runs often fail to get off the ground because of bad luck in the early game. It feels bad to do this whole big draft with someone and then flop. On the other hand maybe this is good because it encourages you to build a board that can reliably survive the early game! It had been an ongoing weakness in the game's design that, while it seems like there should be a trade-off between early and late strength in a board design, because you can always just restart and try again the winning boards are always going to be ones that focus on late strength. It's true that you don't want a board with literally no early strength because you need to be able to get it to that later point, but as long as it's above 0% it's just a matter of how long you want to spend retrying. When I added the Izu (weekly) mode I'd hoped that this might be what it needed to make the early-game matter, but I ended up not having it one-time-only because you sensibly want to test your board. So Draft Mode was my last stab at this: a mode where the multiplayer setup makes you care about Clubs and Braziers because your goal isn't to ascend, it's to play once and get more than the other person. This makes it a very high-skill game: in normal play most people are taking a few attempts to get going - yes that's partly because they're not having to build their boards for that condition but it's also just kinda normal not to expect perfect play. So who's even going to be playing this multiplayer-only mode that requires you to already be an Imbroglio fiend to even get started? A multiplayer game needs a player base to survive. I tried making it "best of two" or "best of four" but then it takes a very long time to play out. These problems seemed potentially solvable (e.g. if you replay you have to keep the new score) but the mode never reached a point of actually being fun so I abandoned it.
I eventually returned with the insight that it should just be another singleplayer mode. Yes it's for the experts - it's in the third expansion! - but if you only need one expert then at least it will actually get played. I came up with this lovely single-player draft mechanism: you're offered four cards / picking a card discards any to the left, then draw up to four. The idea was to simulate how some cards might pass you by in a multiplayer draft, but since it's just you you get that bit of extra control. You can take from the left to keep every card, take from the right to dig deep and maximise the number of new cards you see, or somewhere in the middle. I really like this system and I wouldn't be surprised to see more games building on it one day; I certainly might use it again.
It still felt bad to do the whole draft and then lose early, but this was easier to fix with just one player. Rather than some general rule like "best of two" I could get really explicit and just say "if you score less than 16 it doesn't count". I ended up with a streak system: that number starts low but goes up each round you beat it; if you ever miss the target then you get a replay but the number resets. A neat thing here is that if you're doing well it flips around to become a challenge: you have to get above the target or else you'll lose your streak and have to replay that round - always neat when a single rule can both give support at the bottom and challenge at the top.
Some draft games would let you choose your hero after the draft depending on what cards you got; that doesn't really work here since several heroes have these restrictions like "red weapons only" that would be awkward if the draft pool isn't set up to fit them. So we choose a hero before the draft. Also since the heroes have very different power levels, I'd like some way to mix it up so you're not just encouraged to pick the strongest, but I also don't want to just make it random because then your score depends too much on that chance. I came up with this neat format - seriously check it out if you haven't - where each round you pick the hero from two random options, and your total Draft score is the sum of your score with each hero. This is a bit like the rolling average I used in P1 SELECT except that instead of your previous 16 games you're always choosing which score to replace. If you do really well sometime, you can keep that score on the board by always picking the other hero when it comes up (until eventually you're made to choose between your two best). Again: a spicy format that more games could stand to build on, hidden away here in the third expansion.
You might be noticing that between four new heroes - each breaking something fundamental about the game and so requiring substantial reprogramming, plus an elaborate new game mode, and the most complex set of weapons yet, this is actually an enormous expansion! Hopefully it made a whole lot of money to pay me for all that work. Unfortunately in typical fashion, each expansion sells fewer copies. Ossuary sold 2.73K, Phlogiston 1.27K, and Mizzenmast just 779 copies. Uh-oh. Well, maybe writing now will give it a little extra juice?
This was the last thing I released before the plague got me. Maybe if I'd been around to promote it better it could have reached more people back then! You can see the timeline right here on my blog: expansion released => updated a crash bug but I'm sick => nothing for almost two years => oops still sick. Sounds like I worked quite hard finishing off this game - I'm not sure if my overwork contributed to the illness becoming chronic, or if I felt like I'd done too much because I was already getting sick, or what.
Now for the individual weapons:
Animate Figurehead
At some point I added hybrid heroes to the Izu (weekly) mode. My notes don't tell me exactly when - maybe it was in this expansion too? - maybe the previous one, anyway I'm pretty sure it was a later addition. Having gone to that effort I wanted to get more use out of the concept. I didn't want to just add all the combinations to normal play - that's 256 different pairings and most of them honestly aren't great; I'd worked hard to design good combinations and I want to keep those canonical. So how about a weapon that temporarily mixes them? The main question here was whether it should be red or blue - you'd expect blue because that's where I mostly put more complex effects. Since Susannah is red-only and Ixxthl is blue-only, there's going to be one of them that can't use it and therefore 16 combinations that it can't produce. Spending a while playing those pairings I felt there was the most joy red.
Lightkeeper's Candle
Duplicate your hero's power: always love a good echo. Neat to have an item whose valuation is completely different for each hero.
Whirlpool Trident
We were enjoying the Hourglass telefrags and wanted more, here's a red version.
Bludgeon Catapult
Makes weapons next to it ranged. Since I'd programmed the game in a way that made rewriting weapon effects really simple, I kept trying to make that a thing even though it never fit that well. Whetstone went through so many versions and I'm still not sure it's really there, now there's this and I'm also uncertain. The game would be cleaner without, but hey with 80 weapons there's space for an awkward thing. I gave it lots of damage to compensate for the power not being great.
Unicorn Tusk
Shopkeeper's "enemies use weapons" obviously caused a ton of problems because it wasn't designed in from the start. Effects like cursing were completely undefined when applied to the player. Jonah suggested "skip a heal" for a cursed player - it doesn't have a strong connection to the usual curse effect but it happens at gem o'clock and it feels like a curse so there you go. I wanted to make sure players knew what to expect when they're cursed, so here I made a self-cursing weapon which can elegantly fit that explanation into its rule text. Named for Unicorn to match Ossuary's Dragon Skull. I reworded Witchpact Blade to "+1 for each curse" instead of "+1 for each cursed enemy" to allow a combo here.
Void Cutlass, Smuggler's Chest
A little theme of "red weapons with scaling damage" to go with Witchpact Blade (curses) and Esoteric Prism (charges).
Most of these start at 1 and add bonus damage on top, but for Cutlass (♡ missing) that was too strong so it starts at 0 - that's cute because if you use it at 0 you get hit and now it's online. Except if it's a blue snake hitting you. Well that sucks. Let's throw in a ♡-spend on miss to power it back up.
The Chest also has this "additional copy" rule I'd been wanting in there to mix up the board construction rules, especially in Izu and Draft.
Portal Porthole
Tried this as a IV upgrade for Skeleton Key. It was strong enough to stand alone.
The new weapons needed to keep a sufficient density of curses to make sure there were still interactions for the earlier one so I periodically went through and just tried forcing a curse effect into anything. This one maybe feels a little arbitrary but it played well enough.
Distant Telescope, Shimmering Cloak
I was running out of ideas to fit the "spend ♢ when attacking" format: it had to get weird.
Telescope is Rimeclaws with a twist - instead of paying for extra damage you get another weapon's hit. Trying to increase interactions between different weapons to make it feel combo-ier. The "choose one for level" tech makes this useful enough.
Cloak could have just been "spend ♢ to block any hit" but that got too strong with Rings; "spend ♢ to block ♡ hits" was okay but weak; adding "spend ♡ to block ♢ hits" seemed fine. It's neat how it almost feels like it situationally doubles your hp: once you run out of one colour to spend on blocks you can still take the hits the normal way. Maybe it helps you survive without really moving towards winning: ok let's have another curse effect.
Treasure Map
Wracking my brains for more ways to do alternate scoring: manipulating gem spawn positions? It's not a full alternate win condition but it changes the flow of scoring enough to point in that direction. It's also another ♢ spend, great! And to fit the expansion theme, following the Map to reach the Chest is a good combo. It needed a little extra so of course I'll throw on a curse effect - wait - a charge effect feels less on-theme but plays much better, I guess I just go with it.
Blunderbuss
I wrote earlier in this series that I don't make weapons level up to become ranged because it can be a disadvantage. Well, here's the closest thing I found that I was okay with: it becomes ranged when it's charged. This could have fit fine in Phlogiston but I had another ranged weapon there and it basically fit the pirate theme here.
Galvanic Sail
Another charge weapon that could just have fit in Phlogiston, but complex enough to save for later. I spent a lot of development time on fancy effects that could trigger automatic attacks, because making a combo that plays itself always seems like a cool idea until you try it. This and Venom are the survivors, sufficiently nerfed that the combo centering them isn't totally overwhelming, which probably makes them barely playable if you're not doing that specific build. I will learn!
Starshine's Pearls
We've spent ♢, ♡, ©, of course I'm going to try to make one that spends ★. It has to be pretty strong because you don't want to do that: let's kill two enemies. I enjoyed connecting a few weapon names with the characters: high damage in a power is a good counter for Starshine's lowered base damage.
Anchor, Tentacle Appendage
Fleshing out a last couple of combo possibilities with specific triggers. Basically you just go over the whole set of items repeatedly looking at different ways you can carve out a distinguished subset, and imagine what power could mesh with that subset. Anchor rewards attacking at a distance (which means not just basic ranged weapons, but things like Harp or Rodney that send a hit somewhere else, and Telescope that brings a hit from a distant weapon here). Tentacle rewards spending ♢ in a different style to how Ring does.
Saturday, 12 September 2026
Wednesday, 9 September 2026
imbroglio notes 14 - mizzenmast I
Doug posted about one of my "imbroglio notes" posts today, which spurred me to have a little read over them again and reminisce. Obviously there are 16 of these, in keeping with the 4x4 numerology, and so I was surprised when I reached number 13 (from May 2018) and there were no more! I had been meaning to get onto finishing number 16 sometime - probably when I finally get around to releasing a PC version - but I had completely forgotten that I'd never even posted numbers 14 and 15.
It's really interesting to me to look back at this game, it feels central to my career: my masterwork (in the sense of the piece of work that marks the transition to being a master of a craft). That's not to say I hadn't done good work before that point, but it was a definite step up in scale and complexity, and I gained authority over the process. Part of that is the design was much more elusive - as evidenced by how much I've written about it - I really had to wrestle with the ideas to bring them through. This game also spanned a transitional period in my life: I started it in Scotland not long before our residence expired, worked on it while travelling, completed it back in Aotearoa, and then made the expansions early on in our time in Portugal. My father and father-in-law both died during that time. (These events are partly responsible for the severe delay on the the PC release.) Inevitably this won't be exactly the post I would have written back then, but it looks like I left myself substantial notes to work from, so let's get into it!
As I said in the Mizzenmast announcement post, I'd expected to make 4 expansions, but to maintain quality I merged the last two. Surprisingly many of the remaining weapon ideas I was experimenting with had a nautical theme - it wasn't clear how this fit into the setting of the game, but seemed surprisingly hard to avoid! I would just be trying out a new weapon idea, maybe it can be in such-and-such expansion, sketch a picture for it thinking about how to explain the mechanics.. oh it's a giant octopus tentacle, I GUESS I'LL THROW IT ON THE NAUTICAL PILE THEN. I just had to run with it.
Cruel Pirate Rodney
The first version of the vision disadvantage let you see a 3x3 square regardless of walls. I was very impressed with how large a 4x4 grid could feel when you only see some of it. The character was called "Blind Blacksmith Brenda", with the power to feed her weapon (which eventually made its way to Charlie). How this felt to play was very similar to the final version, but it had several problems. The interaction with ranged weapons was awful: you wouldn't know if a swipe was going to be a move or an attack (this was before there were arrows displayed to indicate attacks, but even with those you don't know what you're attacking). You probably end up not using ranged weapons at all and that's already Harry's disadvantage. Plus it's just generally very hard: you don't know where the gem is so you spend extra turns going the wrong way (similar to Simon, or even Johnny), plus you sometimes move into an attack from a hidden enemy. Also I wasn't sure how I felt about naming a character's disadvantage after a real life disability? I'm right into the blues, guys like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Boy Paxton I have incredibly high esteem for, I think I could write this respectfully, but it's always worth being sensitive because you don't know what someone else's situation is and you don't know what someone will feel who doesn't know where you're coming from. So I took that character out - Molly went there - but eventually returned to the idea because I'd been so pleased with the sense of space. I made ranged weapons reveal their targets and that was so much better that it just fell into place: vision should be proper line of sight! This also also removed some situations where you'd move into an attack (while leaving others, when the enemy is around a corner), and let you sometimes see the gem sooner. Playing it out, it felt like this was now "balanced". I really liked the mix between closed and open spaces instead of being all claustrophobic all the time, I really liked how it made the wall layout really matter. It felt natural enough that this could be how the game was meant to be all along - I'm always happy when a variation is plausibly the alternate-universe standard ruleset. This is pretty close to how vision works in many roguelikes - I'm also happy when rules that are standard in other games become weirdly oppositional in mine (compare with 868-HACK's "super melee attack"). And then of course making him a pirate with an eye-patch explains the reduced vision in a way that's less likely to offend anyone, while tying it into the nautical theme: perfect.
(Present day note: 868-BACK's "advanced graphics" powerup is essentially the same as this at a pure rule-mechanism level, but the display feels completely different.)
Starshine Sea-urchin
I clearly remember when I found the seed of this idea, walking along the coast of Fife past the old salt factory. I was pondering how to make different board-construction challenges for the different heroes: I already had Harry, Susannah, and Ixxthl's basic restrictions on the set of weapons, I had ideas how to increase the challenge of enemies and mazes, and I wondered if there was an interesting way to modulate the weapons themselves. With the weapon description language it's easy enough to make substitutions and rewrite them in a systematic way - replace all instances of "when this kills" with "when this hits" or something, but those types of effect get very fiddly and the subsets of weapons they affect feel very arbitrary. Ideally you want to affect at least a quarter of the cards in a clear and meaningful way. What's something that most weapons have? Well they all deal damage, and half of them have more than 1 damage. How about just "all weapons always do 1 damage"? This completely invalidates damage-only weapons like Cleaver, Broadsword, Brazier; maybe modify it to "weapons have -1 damage (minimum 1)". The neat thing about removing damage is how it shifts the focus to what rules a weapon has, to making combos - so I tried pairing it with Jeska's cursing power to fuel combos, but it felt terrible to kill her Broadsword interaction. Shuffled it around a lot, ended up not using it.
I came back to it for this expansion. I didn't like the implication of "don't use weapons with extra damage"; especially with the extra expansion weapons making that too obvious to play around. Might as well be a "no damage weapons" restriction - but that completely loses the original idea of rewriting weapons. Maybe I give weapons something else to compensate for reduced damage. Maybe they sometimes get the damage still - so I thought of using random damage, maybe the damage is a die roll like this is an normal RPG or something! A 2-damage weapon rolls a d2, 3-damage rolls a d3. It's nice that damage still matters even though reduced, and it's neat to add extra uncertainty to combat. In practice how you play this is still "no damage weapons" and that's a shame. So I make it more extreme. Damage starts at 0. Now even 1-damage weapons are diminished, they're no longer the safe option that avoids the penalty, it gets interesting. It's too harsh because you die whenever you get a few misses in a row (the correct play almost becomes "only damage weapons" to maximise your rolls but even those aren't enough). But it's getting somewhere, almost hitting that feeling of "this could be how the game was meant to be all along" just failing by not actually being good. I tried some different ways of hacking the odds - maybe it's weighted towards higher rolls, maybe it guarantees alternating hits and misses, maybe it rolls in the range [0, damage+1] - all of these kind of work for balance but the added complexity moves it away from the sense of being the primal "could have been all along" rule.
Maybe you roll damage before attacking so you know the outcome to make an informed decision. Adds some complexity. Intriguing how this adds tactical value to having open space to kite enemies while rerolling. Sometimes feels better because you reroll until you get the hit - spending turns but not taking damage. Sometimes feels worse because you don't have a way out and you know a turn ahead that you're guaranteed to miss and die. Feels really bad when you spend time rerolling and still get zeros. Okay what if it only rerolls when you attack? This is bad because there's no escape from a low roll. What if it rolls for all the weapons at once? Now the positional tactics are very clear because you can see where has damage and make an informed choice to go and get it, rather than just taking chances. Also allows me to weight the rolls favourably without having requiring extra complexity in the written rules because you can explicitly see the spread. It doesn't quite have the naturalness of "let's just roll dice like dungeons and dragons" but the clear visibility of outcomes makes it work.
Her active power went through lots of versions too. I really liked "swap your ♢ and ♡". This let you take some damage and then swap to keep fighting, distribute the damage to optimise heals from gems, use Spears to heal ♢, or spend ♡ on wands... but all these cute effects were very situational and 90% of the time it was a bad wait. Rodney's remote attack effect was here for a while, but fit better with his disadvantage so he got it. Because her disadvantage is so complex, her ability wanted to be strong but simple. I ended up back at "restore ♢". This might seem too much like a repeat of Harry, but it plays out pretty differently because it powers different things. In particular it helps enable mana-cost weapons which I'd been feeling were a little underused, and that fits with how her disadvantage is pushing you to focus on weapon powers more than their base damage. Once I'd settled on the random rolls being shown in advance, I tacked on a reroll and that made the power feel less generic and mitigated a lot of problems of reroll-on-attack: if you're stuck with zeros, "heal and take damage" is better than "miss and take damage", while "heal and reroll and wait in place as the enemy moves to you" is way better than "move next to enemy, take damage, miss, take damage".
Castaway Charlie
I really like the hero disadvantages that restrict weapon availability because they give such strong direction for constructing different boards, instead of the less clear situation where you can play any board but different boards are optimal. But there just aren't many simple rules to distinguish subsets; red and blue worked well, "no ranged" wasn't great, "no damage" and "only damage" had sucked; what else even is there? When I started making expansions I tried a "no base weapons" hero, Leon suggested this could be the Shopkeeper - she only has expansion weapons because that's what's in her shop. But this didn't play well; the more-complex expansion items want to be mixed in with the simpler ones from the initial set. I loved the Shopkeeper idea though, so what if she only has the weapons that are left after everyone else has bought theirs? This is straight from 868-HACK - "Favoured Progs" bans the abilities you've most used in the current streak, forcing you to adapt. I really like this idea of restrictions tailored to a particular player's style. Eventually a different concept fit better for the Shopkeeper and this became (in nautical theming) a castaway who's making do with scraps. There's a bunch of messiness here: you can't straightforwardly share his boards because we have different best scores, if you get a top score with him you can't replay the same board. I saved this for the final expansion so that there'd be plenty of score information already to stabilise it.
The Shopkeeper
I didn't even consider the shopkeeper as a playable character until long after I'd drawn them for the button, but of course with such sparse worldbuilding it just made sense to use this one person that we'd met! As above, for a while they had Charlie's disadvantage. Jonah suggested "minotaurs use weapons" as a weird probably-not-viable idea, I tried it anyway, it took a lot of reprogramming to make it work but I loved it. It was too minor just on Minotaurs though so I extended it to all enemies.
Their runepower started as re-randomising the walls, generating a new level (like Zaga-33's "quake" item). Then I thought - scoring a gem triggers that effect, so why not simplify that to a power that scores a gem? Which is obviously really good. It ties several effects together to make a very flexible ability - use it to get past bad wall layouts, to heal, with curses for the ghost effect, or find weapons with gem triggers to make a weird combo. Or maybe simply as a scoring effect! So that was okay, but led to degenerate builds where you could stay in place on a rune-generation weapon, felt quite similar to the old Dream Wheel combos. Leon suggested teleporting to the gem to break stay-in-place builds, this lost some of the feeling of a merchant just buying points but solved enough problems to be worth it. Still you could save up a lot of runes and jump jump jump, so I went for the same solution as with Dream Wheel: it only works half the time. (The opposite half from the Wheel, so they can cover for each other!) A two-part power is complex but acceptable for final expansion; the night-time aspect is kept as simple as possible.
And that is plenty for tonight! The deluxe-sized expansion deserves two posts.
It's really interesting to me to look back at this game, it feels central to my career: my masterwork (in the sense of the piece of work that marks the transition to being a master of a craft). That's not to say I hadn't done good work before that point, but it was a definite step up in scale and complexity, and I gained authority over the process. Part of that is the design was much more elusive - as evidenced by how much I've written about it - I really had to wrestle with the ideas to bring them through. This game also spanned a transitional period in my life: I started it in Scotland not long before our residence expired, worked on it while travelling, completed it back in Aotearoa, and then made the expansions early on in our time in Portugal. My father and father-in-law both died during that time. (These events are partly responsible for the severe delay on the the PC release.) Inevitably this won't be exactly the post I would have written back then, but it looks like I left myself substantial notes to work from, so let's get into it!
As I said in the Mizzenmast announcement post, I'd expected to make 4 expansions, but to maintain quality I merged the last two. Surprisingly many of the remaining weapon ideas I was experimenting with had a nautical theme - it wasn't clear how this fit into the setting of the game, but seemed surprisingly hard to avoid! I would just be trying out a new weapon idea, maybe it can be in such-and-such expansion, sketch a picture for it thinking about how to explain the mechanics.. oh it's a giant octopus tentacle, I GUESS I'LL THROW IT ON THE NAUTICAL PILE THEN. I just had to run with it.
Cruel Pirate Rodney
The first version of the vision disadvantage let you see a 3x3 square regardless of walls. I was very impressed with how large a 4x4 grid could feel when you only see some of it. The character was called "Blind Blacksmith Brenda", with the power to feed her weapon (which eventually made its way to Charlie). How this felt to play was very similar to the final version, but it had several problems. The interaction with ranged weapons was awful: you wouldn't know if a swipe was going to be a move or an attack (this was before there were arrows displayed to indicate attacks, but even with those you don't know what you're attacking). You probably end up not using ranged weapons at all and that's already Harry's disadvantage. Plus it's just generally very hard: you don't know where the gem is so you spend extra turns going the wrong way (similar to Simon, or even Johnny), plus you sometimes move into an attack from a hidden enemy. Also I wasn't sure how I felt about naming a character's disadvantage after a real life disability? I'm right into the blues, guys like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Boy Paxton I have incredibly high esteem for, I think I could write this respectfully, but it's always worth being sensitive because you don't know what someone else's situation is and you don't know what someone will feel who doesn't know where you're coming from. So I took that character out - Molly went there - but eventually returned to the idea because I'd been so pleased with the sense of space. I made ranged weapons reveal their targets and that was so much better that it just fell into place: vision should be proper line of sight! This also also removed some situations where you'd move into an attack (while leaving others, when the enemy is around a corner), and let you sometimes see the gem sooner. Playing it out, it felt like this was now "balanced". I really liked the mix between closed and open spaces instead of being all claustrophobic all the time, I really liked how it made the wall layout really matter. It felt natural enough that this could be how the game was meant to be all along - I'm always happy when a variation is plausibly the alternate-universe standard ruleset. This is pretty close to how vision works in many roguelikes - I'm also happy when rules that are standard in other games become weirdly oppositional in mine (compare with 868-HACK's "super melee attack"). And then of course making him a pirate with an eye-patch explains the reduced vision in a way that's less likely to offend anyone, while tying it into the nautical theme: perfect.
(Present day note: 868-BACK's "advanced graphics" powerup is essentially the same as this at a pure rule-mechanism level, but the display feels completely different.)
Starshine Sea-urchin
I clearly remember when I found the seed of this idea, walking along the coast of Fife past the old salt factory. I was pondering how to make different board-construction challenges for the different heroes: I already had Harry, Susannah, and Ixxthl's basic restrictions on the set of weapons, I had ideas how to increase the challenge of enemies and mazes, and I wondered if there was an interesting way to modulate the weapons themselves. With the weapon description language it's easy enough to make substitutions and rewrite them in a systematic way - replace all instances of "when this kills" with "when this hits" or something, but those types of effect get very fiddly and the subsets of weapons they affect feel very arbitrary. Ideally you want to affect at least a quarter of the cards in a clear and meaningful way. What's something that most weapons have? Well they all deal damage, and half of them have more than 1 damage. How about just "all weapons always do 1 damage"? This completely invalidates damage-only weapons like Cleaver, Broadsword, Brazier; maybe modify it to "weapons have -1 damage (minimum 1)". The neat thing about removing damage is how it shifts the focus to what rules a weapon has, to making combos - so I tried pairing it with Jeska's cursing power to fuel combos, but it felt terrible to kill her Broadsword interaction. Shuffled it around a lot, ended up not using it.
I came back to it for this expansion. I didn't like the implication of "don't use weapons with extra damage"; especially with the extra expansion weapons making that too obvious to play around. Might as well be a "no damage weapons" restriction - but that completely loses the original idea of rewriting weapons. Maybe I give weapons something else to compensate for reduced damage. Maybe they sometimes get the damage still - so I thought of using random damage, maybe the damage is a die roll like this is an normal RPG or something! A 2-damage weapon rolls a d2, 3-damage rolls a d3. It's nice that damage still matters even though reduced, and it's neat to add extra uncertainty to combat. In practice how you play this is still "no damage weapons" and that's a shame. So I make it more extreme. Damage starts at 0. Now even 1-damage weapons are diminished, they're no longer the safe option that avoids the penalty, it gets interesting. It's too harsh because you die whenever you get a few misses in a row (the correct play almost becomes "only damage weapons" to maximise your rolls but even those aren't enough). But it's getting somewhere, almost hitting that feeling of "this could be how the game was meant to be all along" just failing by not actually being good. I tried some different ways of hacking the odds - maybe it's weighted towards higher rolls, maybe it guarantees alternating hits and misses, maybe it rolls in the range [0, damage+1] - all of these kind of work for balance but the added complexity moves it away from the sense of being the primal "could have been all along" rule.
Maybe you roll damage before attacking so you know the outcome to make an informed decision. Adds some complexity. Intriguing how this adds tactical value to having open space to kite enemies while rerolling. Sometimes feels better because you reroll until you get the hit - spending turns but not taking damage. Sometimes feels worse because you don't have a way out and you know a turn ahead that you're guaranteed to miss and die. Feels really bad when you spend time rerolling and still get zeros. Okay what if it only rerolls when you attack? This is bad because there's no escape from a low roll. What if it rolls for all the weapons at once? Now the positional tactics are very clear because you can see where has damage and make an informed choice to go and get it, rather than just taking chances. Also allows me to weight the rolls favourably without having requiring extra complexity in the written rules because you can explicitly see the spread. It doesn't quite have the naturalness of "let's just roll dice like dungeons and dragons" but the clear visibility of outcomes makes it work.
Her active power went through lots of versions too. I really liked "swap your ♢ and ♡". This let you take some damage and then swap to keep fighting, distribute the damage to optimise heals from gems, use Spears to heal ♢, or spend ♡ on wands... but all these cute effects were very situational and 90% of the time it was a bad wait. Rodney's remote attack effect was here for a while, but fit better with his disadvantage so he got it. Because her disadvantage is so complex, her ability wanted to be strong but simple. I ended up back at "restore ♢". This might seem too much like a repeat of Harry, but it plays out pretty differently because it powers different things. In particular it helps enable mana-cost weapons which I'd been feeling were a little underused, and that fits with how her disadvantage is pushing you to focus on weapon powers more than their base damage. Once I'd settled on the random rolls being shown in advance, I tacked on a reroll and that made the power feel less generic and mitigated a lot of problems of reroll-on-attack: if you're stuck with zeros, "heal and take damage" is better than "miss and take damage", while "heal and reroll and wait in place as the enemy moves to you" is way better than "move next to enemy, take damage, miss, take damage".
Castaway Charlie
I really like the hero disadvantages that restrict weapon availability because they give such strong direction for constructing different boards, instead of the less clear situation where you can play any board but different boards are optimal. But there just aren't many simple rules to distinguish subsets; red and blue worked well, "no ranged" wasn't great, "no damage" and "only damage" had sucked; what else even is there? When I started making expansions I tried a "no base weapons" hero, Leon suggested this could be the Shopkeeper - she only has expansion weapons because that's what's in her shop. But this didn't play well; the more-complex expansion items want to be mixed in with the simpler ones from the initial set. I loved the Shopkeeper idea though, so what if she only has the weapons that are left after everyone else has bought theirs? This is straight from 868-HACK - "Favoured Progs" bans the abilities you've most used in the current streak, forcing you to adapt. I really like this idea of restrictions tailored to a particular player's style. Eventually a different concept fit better for the Shopkeeper and this became (in nautical theming) a castaway who's making do with scraps. There's a bunch of messiness here: you can't straightforwardly share his boards because we have different best scores, if you get a top score with him you can't replay the same board. I saved this for the final expansion so that there'd be plenty of score information already to stabilise it.
The Shopkeeper
I didn't even consider the shopkeeper as a playable character until long after I'd drawn them for the button, but of course with such sparse worldbuilding it just made sense to use this one person that we'd met! As above, for a while they had Charlie's disadvantage. Jonah suggested "minotaurs use weapons" as a weird probably-not-viable idea, I tried it anyway, it took a lot of reprogramming to make it work but I loved it. It was too minor just on Minotaurs though so I extended it to all enemies.
Their runepower started as re-randomising the walls, generating a new level (like Zaga-33's "quake" item). Then I thought - scoring a gem triggers that effect, so why not simplify that to a power that scores a gem? Which is obviously really good. It ties several effects together to make a very flexible ability - use it to get past bad wall layouts, to heal, with curses for the ghost effect, or find weapons with gem triggers to make a weird combo. Or maybe simply as a scoring effect! So that was okay, but led to degenerate builds where you could stay in place on a rune-generation weapon, felt quite similar to the old Dream Wheel combos. Leon suggested teleporting to the gem to break stay-in-place builds, this lost some of the feeling of a merchant just buying points but solved enough problems to be worth it. Still you could save up a lot of runes and jump jump jump, so I went for the same solution as with Dream Wheel: it only works half the time. (The opposite half from the Wheel, so they can cover for each other!) A two-part power is complex but acceptable for final expansion; the night-time aspect is kept as simple as possible.
And that is plenty for tonight! The deluxe-sized expansion deserves two posts.
Thursday, 23 July 2026
prayer for the wealthy
for those whose possessions exceed their needs
i pray that they would be unburdened
that they be freed of the fearful drive for more
that what they have could reach where it can help
so they may experience the rewards of charity
for those whose responsibility surpasses their maturity
i pray that they would have the space to grow
that the weight of decision-making be shared amongst those the decisions touch
so the few need not bear it alone
for the inheritors of the guilt of the past
fortunes cursed by ancestral deeds
i pray that they would find a way to give back enough
to in their deepest heart be atoned
for those who nurture hate
i pray that they will receive love
for the pure child they once were
and the shining light they may yet become
for myself
i ask openness to wish good to all
even these i find easier to bear ill will
i pray that they would be unburdened
that they be freed of the fearful drive for more
that what they have could reach where it can help
so they may experience the rewards of charity
for those whose responsibility surpasses their maturity
i pray that they would have the space to grow
that the weight of decision-making be shared amongst those the decisions touch
so the few need not bear it alone
for the inheritors of the guilt of the past
fortunes cursed by ancestral deeds
i pray that they would find a way to give back enough
to in their deepest heart be atoned
for those who nurture hate
i pray that they will receive love
for the pure child they once were
and the shining light they may yet become
for myself
i ask openness to wish good to all
even these i find easier to bear ill will
Sunday, 5 July 2026
The Secret Lives podcast is up to "become a great artist in just 10 seconds" in their year-long series on my work, and I noticed that in the show notes they linked this old blog post of mine. I have not listened to the episode yet, so I don't know the context in which the post is referenced, but looking back at it got me thinking so I wanted to write up how I see this now. (I'm curious to see how this will relate to what's said in the episode - whether it's a constructive response, if I've said things that agree or disagree with them, or if it's just a completely different track.)
A theme that was in my thinking around that time, which I don't think I ever wrote down publicly (maybe because it seemed too ambitious, or too woo), was something like "the soul of mobile games".
People had convinced me to try selling my games on telephones, and the fit was mixed. Certainly some design concepts I was exploring were appropriate for small-screen gaming, but culturally I was nowhere near. I am not an early tech adopter - I've never been able to afford to be, but also I will be quite happily still enjoying the tech that I do have. At the time I did not personally use a mobile telephone. Someone had lent me one for a while a few years earlier and I wasn't into it. I didn't like having people expecting that they could get in touch with me at any random time, when normally they would just have not been bothered. I do use one now, and I appreciate the convenience of being able to navigate in a foreign land without having to ask for help. If I was asking for help I would be forging stronger connections with the people around me. My attention span is reduced just by having it on me.
Selling my games on telephones put them in unpleasant company. Already then "mobile games" were synonymous with gambling, race-to-the-bottom pricing, advertising, operant conditioning, and exploitation of vulnerable people. Someone set me up once with a call with someone from Apple to try to get my games better promotion and it was all this kind of shit. It was clear that they were not taking their work seriously.
So to put that post in context: I was working on Imbroglio. As I said I don't think I've written this publicly, but the initial concept was to destroy all of this evil in mobile games. I wanted to play with all of the unpleasantness that was happening in the medium, and by bringing those things into the play (rather than wielding them against the players) break the power that they have over us. A vaccine against cognitive exploits. OK, that's a wild ambitious concept, and we should be wild and ambitious. I tried to find the structure for a game that would let me play with these ideas, and the exploration found me something. As you work on a game it starts to speak for itself, telling you the shape it wants to take. The shape that it eventually resolved itself into was a lovely little game that didn't bear any obvious mark of these initial concepts. I had set about the important task of exorcising evil and healing souls, and instead I got something that looked very much like the last couple of games I'd made. It felt like a failure. Of course I wasn't going to throw away the thing that I'd made because it was really a delightful game, but it wasn't what I'd hoped for.
From the perspective I have now, I'm not even sure now I did fail. Okay it didn't slay all those demons, but still it's a game that does something interesting with attention span - I talked about play as meditation in my imbroglio notes - maybe it did some good. And young Michael, you are being very hard on yourself describing that game as generic traditional "collect magic gem for high score". It did so much that was very novel. You reached into the void and pulled forth a seed, gave it the care it needed to grow, patiently took the time for it to find a coherent form, released it into the world, and inspired many others. And some of the other concepts I was exploring eventually came home to roost in 868-BACK. Nothing is lost.
In that post I contrasted my more conventionally "game design" games with the ones that felt more like pieces of art. Back then there was a lot of talk about the relationship of games and art. A lot of us found ourselves called to be artists, in the medium of games, but we lacked a clear model of how to do that. Many of the games that had inspired us were made as products, by large teams, and trying to follow those was unhelpful. A couple of overthought and underfelt sketches by famous game-industry men were being paraded as though they were something important. Someone who mostly wrote about movies claimed that games could never be art (feeling insecure in their own medium's tenuous recognition as 'proper' art?). But there we were, doing the thing that is art and what we were making was games. We were doing it, but got confused when we tried to talk about it. Probably best talk less do more.
Looking back, I could say that I was trying to fish in two ponds, and one turned out to be much shallower and one much deeper than I was expecting. Having made several abstract art games, I felt like I was onto something interesting - but I didn't keep finding more to make there that I hadn't already covered. Meanwhile the roguelikes kept revealing more and more.
Creative expression needs a frame to support it. Droqen can declare "death of gameplay" but he's still making platformers. Tale of Tales were doing the same ten years earlier. Try to take out all the "gameplay" to just have it somehow be pure art, and you've just dug down to whatever your default assumptions of gameplay are. Platformer jumping or first person 3d wandering isn't any less "game mechanics" than grid puzzling or tech trees, it's just that person's comfortable default. Which is fine! These gameplay models provide the structure for the art to happen in. It's just very not dead. And what I've found for my own work is that more structure gives more space for expression. Gameplay and "art" aren't in conflict: with more of both they can each support the other. If - as always - it's done with taste and sensitivity. Feels like a good direction for me. Other people have to find their own directions sorry.
I was worried about being typecast. I was right to worry! It straight away went and happened. I made a 3rd similar-ish game and suddenly "broughlike" is a genre? Everyone forgets I made anything else. Nobody even knows I made multiplayer games, when it's what I've done the most of. Certainly nobody knows I used to think abstract interactive art like Knot-Pharmacard Subcondition J might be my whole direction. It's ok I'll just make whatever I make.
A theme that was in my thinking around that time, which I don't think I ever wrote down publicly (maybe because it seemed too ambitious, or too woo), was something like "the soul of mobile games".
People had convinced me to try selling my games on telephones, and the fit was mixed. Certainly some design concepts I was exploring were appropriate for small-screen gaming, but culturally I was nowhere near. I am not an early tech adopter - I've never been able to afford to be, but also I will be quite happily still enjoying the tech that I do have. At the time I did not personally use a mobile telephone. Someone had lent me one for a while a few years earlier and I wasn't into it. I didn't like having people expecting that they could get in touch with me at any random time, when normally they would just have not been bothered. I do use one now, and I appreciate the convenience of being able to navigate in a foreign land without having to ask for help. If I was asking for help I would be forging stronger connections with the people around me. My attention span is reduced just by having it on me.
Selling my games on telephones put them in unpleasant company. Already then "mobile games" were synonymous with gambling, race-to-the-bottom pricing, advertising, operant conditioning, and exploitation of vulnerable people. Someone set me up once with a call with someone from Apple to try to get my games better promotion and it was all this kind of shit. It was clear that they were not taking their work seriously.
So to put that post in context: I was working on Imbroglio. As I said I don't think I've written this publicly, but the initial concept was to destroy all of this evil in mobile games. I wanted to play with all of the unpleasantness that was happening in the medium, and by bringing those things into the play (rather than wielding them against the players) break the power that they have over us. A vaccine against cognitive exploits. OK, that's a wild ambitious concept, and we should be wild and ambitious. I tried to find the structure for a game that would let me play with these ideas, and the exploration found me something. As you work on a game it starts to speak for itself, telling you the shape it wants to take. The shape that it eventually resolved itself into was a lovely little game that didn't bear any obvious mark of these initial concepts. I had set about the important task of exorcising evil and healing souls, and instead I got something that looked very much like the last couple of games I'd made. It felt like a failure. Of course I wasn't going to throw away the thing that I'd made because it was really a delightful game, but it wasn't what I'd hoped for.
From the perspective I have now, I'm not even sure now I did fail. Okay it didn't slay all those demons, but still it's a game that does something interesting with attention span - I talked about play as meditation in my imbroglio notes - maybe it did some good. And young Michael, you are being very hard on yourself describing that game as generic traditional "collect magic gem for high score". It did so much that was very novel. You reached into the void and pulled forth a seed, gave it the care it needed to grow, patiently took the time for it to find a coherent form, released it into the world, and inspired many others. And some of the other concepts I was exploring eventually came home to roost in 868-BACK. Nothing is lost.
In that post I contrasted my more conventionally "game design" games with the ones that felt more like pieces of art. Back then there was a lot of talk about the relationship of games and art. A lot of us found ourselves called to be artists, in the medium of games, but we lacked a clear model of how to do that. Many of the games that had inspired us were made as products, by large teams, and trying to follow those was unhelpful. A couple of overthought and underfelt sketches by famous game-industry men were being paraded as though they were something important. Someone who mostly wrote about movies claimed that games could never be art (feeling insecure in their own medium's tenuous recognition as 'proper' art?). But there we were, doing the thing that is art and what we were making was games. We were doing it, but got confused when we tried to talk about it. Probably best talk less do more.
Looking back, I could say that I was trying to fish in two ponds, and one turned out to be much shallower and one much deeper than I was expecting. Having made several abstract art games, I felt like I was onto something interesting - but I didn't keep finding more to make there that I hadn't already covered. Meanwhile the roguelikes kept revealing more and more.
Creative expression needs a frame to support it. Droqen can declare "death of gameplay" but he's still making platformers. Tale of Tales were doing the same ten years earlier. Try to take out all the "gameplay" to just have it somehow be pure art, and you've just dug down to whatever your default assumptions of gameplay are. Platformer jumping or first person 3d wandering isn't any less "game mechanics" than grid puzzling or tech trees, it's just that person's comfortable default. Which is fine! These gameplay models provide the structure for the art to happen in. It's just very not dead. And what I've found for my own work is that more structure gives more space for expression. Gameplay and "art" aren't in conflict: with more of both they can each support the other. If - as always - it's done with taste and sensitivity. Feels like a good direction for me. Other people have to find their own directions sorry.
I was worried about being typecast. I was right to worry! It straight away went and happened. I made a 3rd similar-ish game and suddenly "broughlike" is a genre? Everyone forgets I made anything else. Nobody even knows I made multiplayer games, when it's what I've done the most of. Certainly nobody knows I used to think abstract interactive art like Knot-Pharmacard Subcondition J might be my whole direction. It's ok I'll just make whatever I make.
Friday, 26 June 2026
advice on how to write about indie games
Instead of "this game is niche"
try saying "i like this game because..."
Look, "niche" is not a property of a game. It's a recess in a wall to put decoration in. (Some games do have niches in them.) I guess you're using it in some metaphorical way to mean that the group of people playing the game is small enough to fit into a niche? This is not very interesting, and it is not even a fact about the game. You're telling us about the game because you like it! What do you like about it? That's way more interesting.
You're not as weird as you think you are. I'm sorry, but you're actually not. You're holding onto this idea of yourself being such an atypical person and your tastes being so niche as a way to feel a bit special. And by god you are special. You are so special. You are this beautiful unique incredible configuration of stardust and we love you. You're great. But you're not unusual. If you like a thing, there's going to be a ton of other people who would like it, for the same reasons you do. Maybe they haven't heard of it yet. Maybe you can tell them.
Instead of "this game is underrated"
Try saying "i think this game is great"
I get it: you think the rating is too low. The injustice of it!
But when you say this to someone, you're first of all telling them "THE RATING IS LOW". That's what they're gonna hear. Yeah sure you're also saying "and I disagree" but look: communication is hard. You can get ideas across more reliably if you stick to one at a time. Start with the main one. Here, that's what you think of the game. Someone else out there thinks something different? Man, you're not obliged to speak for them.
Instead of "too bad this game didn't sell"
try saying "check out this cool game"
We're not at the end of the story!
If someone's trying to get rich through investment fraud, maybe all they care about is all-or-nothing instant hits. But everywhere else, a slow burn still makes a difference. And good work doesn't stop being good just because time has passed.
All my games still sell. They kept selling through the years I was too ill to work. They spike when I release something new or when there's a nice article about me. It's not a lot, but it makes a difference for us. Heck, I hadn't released a game in ages and then suddenly a podcast series started up about my work and people are exploring games from up to 15 years ago. It happens.
Instead of "this has only X many wishlists / reviews / numbers"
try saying "here's something i really like about this game!"
These kinds of numbers are for sad people in suits who don't trust their own sense of what is good. You know what's good.
Personally, when I see this kind of comment about my games I tend to stress out a little. "Oh no, the numbers!" I think that's the most likely outcome if you post something like this: the person who made it feels bad and nobody else cares. Probably that wasn't your intention! (Don't worry, I don't stress for long - I know that juicy long tail is coming for me.)
Instead of "looks bad"
try saying "wow there’s something about it that catches my attention but i don’t feel like i know what’s going on yet, can someone explain what the deal is?"
Why has this person shown up in this thread to post this meaningless trash about something they claim not to even care about? What's going through their brain?
I'll tell you: it's because they are curious. They wouldn't have posted if they weren't actually interested. They're trying to articulate their interest but can't find the words. Surprising but true.
If you catch yourself doing this, feel free to use my wording above.
If you see someone else doing this, you can respond 100% as if they had asked this question and it’ll be a positive exchange.
Instead of "this game is fundamentally flawed"
try saying "this game is worthy of deep study"
If you're writing on the internet about something new or indie, your post might constitute a substantial fraction of the available literature on the topic. It's not a drop in the ocean. There's a good chance that this will even be the first someone has heard about it. Maybe you think you're only writing to a very specific audience, but now it's one of the top search results. You're ahead of the curve.
Many years back, someone wrote a thoughtful essay about a high-level aspect of one of my games that they felt wasn’t working as intended. They weren't even wrong! Unfortunately, they used this kind of language. In the context they were writing to, they assumed that everyone already knew about the game, and already knew that it was interesting and deep, and that's why it was worth writing about. To an academic, “fundamentally flawed” means “there are some long-term challenges that might require changes to the fundamentals to improve on”. To a layperson it just sounds really very bad: it means "broken in a way that can’t be fixed, ever". And so it came about that years later - long after I’d addressed the issue in question - I kept seeing this post resurfacing. Someone would ask on a random forum thread “i heard of this game, is it worth checking out?” and get a reply “nah apparently it’s fundamentally flawed”. Dude. Pretty sure that cost me some sales. Would have been easy to word it in a way that avoided this negative.
Instead of "if only this game was made with a higher budget"
try saying "check out this game"
How the fuck do you think we'll get a higher budget bro.
You're posting about it because you're into it: say so.
One time a big name account posted about one of my games. They could have just said something nice, their followers would buy it on their recommendation, it could have made a real difference. But they chose to dunk on it, specifically to be critical of how little money was spent on it, in a way that encouraged their followers to do the same. I was relatively unknown at the time, so for a while way more people had heard this person's negative opinions about it than anything good. It can really stick - this was well over a decade ago and i literally saw one of their fans repeating the exact same thing this week. Guys.
Look I get it: if someone's doing cool work you want to see what they could accomplish with more resources. So get them there. Support them. Focus on the things you like about what they're already doing and you'll get to see more.
Instead of "mobile when" (or android when, switch when, etc.)
try buying the game
This is a special case of the previous point. Sure, making art is a soulful devotional practice etc., but anyone who's doing it in a sustained commercial way at any level also spends some time thinking about it as a business. When it comes to ports, it's all business. We have some numbers to estimate sales, we have some costs, we decide when it's worth it. If we lose money on ports we can't make the next thing. Get those numbers up.
Instead of "outsider artist"
try saying "member of the [place/website] scene"
An outsider artist has no ties to an established scene. If you heard about someone through games media, they're not an outsider. Talk about the connections they have: knowing which more established figures a creator is linked with will help people to understand where their work comes from.
Instead of "game designer's game designer"
try saying "up-and-coming designer" or "respected and influential designer"
See, this always feels like a backhanded compliment. Sure your games are "good", but in a particular way that nobody wants to pay for.
Nah. Think about it, what's more likely?
- There's a weird category of art which can only appeal to practitioners of that artform, and certain unfortunate individuals are cursed to only ever produce work of that type.
- People working in a medium are likely to hear about someone new doing good work before they break through to the general public.
Instead of "your favourite game designer's favourite game designer"
try saying "Terry Cavanagh recommends this"
You've tried harder to make this positive! We appreciate that! But look: this still fails to get across what you hoped to say. Who even has a favourite game designer? Passing on a recommendation works better if you say who it comes from. Hey you could even recommend it yourself, rather than a vague "lots of people smarter than you or me are into it I guess".
Instead of "whoaaa were they ON DRUGS"
try saying "whoaaa"
So tired of this. So offensive to look at someone's creative work and say "I bet you needed some chemical assistance to think of that". Man, some people are taking drugs, some people aren't, it's not a big deal, don't be such a cop. Some have substance abuse problems and making up a story that you can't do art sober probably doesn't help them.
You can make art.
Instead of "this big-budget game sucks"
try writing about an indie game instead
If you don’t like a thing, don’t waste energy talking about it.
You convinced yourself you need to "be part of the conversation" but you're just adding noise. Nobody cares. Stop chasing clicks. If you'd instead written something positive about something you liked that the reader hadn’t heard of and might like too, in a small way you’d have made the world a better place.
Wednesday, 10 June 2026
868-BACK: quit
quick note: I used to document quite a bit of my game dev process here on this blog. I started doing videos instead in the pandemic (patreon, youtube) because I was finding that drained less energy from me than writing a post. I haven't done either very much recently because I felt so much of what I wanted to talk about would just make more sense once the game was out so you'd know what I was referring to. Now it's out! I'll hopefully be doing some of those posts. I'm not sure yet what the balance of videos to writing will be, but this one's writing!
868-HACK is structured as a series of servers you hack one after another, with increasing difficulty as you go. Quite a few people never even saw the difficulty increase because you had to win a couple of rounds in a row to get there. When I did an expansion for it a few years later (PLAN.B) I wanted to put the difficulty modifiers up front - both so that everyone would see them, and because those of us who'd been playing a bit started to find the game a bit too easy without them. But sometimes a stack of them could just be unfair though so I wanted a way to skip the really bad combinations, and came up with the .QUIT prog. This is just a basic ability you can pick up and use like any other, and what it does is instantly win the round. Actually amazing. This would be blatantly S-tier if not for the opportunity cost: you don't want to take the free win if you could use that siphon to get more points instead.
.QUIT is one of my favourite progs because it's something that computers do but games don't. Coming to the sequel I really wanted to push as far as I could in that direction; try everything I could think of that felt like a "computer" ability and would fit naturally here and not in a typical fantasy game. So .QUIT and .UNDO were at the top of my list for returning progs. (Puzzle games should generally allow undo, strategy games don't because it creates a very boring play pattern around any random or hidden element; putting a cost on it that isn't undone solved that well enough for 868-HACK, but unfortunately wasn't enough to make it work in BACK.) .QUIT fit quite nicely into BACK overall, but the new scrip system made it fairly easy to minimise the opportunity cost.
One of my early ideas for a bonus powerup in 868-BACK was called Local area network!, which I) protected a server from being hacked unless you'd hacked one of its neighbours the day before, and II) forced you to hack one of its neighbors the next day. I really liked having a "map-only" powerup, making a server more difficult to hack not because the levels and enemies were any harder but simply because it was inconvenient to get and out of. I really liked the spatial element this gave to the server map: these little sequences where you had to move step-by-step across it rather than just picking from it like a menu. There were many problems with this. Does nothing on the last day. You could get stuck and lose the game with no options if you weren't careful - and that tended to feel unfair rather than like you'd excitingly hacked yourself into a corner. Didn't interact well with the "reveal powerups by gathering data in adjacent servers" mechanic. So eventually it went away.
Thinking about limitations that could be applied to QUIT to make it slightly less dominant - what about an effect on the server map? I thought of folding in Isolated workstation!: if you quit a server you don't get to explore the ones next to it. Jake suggested folding in Local area network! instead: if you quit a server you have to go to one next to it tomorrow. This was really good! We kept Isolated as the map-only powerup (its device restriction was added much later at Leon's suggestion to prevent it doing less the more of the map is explored). When Linkcubes were added I let it go along those links as well. It seemed like the problem was solved.
Since the game's been released and a lot more people have been playing it, a few rare bugs showed up involving QUIT. This is going to happen - different people have different skills and approaches, so they'll try something in a different situation - or else just the dice get rolled a lot more times so an arrangement comes up that you never saw before. I'd added certain types of server that couldn't be accessed unless specific conditions were met - the megacorp x6s and the shops. In particular this restriction on the shops came very late in development (to stop new players from having a disappointing experience of going to a shop where they can't afford to buy anything). So a few people had been able to quit with only a shop in range but then weren't able to get into the shop! When I dug in to fix this I realised that QUIT was getting quite complicated. We'd already had a few players being confused about when they could or couldn't quit, and this was making it more confusing by adding situations where your ability to quit depended on the status of servers you haven't even explored yet. So rather than add all those complications I gutted it and made the whole thing much simpler: you can always quit, and tomorrow you can go wherever is nearest that you can get into. If you're surrounded by locked shops and corporate headquarters, instead of being sad and stuck you just get to go slightly further. It should play pretty similarly in most cases, but be clearer to understand, less prone to bugs, and maybe even occasionally exploitable in clever ways.
patch is up now!
868-HACK is structured as a series of servers you hack one after another, with increasing difficulty as you go. Quite a few people never even saw the difficulty increase because you had to win a couple of rounds in a row to get there. When I did an expansion for it a few years later (PLAN.B) I wanted to put the difficulty modifiers up front - both so that everyone would see them, and because those of us who'd been playing a bit started to find the game a bit too easy without them. But sometimes a stack of them could just be unfair though so I wanted a way to skip the really bad combinations, and came up with the .QUIT prog. This is just a basic ability you can pick up and use like any other, and what it does is instantly win the round. Actually amazing. This would be blatantly S-tier if not for the opportunity cost: you don't want to take the free win if you could use that siphon to get more points instead.
.QUIT is one of my favourite progs because it's something that computers do but games don't. Coming to the sequel I really wanted to push as far as I could in that direction; try everything I could think of that felt like a "computer" ability and would fit naturally here and not in a typical fantasy game. So .QUIT and .UNDO were at the top of my list for returning progs. (Puzzle games should generally allow undo, strategy games don't because it creates a very boring play pattern around any random or hidden element; putting a cost on it that isn't undone solved that well enough for 868-HACK, but unfortunately wasn't enough to make it work in BACK.) .QUIT fit quite nicely into BACK overall, but the new scrip system made it fairly easy to minimise the opportunity cost.
One of my early ideas for a bonus powerup in 868-BACK was called Local area network!, which I) protected a server from being hacked unless you'd hacked one of its neighbours the day before, and II) forced you to hack one of its neighbors the next day. I really liked having a "map-only" powerup, making a server more difficult to hack not because the levels and enemies were any harder but simply because it was inconvenient to get and out of. I really liked the spatial element this gave to the server map: these little sequences where you had to move step-by-step across it rather than just picking from it like a menu. There were many problems with this. Does nothing on the last day. You could get stuck and lose the game with no options if you weren't careful - and that tended to feel unfair rather than like you'd excitingly hacked yourself into a corner. Didn't interact well with the "reveal powerups by gathering data in adjacent servers" mechanic. So eventually it went away.
Thinking about limitations that could be applied to QUIT to make it slightly less dominant - what about an effect on the server map? I thought of folding in Isolated workstation!: if you quit a server you don't get to explore the ones next to it. Jake suggested folding in Local area network! instead: if you quit a server you have to go to one next to it tomorrow. This was really good! We kept Isolated as the map-only powerup (its device restriction was added much later at Leon's suggestion to prevent it doing less the more of the map is explored). When Linkcubes were added I let it go along those links as well. It seemed like the problem was solved.
Since the game's been released and a lot more people have been playing it, a few rare bugs showed up involving QUIT. This is going to happen - different people have different skills and approaches, so they'll try something in a different situation - or else just the dice get rolled a lot more times so an arrangement comes up that you never saw before. I'd added certain types of server that couldn't be accessed unless specific conditions were met - the megacorp x6s and the shops. In particular this restriction on the shops came very late in development (to stop new players from having a disappointing experience of going to a shop where they can't afford to buy anything). So a few people had been able to quit with only a shop in range but then weren't able to get into the shop! When I dug in to fix this I realised that QUIT was getting quite complicated. We'd already had a few players being confused about when they could or couldn't quit, and this was making it more confusing by adding situations where your ability to quit depended on the status of servers you haven't even explored yet. So rather than add all those complications I gutted it and made the whole thing much simpler: you can always quit, and tomorrow you can go wherever is nearest that you can get into. If you're surrounded by locked shops and corporate headquarters, instead of being sad and stuck you just get to go slightly further. It should play pretty similarly in most cases, but be clearer to understand, less prone to bugs, and maybe even occasionally exploitable in clever ways.
patch is up now!
Friday, 29 May 2026
868-BACK: the sponsors
After I crowdfunded 868-BACK, a couple of people got in touch to see if there was a way they could give a bit of extra financial support. We figured out that the right way to structure that was as a sponsorship. These are people whose work I admire and respect and I'm very happy to shine some light back at them.
Slice and Dice is a wonderful game that takes the combat system of a party-based RPG, infuses it with chaos by leaving the action choices up to a roll of the dice, and builds a whole magnificent structure around a series of these battles with escalating blessings and curses modifying the rules. It's author tann is rather reclusive, but seems like a very lovely person from the interactions we've had. The game has a lot in common with my games - tann has cited Cinco Paus as an inspiration - so I unreservedly recommend that anyone who likes my work check it out.
Puzzmo is a project with a lot of people involved and a lot going on, but a big part of it is the work of Zach Gage. I've known Zach for a long time, and he's had an influence on my work - in fact the core inspiration for Cinco Paus came from a conversation with him. He's a firm believer that the goals of creating interesting artistic games and reaching a broad audience don't need to be incompatible, and Puzzmo is a very serious attempt at bringing those together.
I'm very grateful for their contributions.
Slice and Dice is a wonderful game that takes the combat system of a party-based RPG, infuses it with chaos by leaving the action choices up to a roll of the dice, and builds a whole magnificent structure around a series of these battles with escalating blessings and curses modifying the rules. It's author tann is rather reclusive, but seems like a very lovely person from the interactions we've had. The game has a lot in common with my games - tann has cited Cinco Paus as an inspiration - so I unreservedly recommend that anyone who likes my work check it out.
Puzzmo is a project with a lot of people involved and a lot going on, but a big part of it is the work of Zach Gage. I've known Zach for a long time, and he's had an influence on my work - in fact the core inspiration for Cinco Paus came from a conversation with him. He's a firm believer that the goals of creating interesting artistic games and reaching a broad audience don't need to be incompatible, and Puzzmo is a very serious attempt at bringing those together.
I'm very grateful for their contributions.
Thursday, 28 May 2026
868-BACK: the crew
So first up, the game is out: get it on steam or itch.io.
I just wanted to talk a bit about who made the game! I'm going to go through in more-or-less chronological order of when people joined the project.
Obviously there's me. I started in mid-2024 and worked by myself for a few months before even showing it to anyone else, and I've done SO MUCH.
Jake and Leon were the first people I wanted to show it to. They had both playtested some of my games years ago, and Leon did some writing for 868-HACK (the "with that data you stole..." lines on the victory screen). For several months it was just us three playing - I'd expected to invite more testers in sooner, but they were already finding as much as I could keep up with. They've both contributed a ton of suggestions for all parts of the game - not just the rules and mechanics but writing and aesthetics - and the final design owes a ton to both of them.
Tara (YAKFOX) joined the project somewhere in late-2024. She then started a music production course so it was a while before she was available to actively produce music for the game, but she was part of it, and the discussions we had about the music helped define where the game was going. (And then the music turned out great!)
Then we did the crowdfunding! As well as contributing money, I offered a "name a server" reward and people contributed a variety of names - some cute, some funny, some on-theme, some really weird. This might seem like a little thing but as soon as those names were in there, the world felt more lived-in. Like magic! And a few of those names ended up inspiring strands of the design, folding back in to become very significant elements of the game.
Eventually I felt it really was time to expand the pool of testers a bit more, and Justin (manbearcar) posted an impressive Cinco Paus high score so I invited him in. Again I'd really expected to need more, but just one more person playing it was a valuable flood of information. (He's made a ton of cool games too and recently released Horsey Game.)
Then Finji came on board! Their whole QA and marketing teams contributed a lot. They've done a wonderful job of tuning into the game and making suggestions that will make it easier for people to get into it without breaking what it fundamentally is. They also recognised that I'd bitten off quite a lot with this game, and we set about figuring out what would be helpful to get it over the finish line, so it came about that a few other artists joined in towards the end.
AJ is one of my favourite artists, and his glitchy pixel scenes have been an inspiration for what I want to do in my own visual art. So when we talked about getting in someone else to do some graphics for the scenes that I was struggling with, he was at the top of my list. And he was up for it! He's done some fantastic art for the game - including a scene you will no doubt see quite often.
I asked Adam (from Finji) to also do one of the scenes - see if you can spot which is his. He also suggested adjustments to my font in a way that improved readability without losing the style I was going for, and he brought on Sven Ruthner and together they worked on the title logo, scaling up my font and adding glitchy detail.
Finally, we were missing sound effects. These usually show up quite late in my games, because I have to get into a quite different mindset from design and programming. But they hadn't shown up yet and we'd announced a release date, and I had my hands quite full with everything else, so Adam suggested Josie Brechner as someone to collaborate with on these. She came in and did a fantastic job, some of her sounds are so delightful in a way that you can tell she must have really had fun making them. (.row, wow!)
So that's the crew! It's my biggest game yet, and the one that's most a team effort. It's still very much "me" - I felt that my time working on the game by myself had established a strong voice for it, and when new people came on they were able to get into the flow of what was already happening and do great work that fit into it. And having other people supporting helped me to do my best. And now you all can play it!
I just wanted to talk a bit about who made the game! I'm going to go through in more-or-less chronological order of when people joined the project.
Obviously there's me. I started in mid-2024 and worked by myself for a few months before even showing it to anyone else, and I've done SO MUCH.
Jake and Leon were the first people I wanted to show it to. They had both playtested some of my games years ago, and Leon did some writing for 868-HACK (the "with that data you stole..." lines on the victory screen). For several months it was just us three playing - I'd expected to invite more testers in sooner, but they were already finding as much as I could keep up with. They've both contributed a ton of suggestions for all parts of the game - not just the rules and mechanics but writing and aesthetics - and the final design owes a ton to both of them.
Tara (YAKFOX) joined the project somewhere in late-2024. She then started a music production course so it was a while before she was available to actively produce music for the game, but she was part of it, and the discussions we had about the music helped define where the game was going. (And then the music turned out great!)
Then we did the crowdfunding! As well as contributing money, I offered a "name a server" reward and people contributed a variety of names - some cute, some funny, some on-theme, some really weird. This might seem like a little thing but as soon as those names were in there, the world felt more lived-in. Like magic! And a few of those names ended up inspiring strands of the design, folding back in to become very significant elements of the game.
Eventually I felt it really was time to expand the pool of testers a bit more, and Justin (manbearcar) posted an impressive Cinco Paus high score so I invited him in. Again I'd really expected to need more, but just one more person playing it was a valuable flood of information. (He's made a ton of cool games too and recently released Horsey Game.)
Then Finji came on board! Their whole QA and marketing teams contributed a lot. They've done a wonderful job of tuning into the game and making suggestions that will make it easier for people to get into it without breaking what it fundamentally is. They also recognised that I'd bitten off quite a lot with this game, and we set about figuring out what would be helpful to get it over the finish line, so it came about that a few other artists joined in towards the end.
AJ is one of my favourite artists, and his glitchy pixel scenes have been an inspiration for what I want to do in my own visual art. So when we talked about getting in someone else to do some graphics for the scenes that I was struggling with, he was at the top of my list. And he was up for it! He's done some fantastic art for the game - including a scene you will no doubt see quite often.
I asked Adam (from Finji) to also do one of the scenes - see if you can spot which is his. He also suggested adjustments to my font in a way that improved readability without losing the style I was going for, and he brought on Sven Ruthner and together they worked on the title logo, scaling up my font and adding glitchy detail.
Finally, we were missing sound effects. These usually show up quite late in my games, because I have to get into a quite different mindset from design and programming. But they hadn't shown up yet and we'd announced a release date, and I had my hands quite full with everything else, so Adam suggested Josie Brechner as someone to collaborate with on these. She came in and did a fantastic job, some of her sounds are so delightful in a way that you can tell she must have really had fun making them. (.row, wow!)
So that's the crew! It's my biggest game yet, and the one that's most a team effort. It's still very much "me" - I felt that my time working on the game by myself had established a strong voice for it, and when new people came on they were able to get into the flow of what was already happening and do great work that fit into it. And having other people supporting helped me to do my best. And now you all can play it!
Tuesday, 25 November 2025
Year Of Me
I find it pretty hard to explain when asked what my work is. What should I say?
I'll go simple and direct: "I make videogames" - but it turns out people have a huge variety of preconceptions about what that might mean. Which company do I work for? No. Have you made anything I might have heard of? No. That's so awesome, you get paid to play games? No, neither of those. Why are you such a terrible person, responsible for the brain-rotting drivel that's destroying children's lives? No. Couldn't you do something more natural? Yes and no. So you work in tech, you're rich then? No and no.
Clearly that word gives the wrong idea, I'll try: "I'm an artist". This isn't bad! People get the right overall idea; we all like art as a general concept; you don't expect me to pay for things. Until they dig a little bit further and want to know what kind of art? What medium? UHhh [frantically trying to avoid the v word] interactive digital somethingvi art, let's stick with art. Eventually they find out that it was games all along and are a little disgusted at my deception.
Often I go with "I work in games". I don't quite know what people take from it, but it's somehow vague enough to usually avoid these confusing discussions and we can move onto something more interesting (like the other person).
But okay, someone's found out I work in games: what kind of games? All the kinds. Any kind. Every game. Okay I didn't make every single game that exists, but it was enough of them that this isn't easy to answer. "I've worked in a variety of genres". Ugh. I have though! I'll try to gauge how literate the person asking might be - but even then, my main genre they literally named after me. What am I supposed to say?
"Oh like mobile games?" Yes. Some of my games run on mobile devices, that's not the most interesting thing about them but sure, that'll do. "That must be pretty.. ching ching! (*rubbing fingers together*)". THIS AGAIN.
Wait so if it doesn't make money, why are you doing it? Do you even have a job? (No.)
Once when I was interrogated by border police (not for the first or last time) they really wanted to know what I did and who I worked for. I gave as clear and straightforward answers as I could, and they kept asking again and again, obviously not believing me. Until one of them finally did a google search and shamefacedly told the other "let him go, everything he's said is true".
The Secret Lives of Games (formerly Eggplant, formerly the Spelunky Showlike) have started a year-long series talking about my work. So far the first introductory episode is up, and I think it's the best explanation so far of WHAT DOES MICHAEL EVEN DO. It's on the long side (two hours) but if you've ever wondered, here's an answer. I'm just going to link this next time someone asks me. Take that, border control.
I really appreciate that they're doing this - aside from it being personally about me, which is nice for sure - but from the perspective of taking games seriously as an artform. In any other medium, it's not unusual to have a show looking back across an artist's work; a Yuri Norstein retrospective or whatever; but even in games hardly anyone takes games seriously. This is something distinctly countercultural: the claim that play is not merely something a multi-million dollar industry can be built around, but something culturally important and worth talking about.
I'll go simple and direct: "I make videogames" - but it turns out people have a huge variety of preconceptions about what that might mean. Which company do I work for? No. Have you made anything I might have heard of? No. That's so awesome, you get paid to play games? No, neither of those. Why are you such a terrible person, responsible for the brain-rotting drivel that's destroying children's lives? No. Couldn't you do something more natural? Yes and no. So you work in tech, you're rich then? No and no.
Clearly that word gives the wrong idea, I'll try: "I'm an artist". This isn't bad! People get the right overall idea; we all like art as a general concept; you don't expect me to pay for things. Until they dig a little bit further and want to know what kind of art? What medium? UHhh [frantically trying to avoid the v word] interactive digital something
Often I go with "I work in games". I don't quite know what people take from it, but it's somehow vague enough to usually avoid these confusing discussions and we can move onto something more interesting (like the other person).
But okay, someone's found out I work in games: what kind of games? All the kinds. Any kind. Every game. Okay I didn't make every single game that exists, but it was enough of them that this isn't easy to answer. "I've worked in a variety of genres". Ugh. I have though! I'll try to gauge how literate the person asking might be - but even then, my main genre they literally named after me. What am I supposed to say?
"Oh like mobile games?" Yes. Some of my games run on mobile devices, that's not the most interesting thing about them but sure, that'll do. "That must be pretty.. ching ching! (*rubbing fingers together*)". THIS AGAIN.
Wait so if it doesn't make money, why are you doing it? Do you even have a job? (No.)
Once when I was interrogated by border police (not for the first or last time) they really wanted to know what I did and who I worked for. I gave as clear and straightforward answers as I could, and they kept asking again and again, obviously not believing me. Until one of them finally did a google search and shamefacedly told the other "let him go, everything he's said is true".
The Secret Lives of Games (formerly Eggplant, formerly the Spelunky Showlike) have started a year-long series talking about my work. So far the first introductory episode is up, and I think it's the best explanation so far of WHAT DOES MICHAEL EVEN DO. It's on the long side (two hours) but if you've ever wondered, here's an answer. I'm just going to link this next time someone asks me. Take that, border control.
I really appreciate that they're doing this - aside from it being personally about me, which is nice for sure - but from the perspective of taking games seriously as an artform. In any other medium, it's not unusual to have a show looking back across an artist's work; a Yuri Norstein retrospective or whatever; but even in games hardly anyone takes games seriously. This is something distinctly countercultural: the claim that play is not merely something a multi-million dollar industry can be built around, but something culturally important and worth talking about.
Thursday, 29 May 2025
868-BACK trailer: UNIFIED
Hey hey!
I am still busily working on 868-BACK. I'm very happy with how it's coming along.
It has grown! When I was crowdfunding it at the end of last year, I described it as being 'on par with the biggest games I've made before'. Now I would describe it as definitely my biggest game yet. Nobody ever expected a big 868-HACK. It still has that tight focus; it's big in a way that honours its smallness, I can't think of much like it.
I also said 'I'm aiming for a release mid-2025'. That would be around now, wouldn't it? Well, there is still a lot to do! I would like to very clearly update that to late-2025.
This is a good thing. I am giving the game the time it needs to be what it wants to be. It's become very clear to me how important it is to my work to be able to take that time when I need to. Some of my games I've made very quickly, some have gradually come together over a few years, but in both cases it's been a matter of allowing the organic process to grow to completion. I have to not rush things.
In this case, a couple of ideas arrived that really blossom the game into something extra strange and special - the kind of "blow your mind" recontextualisation that we all love - but the technicalities of making sure they work right with every other piece has added some time. There's still some uncertainty ahead. There's a small chance it ends up being "early-2026". I'm going to try to avoid that, since A) it's been way too long since I've released a game and those of you who've supported me through this time really deserve something, and B) we'll run out of money. But, if it ends up that's just the best thing for the game, I'll do it somehow. Still, there's a lot of 2025 left!
Meanwhile, we've made a trailer!
The folk from thinkygames.com asked if I could share a trailer, and I had a think. One the one hand, probably I shouldn't take on extra work - my plate is already so full. But on the other hand I am trying to do everything the best I can, to finish and promote this game above and beyond what I've done before, to get the marketing and money side right not just the making. Well, by the time I'd spent a while pondering those two hands then I had an idea for a trailer I wanted to make so I just went for it. It ended up fitting well because it gave a focus for working on audiovisual design for one of the corporations, which we needed to do anyway.
(p.s. they also had trailers for a bunch of other games that look neat, and a big discount on Steam ongoing.)
The trailer introduces UNIFIED MEGACORP, one of the three megacorporations in the game. What makes them "mega" is that they control more than one connected server, so hacking them is a multi-step process. Unified are - well I hope the video gives you a feel for them. We'll reveal the other two along the way. It's also a first taste of the game's music, which Tara is collaborating on.
I've also put up a Steam page. You can wishlist it if you want to!
As I said above, it's not clear at this point whether the budget we have will last until the game feels definitively done. I don't want a publisher messing it up, so I'd prefer not to go there without really good reasons. I'll make it work somehow. Maybe I take a few weeks off to make a smaller game to support development of the bigger one - just six months ago that would have been impossible but my health is getting better all the time and now I do have some side-project energy, which is a really good sign. We'll see what happens! But simply, I would really appreciate it if any of you do want to support my ongoing work. I would appreciate if you buy my other games (ios link, itch.io link) - I've made a lot of them and they are still good! I would appreciate it if you support my Patreon. I would appreciate it if you just want to throw large amounts of money at me (please contact me directly).
That said, THANK YOU SO MUCH TO EVERYONE WHO HAS SUPPORTED ME TO THIS POINT. I am thriving. I have gone from being absolutely smitten with covid in 2020 and not being able to work at all, to now doing my best work so far (and with better yet to come). It means so much to me that a lot of you really still appreciate all the work I've done before, and you've helped me through such a hard time and I am - still not at full strength, but definitely - BACK.
I am still busily working on 868-BACK. I'm very happy with how it's coming along.
It has grown! When I was crowdfunding it at the end of last year, I described it as being 'on par with the biggest games I've made before'. Now I would describe it as definitely my biggest game yet. Nobody ever expected a big 868-HACK. It still has that tight focus; it's big in a way that honours its smallness, I can't think of much like it.
I also said 'I'm aiming for a release mid-2025'. That would be around now, wouldn't it? Well, there is still a lot to do! I would like to very clearly update that to late-2025.
This is a good thing. I am giving the game the time it needs to be what it wants to be. It's become very clear to me how important it is to my work to be able to take that time when I need to. Some of my games I've made very quickly, some have gradually come together over a few years, but in both cases it's been a matter of allowing the organic process to grow to completion. I have to not rush things.
In this case, a couple of ideas arrived that really blossom the game into something extra strange and special - the kind of "blow your mind" recontextualisation that we all love - but the technicalities of making sure they work right with every other piece has added some time. There's still some uncertainty ahead. There's a small chance it ends up being "early-2026". I'm going to try to avoid that, since A) it's been way too long since I've released a game and those of you who've supported me through this time really deserve something, and B) we'll run out of money. But, if it ends up that's just the best thing for the game, I'll do it somehow. Still, there's a lot of 2025 left!
Meanwhile, we've made a trailer!
The folk from thinkygames.com asked if I could share a trailer, and I had a think. One the one hand, probably I shouldn't take on extra work - my plate is already so full. But on the other hand I am trying to do everything the best I can, to finish and promote this game above and beyond what I've done before, to get the marketing and money side right not just the making. Well, by the time I'd spent a while pondering those two hands then I had an idea for a trailer I wanted to make so I just went for it. It ended up fitting well because it gave a focus for working on audiovisual design for one of the corporations, which we needed to do anyway.
(p.s. they also had trailers for a bunch of other games that look neat, and a big discount on Steam ongoing.)
The trailer introduces UNIFIED MEGACORP, one of the three megacorporations in the game. What makes them "mega" is that they control more than one connected server, so hacking them is a multi-step process. Unified are - well I hope the video gives you a feel for them. We'll reveal the other two along the way. It's also a first taste of the game's music, which Tara is collaborating on.
I've also put up a Steam page. You can wishlist it if you want to!
As I said above, it's not clear at this point whether the budget we have will last until the game feels definitively done. I don't want a publisher messing it up, so I'd prefer not to go there without really good reasons. I'll make it work somehow. Maybe I take a few weeks off to make a smaller game to support development of the bigger one - just six months ago that would have been impossible but my health is getting better all the time and now I do have some side-project energy, which is a really good sign. We'll see what happens! But simply, I would really appreciate it if any of you do want to support my ongoing work. I would appreciate if you buy my other games (ios link, itch.io link) - I've made a lot of them and they are still good! I would appreciate it if you support my Patreon. I would appreciate it if you just want to throw large amounts of money at me (please contact me directly).
That said, THANK YOU SO MUCH TO EVERYONE WHO HAS SUPPORTED ME TO THIS POINT. I am thriving. I have gone from being absolutely smitten with covid in 2020 and not being able to work at all, to now doing my best work so far (and with better yet to come). It means so much to me that a lot of you really still appreciate all the work I've done before, and you've helped me through such a hard time and I am - still not at full strength, but definitely - BACK.
Thursday, 30 January 2025
making choices on server map - part 2
The server map is kind of a second game, where one move in the map (hacking a server) comprises an entire round of the core game. In my last post wrote about how I was trying to make the decision of "which server do I have next?" rich and interesting; while that's a big decision in relation to the core game it's a very zoomed-in perspective on the metagame. Today I'm thinking through the wider question of what the player is trying to achieve across multiple hacks.
My first thought was to simply reflect the core roguelike gameplay: each server is made up of sectors, the goal of each sector is "get to the exit", and the goal of the entire server is "get to the final exit". The goal on the map could be "get to the final server". There would be a lovely symmetry, "as above, so below". I spent a while prototyping this version.
A big problem I ran onto early on is that the whole map is way too much information — thirty-odd servers each with their own tools and defenses. I was never planning on making you choose between all of these at once, you'd be stepping through them one at a time, but it turns out to also be too much to look at and think about to plan a route through. That's okay, I just add "fog of war": you can only see where you've explored. This felt really good. You start with a very simple set of options, then gradually add a few at a time (ruling some out as you go) and by the time the screen is full of information you've already digested most of it. It gives a nice Matrix moment: if a friend sees you playing they'll be impressed by the impenetrable wall of symbols, but you "don't even see the code anymore".
Putting these two concepts together: you're trying to get to the exit but you need to explore to find it. Remember from the previous post that there's a limited number of rounds, so you're trying to get to the exit before you run out of time (and pick up as many points as you can along the way). This more-or-less worked, it's a game. But there ended up being a fairly optimal search pattern you could follow to have the maximum chance of finding the exit, and this tends to feel unsatisfactory no matter the outcome: if you find it that's unexciting because it's to be expected, and if you don't find it that's unfair because you did the best possible with the information you had. And if you're trying to get a high score, then that's determined by whether the map randomly lines up the highest scoring opportunities with the correct search pattern. If not, you'd have to keep restarting until it does (which some players are going to do to eke out an advantage no matter what but I try to avoid privileging too much).
I started experimenting with other goals. I tried having multiple options, whereby you could win the game by completing any one of them. This has several advantages over a single goal. It suggests different categories players can choose to compete in to extend the longevity of the game - completing a specific goal, or getting bonus endings by completing more than one simultaneously. As a designer I can try to balance the goals such that when you're failing one of them you're likely to be close to succeeding at another - e.g. if you've searched the map and not found the exit then at least you might know where all the megacorps' territories are, or if you've completely failed at exploring then you've likely had many opportunities to [redacted] the [redacted].
Even with these balancing factors I kept running into the situation where one mistake or unlucky roll can prevent you from achieve your goals no matter how cleverly you've played up to that point. Weirdly this felt both really bad and really good. These situations made great exciting moments that fit the mood of the game, they weren't a rough edge I wanted to smooth off. But if it went badly, then the gameplay was telling you to quit and restart, which at that point stopped fitting the mood. At 868-HACK's scale it flowed really well to crash and restart, and I would have liked it to work similarly, but with the game being a bit bigger and having a few different elements in play it just.. wasn't.
So I stepped back to think about what makes sense in the story of the game. You've returned to the life of crime you left behind, risking everything on one last hack to save everything you value the most.. you took your best chance.. it didn't work out. You got so close but you realised you couldn't make it. What do you do now? You could try anyway, going out in glory like some kind of hero. But no, you want to make them pay. You want to do as much damage as you can on your way down.
Game design is about making the thing that's coolest to do line up with the strategically optimal move. (Or most exciting, narratively appropriate, etc., you get it.) I had been thinking the goals were absolute: this is what you must do to win the game. I had thought that was narratively appropriate: this is what the hacker values more than anything, enough to bring them back. But it's more interesting to be dynamically evaluating - if you've had a bad run and now there's only one option that gives a 1/16 chance of making it.. if the goals are absolute then there's no choice, you just take that chance.. but maybe you take the option that has no chance BUT hacks them up good / gets a cool item / etc.
Brief historical diversion: when I made 86856527 (which became 868-HACK), I'd been playing a lot of roguelikes (Rogue, ADOM, Nethack, Crawl..) and I thought high scores are a waste of time, a distraction from what's cool about games: exploring a world and having adventures. I'd also been playing a lot of board and card games (Race for the Galaxy, Dominion, euros) and I thought scores are a great mechanism, a clever abstraction that can enable what's cool about games: deep subtle competition. Basically I believed that scores were a good thing for boardgames but somehow a bad thing for videogames so I was resistant to putting them in mine. It's probably fair to say that the videogames I was playing just didn't have very good scoring (despite their strengths in other areas). Fortunately I got through my resistance, and with 868-HACK found the maybe-novel idea of putting something like a board-game-style scoring mechanism into a roguelike.
(These days people even call Balatro a roguelike. Not my fault ok.)
Back to the topic: I have a game with a scoring system, and narrative goals. I've been resisting assigning scores to the goals, because they're the thing that you really value, more than mere score! But maybe I have to learn the same lesson again twelve years later, and put some numbers on them. That's what makes the formal program-mechanical perspective of the game match up to the cool story in those 1/16 risk situations — the character is thinking about whether their chance of success is worth it versus just smashing things, the computer program is evaluating whether the number is bigger than the other number, the player is thinking about whether their chance of success is worth it versus just smashing things.
My first thought was to simply reflect the core roguelike gameplay: each server is made up of sectors, the goal of each sector is "get to the exit", and the goal of the entire server is "get to the final exit". The goal on the map could be "get to the final server". There would be a lovely symmetry, "as above, so below". I spent a while prototyping this version.
A big problem I ran onto early on is that the whole map is way too much information — thirty-odd servers each with their own tools and defenses. I was never planning on making you choose between all of these at once, you'd be stepping through them one at a time, but it turns out to also be too much to look at and think about to plan a route through. That's okay, I just add "fog of war": you can only see where you've explored. This felt really good. You start with a very simple set of options, then gradually add a few at a time (ruling some out as you go) and by the time the screen is full of information you've already digested most of it. It gives a nice Matrix moment: if a friend sees you playing they'll be impressed by the impenetrable wall of symbols, but you "don't even see the code anymore".
Putting these two concepts together: you're trying to get to the exit but you need to explore to find it. Remember from the previous post that there's a limited number of rounds, so you're trying to get to the exit before you run out of time (and pick up as many points as you can along the way). This more-or-less worked, it's a game. But there ended up being a fairly optimal search pattern you could follow to have the maximum chance of finding the exit, and this tends to feel unsatisfactory no matter the outcome: if you find it that's unexciting because it's to be expected, and if you don't find it that's unfair because you did the best possible with the information you had. And if you're trying to get a high score, then that's determined by whether the map randomly lines up the highest scoring opportunities with the correct search pattern. If not, you'd have to keep restarting until it does (which some players are going to do to eke out an advantage no matter what but I try to avoid privileging too much).
I started experimenting with other goals. I tried having multiple options, whereby you could win the game by completing any one of them. This has several advantages over a single goal. It suggests different categories players can choose to compete in to extend the longevity of the game - completing a specific goal, or getting bonus endings by completing more than one simultaneously. As a designer I can try to balance the goals such that when you're failing one of them you're likely to be close to succeeding at another - e.g. if you've searched the map and not found the exit then at least you might know where all the megacorps' territories are, or if you've completely failed at exploring then you've likely had many opportunities to [redacted] the [redacted].
Even with these balancing factors I kept running into the situation where one mistake or unlucky roll can prevent you from achieve your goals no matter how cleverly you've played up to that point. Weirdly this felt both really bad and really good. These situations made great exciting moments that fit the mood of the game, they weren't a rough edge I wanted to smooth off. But if it went badly, then the gameplay was telling you to quit and restart, which at that point stopped fitting the mood. At 868-HACK's scale it flowed really well to crash and restart, and I would have liked it to work similarly, but with the game being a bit bigger and having a few different elements in play it just.. wasn't.
So I stepped back to think about what makes sense in the story of the game. You've returned to the life of crime you left behind, risking everything on one last hack to save everything you value the most.. you took your best chance.. it didn't work out. You got so close but you realised you couldn't make it. What do you do now? You could try anyway, going out in glory like some kind of hero. But no, you want to make them pay. You want to do as much damage as you can on your way down.
Game design is about making the thing that's coolest to do line up with the strategically optimal move. (Or most exciting, narratively appropriate, etc., you get it.) I had been thinking the goals were absolute: this is what you must do to win the game. I had thought that was narratively appropriate: this is what the hacker values more than anything, enough to bring them back. But it's more interesting to be dynamically evaluating - if you've had a bad run and now there's only one option that gives a 1/16 chance of making it.. if the goals are absolute then there's no choice, you just take that chance.. but maybe you take the option that has no chance BUT hacks them up good / gets a cool item / etc.
Brief historical diversion: when I made 86856527 (which became 868-HACK), I'd been playing a lot of roguelikes (Rogue, ADOM, Nethack, Crawl..) and I thought high scores are a waste of time, a distraction from what's cool about games: exploring a world and having adventures. I'd also been playing a lot of board and card games (Race for the Galaxy, Dominion, euros) and I thought scores are a great mechanism, a clever abstraction that can enable what's cool about games: deep subtle competition. Basically I believed that scores were a good thing for boardgames but somehow a bad thing for videogames so I was resistant to putting them in mine. It's probably fair to say that the videogames I was playing just didn't have very good scoring (despite their strengths in other areas). Fortunately I got through my resistance, and with 868-HACK found the maybe-novel idea of putting something like a board-game-style scoring mechanism into a roguelike.
(These days people even call Balatro a roguelike. Not my fault ok.)
Back to the topic: I have a game with a scoring system, and narrative goals. I've been resisting assigning scores to the goals, because they're the thing that you really value, more than mere score! But maybe I have to learn the same lesson again twelve years later, and put some numbers on them. That's what makes the formal program-mechanical perspective of the game match up to the cool story in those 1/16 risk situations — the character is thinking about whether their chance of success is worth it versus just smashing things, the computer program is evaluating whether the number is bigger than the other number, the player is thinking about whether their chance of success is worth it versus just smashing things.
Thursday, 23 January 2025
making choices on server map - part 1
Hey, not sure I'm managing to fit in a video this month so you get a design blog instead!
(Which is interesting, have I reached a point in recovery where this is less effort again?)
Okay, game structure. I discussed the basic idea of 868-BACK's server map in a previous post (on Patreon), to summarise:
Now, the idea of a score multiplier is sound, but still: why would you choose a harder server? As far as I've described, the optimal play for a high score might still be to always pick the easiest server, to minimise your chance of losing and get more points in the long run. HACK had this lovely tension between survival and score - your score is "points per round" times "number of rounds" so you can do better by increasing either of those values, and the ideal maximum is some incalculable midpoint between safety and foolhardiness. But making that work well relied on the danger increasing fast enough that you can't take "number of rounds" to infinity. If in BACK I'm putting this danger curve in the player's control, where does the pressure come from?
So: I've limited the number of rounds! This loses that beautiful multiplication by the number of rounds - but I've decided to be very comfortable with losing specific elements: the sequel is a new game finding its own way, and the original isn't going away. With a limited number of rounds, you get a high score by maximising your per-round score, so there's an incentive to attempt difficult servers.
We also don't want the optimal strategy to always be "pick the server with the highest mult". I'm not too worried about that because it's a multiplier: you still need to get the points to multiply. Probably there will be a sweet spot in the middle, and probably finding it will be tricky and depend on all the details. (And the details are interesting! I'm discussing this here at a very abstract level by just looking at difficulty as number of powerups, but it's really about getting to know the specific powerups and thinking about the complex ways they can interact.)
Next point: what should the multipliers be? My first thought was multiplier = number of powerups. (Yes the difficulty modifiers are still called "bonus powerups", deal.) But I probably still want some servers with no powerups because the game is complex enough to get started with anyway, so to not give zero for those my second thought was multiplier = number of powerups + 1. Generally start with the simplest idea: if it works out then it'll also be easier on players, and if it doesn't well you haven't spent too much time going in the wrong direction.
Obviously these numbers are "wrong": e.g. a server with one powerup isn't twice as hard as one with none, it's maybe 1.25x, so giving it a 2x multiplier isn't accurately giving a reward commensurate with the difficulty. But it doesn't have to be! I don't really mind if the gradient here is quite steep giving players strong encouragement to play with powerups: that's where the game gets really interesting, and it's more important for a scoring system to encourage doing interesting things than to measure of how well you played.
As I mentioned above, the scoring isn't the only reward for hacking a server: we're also collecting devices. Intuitively, the more powerful devices would be accessed through the more well-defended servers. But wait: if we keep the dead simple rule of "+1 powerup = +1 mult", those servers are already offering the best reward! Should I put the best devices on easier servers so there will be a choice of better scoring vs. better abilities? Or should I make the rule more complicated, e.g. "+1 powerup = +1 mult OR +1 device tier"? In the end what we've found playing it is that each additional powerup tends to increase the danger level superlinearly, as you increase the risk of nasty interactions between the different powerups. So a mere linear increase in multiplier doesn't cut it by itself, and it works out perfectly to give something like "+1 powerup = +1 mult AND +1 device tier".
(Okay, this is really long, I had two more main points to make but I'm tired and it's gotten long. So my conclusion is: writing is still more tiring for me than video, but this was too big a topic to get through in one go no matter what the medium and that is probably why I wasn't getting around to doing the video.)
(Which is interesting, have I reached a point in recovery where this is less effort again?)
Okay, game structure. I discussed the basic idea of 868-BACK's server map in a previous post (on Patreon), to summarise:
- In 868-HACK after you hack a server, there's another random one after it, with difficulty increasing until you lose.
- For 868-BACK I've introduced a choice, selecting servers on a grid.
- Why would you ever choose a harder server? Because their data is more valuable (because there's a score multiplier).
- Servers also house devices, letting you gain additional powers as you progress in the game. (Unlike HACK where the only progression is increasing difficulty.)
Now, the idea of a score multiplier is sound, but still: why would you choose a harder server? As far as I've described, the optimal play for a high score might still be to always pick the easiest server, to minimise your chance of losing and get more points in the long run. HACK had this lovely tension between survival and score - your score is "points per round" times "number of rounds" so you can do better by increasing either of those values, and the ideal maximum is some incalculable midpoint between safety and foolhardiness. But making that work well relied on the danger increasing fast enough that you can't take "number of rounds" to infinity. If in BACK I'm putting this danger curve in the player's control, where does the pressure come from?
So: I've limited the number of rounds! This loses that beautiful multiplication by the number of rounds - but I've decided to be very comfortable with losing specific elements: the sequel is a new game finding its own way, and the original isn't going away. With a limited number of rounds, you get a high score by maximising your per-round score, so there's an incentive to attempt difficult servers.
We also don't want the optimal strategy to always be "pick the server with the highest mult". I'm not too worried about that because it's a multiplier: you still need to get the points to multiply. Probably there will be a sweet spot in the middle, and probably finding it will be tricky and depend on all the details. (And the details are interesting! I'm discussing this here at a very abstract level by just looking at difficulty as number of powerups, but it's really about getting to know the specific powerups and thinking about the complex ways they can interact.)
Next point: what should the multipliers be? My first thought was multiplier = number of powerups. (Yes the difficulty modifiers are still called "bonus powerups", deal.) But I probably still want some servers with no powerups because the game is complex enough to get started with anyway, so to not give zero for those my second thought was multiplier = number of powerups + 1. Generally start with the simplest idea: if it works out then it'll also be easier on players, and if it doesn't well you haven't spent too much time going in the wrong direction.
Obviously these numbers are "wrong": e.g. a server with one powerup isn't twice as hard as one with none, it's maybe 1.25x, so giving it a 2x multiplier isn't accurately giving a reward commensurate with the difficulty. But it doesn't have to be! I don't really mind if the gradient here is quite steep giving players strong encouragement to play with powerups: that's where the game gets really interesting, and it's more important for a scoring system to encourage doing interesting things than to measure of how well you played.
As I mentioned above, the scoring isn't the only reward for hacking a server: we're also collecting devices. Intuitively, the more powerful devices would be accessed through the more well-defended servers. But wait: if we keep the dead simple rule of "+1 powerup = +1 mult", those servers are already offering the best reward! Should I put the best devices on easier servers so there will be a choice of better scoring vs. better abilities? Or should I make the rule more complicated, e.g. "+1 powerup = +1 mult OR +1 device tier"? In the end what we've found playing it is that each additional powerup tends to increase the danger level superlinearly, as you increase the risk of nasty interactions between the different powerups. So a mere linear increase in multiplier doesn't cut it by itself, and it works out perfectly to give something like "+1 powerup = +1 mult AND +1 device tier".
(Okay, this is really long, I had two more main points to make but I'm tired and it's gotten long. So my conclusion is: writing is still more tiring for me than video, but this was too big a topic to get through in one go no matter what the medium and that is probably why I wasn't getting around to doing the video.)
Sunday, 8 December 2024
archive - patreon "about"
I've updated my "about" page on Patreon to reflect my current situation. I just wanted to keep a record of what I wrote at the time (July 2022) so I've copied it here:
Hi, I'm Michael and I make videogames.
I used to make really a lot of games. I did jams and made small games really quickly, and I spent a long time making bigger games. You can find my work on smestorp.com; there are several available for free and some bigger ones for sale. There's also a discord where people talk about my games - I don't run it, some lovely people set it up. There's even been a jam where people made games inspired by my games (this writeup about it is really nice).
In 2020, like a lot of people, I got very sick and couldn't work much for a long time. It's bad. Making a living from my work has always been precarious, but it had felt like I was getting there and I had been confident of making something bigger again soon, and this illness has completely disrupted that. Since then I've done some small updates on my previous games, made a few small prototypes, but I'm not anywhere near releasing something new.
My health has improved since then. I'm not back to where I was, I still experience fatigue, but the shadow has passed and I'm getting better. I have more energy and more ability to concentrate, and I'm itching to use that to MAKE STUFF again.
I have two children - one three years old and another being born soon. It's chaos. I'm definitely not going to be on track to release anything with a newborn around so here I'm asking for support to get through. I've been learning how to manage myself to be able to do creative work with less focused time and less energy, but simply having money would do more to help free me up to make things.
I've started making videos to talk about my work, games, and other things that interest me. The first is linked above. It's rambling but honest. I'm planning to do these on a regular schedule. This will be my main public output for now. When I have a game to preview I'll make it available to subscribers; that will take time.
There's also a lot of my games that need attention to keep them working on new operating systems, or have rare bugs that would be nice to have fixed, or it would be nice to release on another platform so more people can play them. I've been very dedicated to supporting my games after release but I've fallen behind on that. This is work that doesn't pay very well because mostly it's for people who've already paid! Supporting me here will also help to do this. But my main focus with my limited time and energy will be to make something new.
Thanks to anyone who wants to give anything, and equally much thanks to anyone who takes time to read, listen, to play my games! 💚
Thursday, 28 November 2024
CROW FUN
I'm responding to this thread (bluesky link, also twitter link) by Jake Eakle / personman:
(Yeah read the whole thread it's good.)
So on one level like it even seems absurd to say the game teaches ethics, on the surface there's not much that looks like that! It's not telling a story with characters and morals and quotes. You could say that the ideas that Jake's talking about aren't in the game at all, and entirely in his head - but I believe him. It's meaningfully something he got out of it, that emerged from the Jake+HACK system as he spent time with it, not just thoughts he would have had on his own without the game as an - inspiration? object of meditation? friend?
Man, this what making art is all about!
I don't know how much of these ideas I "put in there". I definitely didn't make the game as an allegory to communicate a specific message. But I tried thoughtfully to make good art.
It's this alchemy that happens when thoughtful, heartfelt work comes together with an earnest audience (cocreator?) and it unwinds in them and something new comes out. Different people will get different things out, because it's the interaction between.. some people might not get anything - or might not like what they get - but what I mean by a thing being "art" is essentially this quality of revealing new depths through engaging with it. (Does "better" art mean art that can alchemise with more different souls? Is that a thing?)
Ok that's that thought! One of the really nice things about doing this crowdfunding is seeing lots of different people saying stuff about what my work has meant to them! Thank you everyone!
these ideas got /inside me/, man!! i don't know exactly how to explain it but it really feels like engaging with this game taught me The Truth.
like, you gotta let things be how they are. sometimes that means stepping back and letting things settle into their natural shapes. sometimes it means stepping UP and putting in the hard work to get them where they're going. both are good! both are true! do you see??
and you gotta meet people where they're at. with complete respect and without hiding the truth from them! without sectioning them off into a little fuckin zone! but still you must PROVIDE.
this game has deeply important ethics lessons for you, if you listen.
(Yeah read the whole thread it's good.)
So on one level like it even seems absurd to say the game teaches ethics, on the surface there's not much that looks like that! It's not telling a story with characters and morals and quotes. You could say that the ideas that Jake's talking about aren't in the game at all, and entirely in his head - but I believe him. It's meaningfully something he got out of it, that emerged from the Jake+HACK system as he spent time with it, not just thoughts he would have had on his own without the game as an - inspiration? object of meditation? friend?
Man, this what making art is all about!
I don't know how much of these ideas I "put in there". I definitely didn't make the game as an allegory to communicate a specific message. But I tried thoughtfully to make good art.
It's this alchemy that happens when thoughtful, heartfelt work comes together with an earnest audience (cocreator?) and it unwinds in them and something new comes out. Different people will get different things out, because it's the interaction between.. some people might not get anything - or might not like what they get - but what I mean by a thing being "art" is essentially this quality of revealing new depths through engaging with it. (Does "better" art mean art that can alchemise with more different souls? Is that a thing?)
Ok that's that thought! One of the really nice things about doing this crowdfunding is seeing lots of different people saying stuff about what my work has meant to them! Thank you everyone!
Thursday, 21 November 2024
crowfunding: 868-BACK
Hey! It's been a while since I've written here. I have, though, been fairly consistent about doing a monthly post on Patreon with videos (which are also mostly on youtube). It's been a good process for developing my voice, as always just consistently doing a thing you get better at it and now I'm a more confident speaker! I know video isn't the most efficient medium for everyone - I myself would still much prefer to read text than watch a video, and e.g. when I search for the answer to a problem and all the answers are in the form of video tutorials I'm pretty upset. And my videos are definitely often longer than they would need to be to communicate the information because I'm taking time to think, rambling a bit, and then not editing. But the vibe is good!
Anyway, I'll skip ahead to the present (my last video covers the gap pretty well if you want to check that out) and: I am announcing my next game!
It's called 868-BACK and it's.. well you can guess what it is. What? Michael's making a sequel? I really thought for a long time that was something I would never do, like that sequels are kind of crass. Like - beneath me, I guess? I'd look at these monolithic franchises and just be so bored seeing the same thing being made over and over again. But I'm *_*-CreAtive*^-^, I wouldn't do that! Hah.
Creative work has something in common with therapy, maybe it's a kind of therapy. If you want to keep making new things and pushing boundaries, you have to really look inside yourself and witness what's there. It takes personal growth. Or it gives personal growth maybe? It's all mixed in together, it's just part of being a person. You look at the things that you're cringing away from, the triggers you avoid, and at some point you just have to gird up and go after them.
And it feels sometimes ridiculous when I say things like this because I'm very aware that the things I make don't look "deep" and "serious" because they're full of wizards and robots. Which is just another knot to push past.
Last year I announced I was making a sequel to Cinco Paus! I wasn't very far along with it, and I was trying to figure out what I really wanted to do with it and how I could afford that.. anyway the point is, I was able to convince myself to do a (ugh) seeequel because the original game never really reached an audience, the idea was really to make a version that could (and I'd get to add fancy cool new stuff too, which would be fun to make, but that wasn't why I was doing it). Well, that hasn't gone anywhere yet (see that video I linked earlier for a fuller story but, don't worry it's all good, plans change with the winds but we go places).
Anyway, this year I was reorienting, trying to figure out how to bring in some money, asking myself what I really wanted to make yet. And, a mime wrote to me asking, for the Nth time, if I could add a portrait mode to 868-HACK. Now, 868-HACK started as a jam game made in a week, and then just sort of accreted from there with no good software engineering design at all. It's embarrassing, but to rework it for a portrait display I'd have to go through and change lots of hard-coded numbers because the gameplay code constantly refers to specific screen coordinates. (Okay the thing is, what matters is what gets the job done. I had tried several times to make videogames doing everything "properly" and those projects never got off the ground. I've seen so many other people's projects also go nowhere because they try to do it "right" too. I found an approach that was quick and dirty and let me get out the games I was yearning to make, and it worked(ish). Now I've done a few I'm much better at finding the middle ground between getting it done and making it extensible, but the only way I got that was the real experience of doing it wrong - my CS degree taught me lots of "right" ways but never met them with the reality of messy explorative creative expression.) So I always say no! No portrait mode for you! But it got me thinking, I'd been working in Godot engine, and ported Zaga-33 (a smaller simpler game) to it so I could release it on Android.. how much work would it be to port 868-HACK, maybe a portrait mode and a new platform release would be worth something together?
(Yes he's actually a mime, and he's bloody good too, check this out.)
At some point in there I got out my notebook of "things to try if I ever come back to 868-HACK". There was some damn good stuff in there! What had I been sitting on this for? A bunch of new ideas started flowing too. Before I knew it, I had several more notebook pages tentatively titled "868-HACK sequel??? 869hack?".
Well. Turns out sequels are totally fine! I got past that discomfort with the idea of a Cinco Paus sequel (which is still on the cards!) but that's opened up a whole new vista. It had been really important to me to be being original and constantly doing new work, and all my so-called "broughlikes" are determinedly avoiding each other. Seriously, 868-HACK / Imbroglio / Cinco Paus are about as far apart as games can possibly be while being in the same niche subgenre and interested in all the same things. Sometimes I'd see comments about how my games are all kinda the same and I'd really bristle! No! They are definitely different! (Even ignoring Helix etc. in totally different genres, but people do.) And I'm proud of how different they are, I'm not going to turn around and say that's not a good thing. That drive for difference really pushed me to discover some great ideas. Here's where the "therapy" comes in: sometimes we discover that we have a belief that's limiting us from doing what is there for us to do, and we feel like we're blocked because we're not letting ourselves just do the thing that we could do, that we want to do, and would be good for us to do. But - those limitations we put on ourselves aren't intrinsically bad things! To get past them, we have to recognise that they were something that served us at the time, but their time is past and now we can move past them. Step by step, I'm past the idea that I should avoid things that are too close to what I've done before, and I've allowed myself to consider the (to other people bleedingly obvious) idea of making a sequel to my most successful work.
And a vista opens up. I had been treating everything I'd made before as an obstacle, and so the possibilities of what I could make were gradually closing smaller and smaller every step. But I own everything I've made, I can do whatever the heck I want with it, it's all just resources. I watch my daughter painstakingly drawing a perfect picture one day, and the next day she cuts it up with scissors to stick pieces on something else. Yesterday's meal is today's ingredients.
I'll be posting more details about the design direction and where it's at soon! But, mostly being busy just working on it.
Also (importantly) I have run out of money, so I am inviting crowdfunding support so I can finish the game: 868-BACK on backerkit. Please share, support, etc. I hope you're excited about seeing what I do with the freedom to take the original and twist it into wild new shapes, and I hope for some of you that excitement translates into a willingness to donate up-front. Thanks!
Anyway, I'll skip ahead to the present (my last video covers the gap pretty well if you want to check that out) and: I am announcing my next game!
It's called 868-BACK and it's.. well you can guess what it is. What? Michael's making a sequel? I really thought for a long time that was something I would never do, like that sequels are kind of crass. Like - beneath me, I guess? I'd look at these monolithic franchises and just be so bored seeing the same thing being made over and over again. But I'm *_*-CreAtive*^-^, I wouldn't do that! Hah.
Creative work has something in common with therapy, maybe it's a kind of therapy. If you want to keep making new things and pushing boundaries, you have to really look inside yourself and witness what's there. It takes personal growth. Or it gives personal growth maybe? It's all mixed in together, it's just part of being a person. You look at the things that you're cringing away from, the triggers you avoid, and at some point you just have to gird up and go after them.
And it feels sometimes ridiculous when I say things like this because I'm very aware that the things I make don't look "deep" and "serious" because they're full of wizards and robots. Which is just another knot to push past.
Last year I announced I was making a sequel to Cinco Paus! I wasn't very far along with it, and I was trying to figure out what I really wanted to do with it and how I could afford that.. anyway the point is, I was able to convince myself to do a (ugh) seeequel because the original game never really reached an audience, the idea was really to make a version that could (and I'd get to add fancy cool new stuff too, which would be fun to make, but that wasn't why I was doing it). Well, that hasn't gone anywhere yet (see that video I linked earlier for a fuller story but, don't worry it's all good, plans change with the winds but we go places).
Anyway, this year I was reorienting, trying to figure out how to bring in some money, asking myself what I really wanted to make yet. And, a mime wrote to me asking, for the Nth time, if I could add a portrait mode to 868-HACK. Now, 868-HACK started as a jam game made in a week, and then just sort of accreted from there with no good software engineering design at all. It's embarrassing, but to rework it for a portrait display I'd have to go through and change lots of hard-coded numbers because the gameplay code constantly refers to specific screen coordinates. (Okay the thing is, what matters is what gets the job done. I had tried several times to make videogames doing everything "properly" and those projects never got off the ground. I've seen so many other people's projects also go nowhere because they try to do it "right" too. I found an approach that was quick and dirty and let me get out the games I was yearning to make, and it worked(ish). Now I've done a few I'm much better at finding the middle ground between getting it done and making it extensible, but the only way I got that was the real experience of doing it wrong - my CS degree taught me lots of "right" ways but never met them with the reality of messy explorative creative expression.) So I always say no! No portrait mode for you! But it got me thinking, I'd been working in Godot engine, and ported Zaga-33 (a smaller simpler game) to it so I could release it on Android.. how much work would it be to port 868-HACK, maybe a portrait mode and a new platform release would be worth something together?
(Yes he's actually a mime, and he's bloody good too, check this out.)
At some point in there I got out my notebook of "things to try if I ever come back to 868-HACK". There was some damn good stuff in there! What had I been sitting on this for? A bunch of new ideas started flowing too. Before I knew it, I had several more notebook pages tentatively titled "868-HACK sequel??? 869hack?".
Well. Turns out sequels are totally fine! I got past that discomfort with the idea of a Cinco Paus sequel (which is still on the cards!) but that's opened up a whole new vista. It had been really important to me to be being original and constantly doing new work, and all my so-called "broughlikes" are determinedly avoiding each other. Seriously, 868-HACK / Imbroglio / Cinco Paus are about as far apart as games can possibly be while being in the same niche subgenre and interested in all the same things. Sometimes I'd see comments about how my games are all kinda the same and I'd really bristle! No! They are definitely different! (Even ignoring Helix etc. in totally different genres, but people do.) And I'm proud of how different they are, I'm not going to turn around and say that's not a good thing. That drive for difference really pushed me to discover some great ideas. Here's where the "therapy" comes in: sometimes we discover that we have a belief that's limiting us from doing what is there for us to do, and we feel like we're blocked because we're not letting ourselves just do the thing that we could do, that we want to do, and would be good for us to do. But - those limitations we put on ourselves aren't intrinsically bad things! To get past them, we have to recognise that they were something that served us at the time, but their time is past and now we can move past them. Step by step, I'm past the idea that I should avoid things that are too close to what I've done before, and I've allowed myself to consider the (to other people bleedingly obvious) idea of making a sequel to my most successful work.
And a vista opens up. I had been treating everything I'd made before as an obstacle, and so the possibilities of what I could make were gradually closing smaller and smaller every step. But I own everything I've made, I can do whatever the heck I want with it, it's all just resources. I watch my daughter painstakingly drawing a perfect picture one day, and the next day she cuts it up with scissors to stick pieces on something else. Yesterday's meal is today's ingredients.
I'll be posting more details about the design direction and where it's at soon! But, mostly being busy just working on it.
Also (importantly) I have run out of money, so I am inviting crowdfunding support so I can finish the game: 868-BACK on backerkit. Please share, support, etc. I hope you're excited about seeing what I do with the freedom to take the original and twist it into wild new shapes, and I hope for some of you that excitement translates into a willingness to donate up-front. Thanks!
Saturday, 13 May 2023
Zaga-33 reborn
(This is the same as I just posted on Patreon but I'll put it here too.)
This took way longer than I expected!
In early March I decided to just spend a week rewriting an old game in Godot to help learn the engine while at the same time making it work on iOS again since I hadn't kept up with updates, and finally releasing on Android. Of course that week I got a bad case of covid. I still got the game largely working that week, but then needed a lot of recovery. I'm feeling great now though: not gonna have any bad long-term effects because I really did take the rest I needed at the time.
And then yeah just the details of getting it working on everything dragged on. It's not what I'm best at. There's still issues with the "google play store" - they cancelled me because I didn't update Glitch Tank often enough and now won't verify me because I live in a different country. Hopefully that gets sorted eventually, but thankfully you at least can distribute software on Android without official approval, so I've released it already on itch.io.
So! Here it is on android platform, eleven years late. And here it is back on iOS, four years after being taken down for not being updated sufficiently frequently.
Incidentally I did add a new mode! I thought about making it secret but that doesn't really make sense after such time, so all you have to do is complete the game once and then tap the moon.
itch.io link for android, windows, macos
appstore link for ios
This took way longer than I expected!
In early March I decided to just spend a week rewriting an old game in Godot to help learn the engine while at the same time making it work on iOS again since I hadn't kept up with updates, and finally releasing on Android. Of course that week I got a bad case of covid. I still got the game largely working that week, but then needed a lot of recovery. I'm feeling great now though: not gonna have any bad long-term effects because I really did take the rest I needed at the time.
And then yeah just the details of getting it working on everything dragged on. It's not what I'm best at. There's still issues with the "google play store" - they cancelled me because I didn't update Glitch Tank often enough and now won't verify me because I live in a different country. Hopefully that gets sorted eventually, but thankfully you at least can distribute software on Android without official approval, so I've released it already on itch.io.
So! Here it is on android platform, eleven years late. And here it is back on iOS, four years after being taken down for not being updated sufficiently frequently.
Incidentally I did add a new mode! I thought about making it secret but that doesn't really make sense after such time, so all you have to do is complete the game once and then tap the moon.
itch.io link for android, windows, macos
appstore link for ios
Monday, 12 September 2022
patreon / videos
I started this blog 13 years ago (not quite to the day) with an exercise of writing a post about each power in the game I was working on at the time. I got about half-way through the exercise and it served its purpose of opening the channel for me, getting me habituated to writing here. I've written a bunch of different things here: little diary entries, reviews of games I like, game design theory, assorted nonsense don't even know what. Most consistently I've posted when I release games, usually with some analysis of the development process.
There's a part of me here, a voice I'm comfortable speaking in at certain times about certain things. For a few years there I was coming to that voice quite often, this was a fruitful channel for the ideas I was thinking through at the time. Other ideas haven't fit as much. Maybe because I assume a certain audience; I restrict myself based on what I expect people who might read this to be interested in. Maybe because I developed the habit of writing here at a certain time when I had particular interests. Writing right now feels a little like channeling my past self rather than being the same person currently I am day to day.
Similarly my twitter was somewhere I posted a lot for a while, dropped off for a bunch of reasons, but still sometimes I have a thought that feels like a tweet to me so maybe I post it. When I look at what I've posted there recently I see "feels like a tweet" means a limited style and set of topics. I'm filtering through the lens of who I was 8-10 years ago when that was more part of my life. Not intentionally it just happens. Cognitive archaeology. We're built of accumulated layers of self and the older ones are still there but less active and less important to where we are now. I wasn't filtering myself then, and perhaps if I'd consistently kept posting there unrestrictedly it would be full of thoughts about massage, foraging, homebrew, childbirth. Topics that until one sentence ago you had no idea I'd taken an interest in.
So how do I communicate now? My voice of the moment, to speak my present thoughts, unfiltered by assumptions of past selves. I saw some tweets from @visakanv about how he was finding it good to just video himself talking and it unexpectedly resonated. People had suggested videos to me before and I'd never felt any impulse to do it but this time I just thought: okay. (I haven't watched any of his videos yet so I don't know if the direction I've taken has any relation to what he was actually talking about but it's not important.) Video has all the complexities of voice and body language, deep subconscious embodied communication, so much less controlled than text where you can write and rewrite until it's exact. So I've started making videos where I talk spontaneously to simply see where it goes. I'll do it as an exercise until it feels comfortable. I intend to talk about various topics not exclusively games, to aim for this sense of not feeling restricted by my idea of who I'm talking to. Maybe I'll try that here too.
I've done a few talks here and there, conferences and stuff, and I have varying satisfaction with them. Public speaking: it's a skill worth getting better at. The talk that felt best to me wasn't recorded and was about a game I didn't actually release yet (Smesport); I just spoke passionately from right in the middle of thinking about it rather than trying to distill lessons afterward for an audience. I want more like that. People have told me through the years that I should promote my games better, talk them up. I've always been reluctant to, preferring to let the work speak for itself. Well, sometimes it can, but it really deserves the best I can give it. The specific ways that people suggest talking about them don't gel with me, but that doesn't mean they're not right at the root, I just have to develop a way that's authentic to me.
I haven't released a game for a long time, I've been sick for a long time, I was about to have another child, and I was really worrying what to do about money. So I've started a patreon. If you want to and can afford to donate money to support me keeping going I really appreciate it. It's been really nice to feel that people value what I've done. I wish I had a new game to sell but I don't; when I do I'll show you but it's really slow right now. I wish some of the games I already made had sold more. Anyway I'm promising to make a video at least every two weeks. There might be other things too, maybe I'll write more or post some drawings or something.
(About my illness: when I posted here previously I'd had some improvement and was feeling cautiously optimistic that it would continue. It's similar now, maybe a little better overall but it fluctuates and some days are still pretty hard. When I do too much one day I take several days to recover, so I have to keep being careful. But I'm way way better than I was through 2020.)
So in typical Michael fashion I'm trying to kill multiple birds with fewer than the usual number of stones. A creative outlet, a source of income, a self-improvement practice, a quiet forest time. Here are the videos: michael in the forest. They're not much but there will be more. From my experience with games I know well that it's very effective to first just make things. I'm not trying to make the best video or the best talk, I'm just doing it and then doing it again and eventually some of them will be quite good.
There's a part of me here, a voice I'm comfortable speaking in at certain times about certain things. For a few years there I was coming to that voice quite often, this was a fruitful channel for the ideas I was thinking through at the time. Other ideas haven't fit as much. Maybe because I assume a certain audience; I restrict myself based on what I expect people who might read this to be interested in. Maybe because I developed the habit of writing here at a certain time when I had particular interests. Writing right now feels a little like channeling my past self rather than being the same person currently I am day to day.
Similarly my twitter was somewhere I posted a lot for a while, dropped off for a bunch of reasons, but still sometimes I have a thought that feels like a tweet to me so maybe I post it. When I look at what I've posted there recently I see "feels like a tweet" means a limited style and set of topics. I'm filtering through the lens of who I was 8-10 years ago when that was more part of my life. Not intentionally it just happens. Cognitive archaeology. We're built of accumulated layers of self and the older ones are still there but less active and less important to where we are now. I wasn't filtering myself then, and perhaps if I'd consistently kept posting there unrestrictedly it would be full of thoughts about massage, foraging, homebrew, childbirth. Topics that until one sentence ago you had no idea I'd taken an interest in.
So how do I communicate now? My voice of the moment, to speak my present thoughts, unfiltered by assumptions of past selves. I saw some tweets from @visakanv about how he was finding it good to just video himself talking and it unexpectedly resonated. People had suggested videos to me before and I'd never felt any impulse to do it but this time I just thought: okay. (I haven't watched any of his videos yet so I don't know if the direction I've taken has any relation to what he was actually talking about but it's not important.) Video has all the complexities of voice and body language, deep subconscious embodied communication, so much less controlled than text where you can write and rewrite until it's exact. So I've started making videos where I talk spontaneously to simply see where it goes. I'll do it as an exercise until it feels comfortable. I intend to talk about various topics not exclusively games, to aim for this sense of not feeling restricted by my idea of who I'm talking to. Maybe I'll try that here too.
I've done a few talks here and there, conferences and stuff, and I have varying satisfaction with them. Public speaking: it's a skill worth getting better at. The talk that felt best to me wasn't recorded and was about a game I didn't actually release yet (Smesport); I just spoke passionately from right in the middle of thinking about it rather than trying to distill lessons afterward for an audience. I want more like that. People have told me through the years that I should promote my games better, talk them up. I've always been reluctant to, preferring to let the work speak for itself. Well, sometimes it can, but it really deserves the best I can give it. The specific ways that people suggest talking about them don't gel with me, but that doesn't mean they're not right at the root, I just have to develop a way that's authentic to me.
I haven't released a game for a long time, I've been sick for a long time, I was about to have another child, and I was really worrying what to do about money. So I've started a patreon. If you want to and can afford to donate money to support me keeping going I really appreciate it. It's been really nice to feel that people value what I've done. I wish I had a new game to sell but I don't; when I do I'll show you but it's really slow right now. I wish some of the games I already made had sold more. Anyway I'm promising to make a video at least every two weeks. There might be other things too, maybe I'll write more or post some drawings or something.
(About my illness: when I posted here previously I'd had some improvement and was feeling cautiously optimistic that it would continue. It's similar now, maybe a little better overall but it fluctuates and some days are still pretty hard. When I do too much one day I take several days to recover, so I have to keep being careful. But I'm way way better than I was through 2020.)
So in typical Michael fashion I'm trying to kill multiple birds with fewer than the usual number of stones. A creative outlet, a source of income, a self-improvement practice, a quiet forest time. Here are the videos: michael in the forest. They're not much but there will be more. From my experience with games I know well that it's very effective to first just make things. I'm not trying to make the best video or the best talk, I'm just doing it and then doing it again and eventually some of them will be quite good.
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