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.
Wednesday, 9 September 2026
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!
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