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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)