10 More Rules (Nov 06 2026)

I have added 10 more rules to Randomly Generated RPG. At first it seemed difficult, but I realized that I could split one of the new rules into multiple ones. That’s why these four rules look really similar.

When anyone changes someone’s Mood, if they’re on the same team, the target gains 1 Defense.

When anyone changes someone’s Mood, if they’re on different teams, the target loses 1 Defense.

When anyone changes someone’s Position, if they’re on the same team, the target gains 1 Power.

When anyone changes someone’s Position, if they’re on different teams, the target loses 1 Power.

All basically just simple tweaks on each other. At first instead of checking “teams” it checked if you changed your own mood/position, or someone else’s. But that didn’t seem great, as very few abilities changed just your own mood/position. “Teams” is kind of a weird phrase but I decided to live with it; all players are on one team and all enemies are on another team.

As for why the rules were harder than I expected to make. The problem is some of them get messed up by abilities. The problem with a rule like “when anyone heals, they become focused” is that there are some abilities that both heal and change moods. If this rule triggered in between, the mood change from the ability would happen afterwards, basically canceling the rule. Having to carefully read the ability to see what the correct order is seems terrible. And I didn’t know if I wanted to change the abilities to get rid of this, as there’s a lot of them. That’s a consequence of positions and moods overriding each other. That’s why so many of the rules care about health, power, and defense, as they’re numbers that can easily go up and down.

At the same time, I didn’t want too many rules that triggered at the same time, e.g. at the start of a round. Due to how bad that part of the code is, I didn’t want to add in a way to make you choose the order of the rules. While I did rewrite some code, I didn’t know if I wanted to add the ability to choose the order the rules resolve. Instead I had to make sure there were no cases where the order of the rules would matter much. And finally I didn’t want too many rules that are just a benefit, or just a downside, they had to split the difference somehow. Although this wasn’t too difficult since they can help/hurt both players and enemies. But despite all these issues, I got to 20 rules anyway, which I’m quite happy with.

Another thing I changed was one of the enemies. For a long time there was a Wall that wouldn’t attack you, just get in the way. It sounded so funny, but it’s weird and bad that it’s the only enemy in the game that never attacks you. But if I changed its healing ability to one that attacks you, being a Wall doesn’t make sense. Instead I switched it to a Golem, which at least makes some sense. 

Now despite adding all these rules, I think perhaps it was a mistake to work on them first. As I’ve said a lot, the main code for Randomly Generated RPG is bad and overreliant on enumerators and would be much different if I felt like rewriting it from scratch. But I could’ve made a new game first, that featured that code rewrite, and then once it’s done, I can go back and rewrite Randomly Generated RPG. But now that Randomly Generated RPG has a nice 20 rules, why would I ever go back and do that, other than just for fun?

Also I’ve been listening to the sequel to numb numb this week. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YHJoexs5TU

Time Attack Update (Oct 30 2026)

I got up to 15 rules for Time Attack. Just like with All Shapes and Sizes I’m gonna take a break from adding more for now, will come back to add the final 5 later. One significant advantage this game has over All Shapes and Sizes is that I don’t feel so bad making rules that are neutral and/or hurt you. The new triggers also helped. One bummer is that, both because of the UI and player attention, I can only have 2 rules per game. In terms of amount of replayability and variety, having 4 things per game is a lot more than just 2 per game. But Time Attack doesn’t have much room at the top, and you’re constantly paying attention to all the bullets being shot at you.

Last week I said after Time Attack I’ll try to start a new game. Except that this week I got some ideas for Randomly Generated RPG, which means I’m gonna go back to that first. Since this is a game I’m much more familiar with, it’s possible I’ll be able to crank out the 10 extra rules I want, but just 5 will be fine for now. I also considered rewriting some of the code related to the combat loop, but that may be a lost cause. There’s no real advantage to doing so, other than to make me happy, and I doubt any of the new rules will require me to rewrite anything. Any new code architecture will instead be saved for a future game.

I also made a fairly large gameplay change to Crafts Fair. I decided I wasn’t happy with the rule where: you create a token at level 1, and then upgrade a token. The intention is to force you to end up with a bunch of tokens at the lower level, while still letting you upgrade tokens. But now I think that you too often end up with a bunch of tokens you can’t use, and also upgrading to the highest levels takes too long. Now you get to choose twice: either make a token at level 1, or upgrade a token. You can still do the classic make a token, upgrade a token, but you can also do just one or the other. I think this should play a lot better, and is probably more intuitive as well. 

But I would really like to finish one more new game before the end of the year. It’s only been Crafts Fair, Four Games at Once, and Area Control (Trade Secrets only somewhat counts as a new game), which doesn’t feel like much. The improvements I made to my other games are great, except for when I get stuck on making progress, but still I want to make new games.

Early Release (Oct 23 2026)

It’s the 3rd anniversary of this blog, just one day late. Unfortunately the rest of this post isn’t too happy. First, an update on the experiments from last week. Creating shapes in a row worked great. Creating shapes one by one was not interesting enough. Instead I made a new shape that’s a combination of a Bomb and a Star, which I was happy with.

But the depressing thing is the lack of game design progress. I’ve been working on this All Shapes and Sizes update for over a month and still only have 5/10 new shapes. But starting from August, when I tried to make that platforming season game, I haven’t felt satisfied with my game design abilities. Other than that 1 week I made 10 new cards for Area Control, every other week has been sluggish. It doesn’t feel good to struggle for what’s about to be 3 months in a row!

For now I want to give myself a clean slate. I decided to go ahead and release the All Shapes and Sizes update with the 5 new shapes, and then come back to it later for the extra 5. Then for the next week, I’ll try to make just 5 new rules for Time Attack, and no new enemies yet. And then after that, start a new game. I just want to feel productive again. Probably I will try to make the game about placing path cards onto a map.

I don’t know if I’ve made this joke on this blog before, but: all games are a combination of numbers changing and objects moving. For example, all the abilities in Randomly Generated RPG mostly change health or stats, and positions/moods are both enums, which are fancy numbers. I have more experience making games that are mostly about numbers changing, to the point where I wrote a presentation about how to use math to balance games. But I have a lot less experience with a game that’s mostly moving things, which would be something like Time Attack. This I think is why turn-based games are easier to make content for, as they have a lot of numbers. Meanwhile All Shapes and Sizes and Time Attack are action games, and are tougher for me to figure out.