Retheme Work (Mar 07 2025)

The game concept of 2 robots gaining weapons and fighting each other. It sounds great, except that applying it to this game has been harder than expected. Naming the weapons is hard without them all sounding super similar, and I got nothing for the environments. Plus finding art would be hard too. Instead I gave up and went for something more basic: the players are 2 fortresses fighting each other with troops. Art should be somewhat easier as they can be from Randomly Generated RPG.

Renaming all (25) cards for this has been annoying too though. For the environments I decided that they’ll be auras of some kind, which sort of makes sense why there can only be one aura per row. I haven’t gathered any art yet though. It’s fairly annoying that everything will need art though. For the Randomly Generated RPG update, most of the changes were in the abilities, which don’t need new art (I had to get a couple new pieces of art for some renamed enemies, but it was like 3 at most). This game though, every card needs art.

Last week I got a new idea for a game and shelved it for the future. I made the same mistake and came up with another new game idea. It’s another 2-player game where you place buildings on a shared map. Each turn, you add a building of your color, then you play a card that gives you points depending on where the buildings are, such as “+$1 per building in a column.” After both players empty their hand, the game ends. If expanded upon the buildings can do different things when placed/run. The only downside is that it can’t really be simultaneous, as what if both players place a building in the same spot? Anyways it sounds like a nice concept for a game.  

I’ve also worked out a new way to draw cards. This would be used in a game like Battery RAM, where there’s only 1 deck of cards that players draw from. Instead of directly drawing cards from that deck, each player has their own mini deck of 12 or so cards. In between turns, any cards you discarded get sent to the master discard pile, and if your mini deck has less than 12 cards, you add cards from the master deck to the bottom of your mini deck. If the master deck doesn’t have enough cards for all players, it reshuffles the master discard pile first. This is way better at handling cases where multiple players need to draw cards at the same time.

Other miscellaneous stuff. Since the start of the year I’ve majorly disconnected from social media and the news. It’s just endless negativity and complaining. Most of it is just an echo chamber and I don’t feel any need to see any of it. It’s great, I recommend it. Really the only things I read now are Donald X.’s private playtesting discord, and Blogatog.

I also managed to remember a weird dream, but only a little bit of it. I was in a flower field on top of a mountain, but then suddenly the sky turned orange and the whole flower field got set on fire. I had to escape by jumping off with a parachute (I have no idea where it came from). 

Finally, here are some new songs I’ve been listening to recently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pGRdRhjX3o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo6OdQfo1xU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RSd4ylcopc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXux3ejTjQM&list=OLAK5uy_lRW_m1VIRdL1Z3CJhpWjhryJzkFTd4IBE&index=5&pp=8AUB 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpRY6yh6Pik&list=OLAK5uy_lRW_m1VIRdL1Z3CJhpWjhryJzkFTd4IBE&index=6&pp=8AUB

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kbeziYOIK0&list=OLAK5uy_ne2-LIdpPpvTODyvnhreNcSJKEW6vzNPU&index=2&pp=8AUB

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAeSdRSg8JY&list=OLAK5uy_nMUfa-v5gOnCBsZDCR2q87x_uZHr5W-hA&index=3

Game Design Rambling (Feb 28 2025)

The update to Randomly Generated RPG is finally done. It came out on Feb 23rd, only a couple more days after the blog post. I have no idea how many abilities ended up getting changed in the new update, but probably over 70%. Uploading it to itch.io was surprisingly difficult. Firstly the file size was just slightly too large (even though it’s not even 1 gigabyte, not sure why it failed), and I had to shrink the size of the character arts. Then I discovered that some try catch statements (specifically null reference exceptions) don't work properly on webgl, and I had to fix that. Pretty annoying process but at least it’s all done now.

After that, it was back to work on the PvZ Heroes game (which I really need to rename to the robot fighting game). Firstly I grew dissatisfied with the math in the game. Mainly that, the cards grew too strong too quickly. I ended up deciding that 1 coin is equal to 1 power or 1 health (it used to be equal to 2 power or 2 health), and to make that up, a card is worth 3 coins. That means the difference between a card that costs $2 and $3 is reduced. Except that now this means the cards at higher costs felt too weak. I didn’t have a solution here, except to artificially make the more expensive cards stronger. This means the difference between a $3 and a $4 is larger, and that seems ok, since that’s later in the game. 

Now onto other topics. Last month, the author of Coffin of Andy and Leyley did a Q&A and one of the questions was advice for game developers. They wrote this (definitely sarcastic) response:

“Write your own engine. Sell your house and quit your job to make your first game ever (as long as it’s an MMORPG). Start a video blog about your game to make sure you don’t have time to actually develop it. Worship social media, spend all day absorbing negativity, and sacrifice everything to cater to the whims of strangers. Read marketing advice written by people who’ve never shipped a game. Switch engines midway through development! On top of that, repeatedly remake already finished content, and remember to keep starting side projects. Finally and most importantly: Make sure to neglect your physical and mental health until you burn out, because that’s when you can finally put your game on an infinite hiatus! If, despite your best efforts you end up finishing a game, make sure you don’t test the build before releasing it.”

While I agree with (the opposites of) this advice, there is one that I’ve definitely failed at, which is not starting side projects. Like in the middle of the PvZ Heroes game, I did that update for Randomly Generated RPG. Fortunately I’ve learned from this mistake and will not do another side project in the middle of working on this game again. Just kidding, I’ve started another one.

There had been an idea I had in my ideas file for a while. The base concept is Temporum, where you advance crowns through different times and gain powers from ruling them, but the goal is to get all your crowns to the end. I had an idea that would build on top of it: some cards will add bonus crowns to any time. The only thing bonus crowns do is help in ruling times; they don’t count for anything else (e.g. ending the game). I’ve wanted to turn this idea into my own game (where the crowns are instead soldiers in an army advancing, and you add scouts into areas to help you control areas).

But the problem with all card games I make now is, I don’t want them to be: each turn, choose one of 4 things to do; and I don’t want you to have to pay a cost to play cards for abilities and points; and I don’t want them to be non-simultaneous. Temporum doesn’t have the 2nd problem but does have the 1st and 3rd. Solving those was tricky but I think I have a solution. The game will only check who controls each area at the very start of a round; if you control an area but move soldiers away from it, it doesn't matter, you still control the area until the next round. As for simultaneous turns, you get +1 card and +1 play each turn, you play cards all at the same time, and you can save +plays for future turns. I have more planned concepts for this game, but I’ve decided that I’m not going to start programming this side project until my actual main project is done, so I’m going to stop here. 

But I can talk more about why I want games with simultaneous turns. I prefer them over consecutive turn games because they are much faster when played. (A consecutive turn game is when one player takes their turn, then the next player takes their turn, and so on.) The problem with consecutive turn games is, if a game takes 30 minutes, you’re only playing for half of that time; the other half is waiting for the other player while you do nothing. It’s not great when you’re alternating between thinking “everyone is waiting on me to just hurry up” and “I wish they would play faster.” For a simultaneous game, there’s much less waiting, because everyone starts their turn at the same time. I even made a spreadsheet for this (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14fxYh4zNsu7Hdi-dZZP6ry6U5CW-tDXh7djadh9UveA/edit?usp=sharing). If you mess around with the numbers you’ll see that simultaneous turns saves much more time. This is especially true if you have more than 2 players, or if one of the players is much slower than the others.

Now the question is, can any games I’ve made (that I still somewhat care about) be converted to simultaneous? The list is Antiquitus, Mutating Forest, Vestigal, and the current PvZ Heroes game. The main problem is collision; what if 2 players want to do something to the same thing at once? Vestigal could have a workaround; if 2 players move a pawn onto the same spot, they both die. That doesn’t seem so bad, except that Vestigal is an old game that I don’t really feel the need to update.

Other games are more of a struggle though. Like in Antiquitus, what if 2 players try to take the same tile? It really doesn't want to be “neither player gets the tile,” as that kills your entire turn (while the other players who were smart enough to take a different tile get ahead). PvZ Heroes has the issue in: what if 2 players want to move the same troop to different rows, or play environments onto the same row? I could fix the first problem by not having ways to move troops, but I like being able to move troops. And I can’t solve the environment issue with the Vestigal fix, because environments have different costs. I don’t think there are viable solutions here that don’t involve redesigning the entire game, which means I’ll just have to live with this game having consecutive turns.

Out of Control Update (Feb 21 2025)

The plan was to give a quick update to Randomly Generated RPG, probably only take a week or so. Oops that didn’t work out. Most of the week was spent changing and killing a lot of abilities (both for players and enemies), and I made zero progress on the PvZ Heroes game. It feels a lot like my last semester of college, where working on this game just took over my life. One week later, while I’ve made a lot of progress, there’s still work to be done. The current goal is to get the update out before the end of the month.

Along the way, I made some changes to the gameplay. First, I got rid of accuracy. Buffing and nerfing accuracy didn’t seem that interesting. It didn’t sound fun for your attacks to miss. Another bad part is that accuracy means absolutely nothing on Angel. All of this made me just want to get rid of it altogether.

I also wasn’t so satisfied with the luck stat. The luck stat was your chance of getting critical hits, and you increased/decreased your percentage of that happening by like 10% or so. I ended up overhauling it. Basically: if you have 0 luck, you can’t do critical hits at all; at 1 luck you have a 20% chance; at 2 luck you have a 40% chance. If you do get a critical hit, you get +3 to your damage/healing. However, if you have negative luck, you instead have a chance of getting -3 to your damage/healing. This was a much more noticeable effect, and losing luck is actually bad now. 

As a counterpart to Locked (the new status effect that prevents your position/emotion from changing), I buffed Protected. In addition to blocking all damage, it also blocks all negative stat modifiers (power, defense, speed, luck). Speaking of speed, I'm committing to not doing my overhaul from last week. It still seemed too complicated and better for a different game.

The reason making abilities has taken so long is because I got stricter with the ability pie. Player abilities are allowed and not allowed to do certain things. I decided that, if both Knight and Angel can do a certain ability, it goes to Knight (and same thing for Wizard). That means Angel can only do things that neither Knight or Wizard can do (such as healing, or changing emotions and positions at the same time). Even though this new design restriction is not going to be noticeable for anyone playing the game, it’s still something I want to do.

As for the enemies, I also got stricter there. Their abilities must correspond to their core concept (explained in their bio), they can’t just have random abilities. One trap I've fallen into a lot is that I can easily have 3 abilities that fit their bio…but then what’s the 4th ability going to do? I've decided enemies must have 4 abilities (except that a handful of 1-star enemies are allowed to have 2), and trying to figure out the 4th ability has been difficult. I'm only down to 2 more to do though.

A few enemy concepts have evolved. For example, Archer makes players angry so that it can be happy and get an emotional advantage on them, and Wolf no longer jumps up and down, it now makes 1-star enemies stronger. But the one enemy I’ve struggled the most on is Astronaut. I’ve grown dissatisfied with their concept of “make players elevated and happy, then this becomes sad,” and it feels redundant (especially because Bat has now become the enemy that becomes sad and attacks happy players). Which means it’s likely that I’ll just replace that one completely, although what the replacement will do I’m not sure.

Finally I changed some cheats and challenges. Firstly, I didn’t like having both Stronger Players and Stronger Enemies. I turned Stronger Players into Weaker Enemies, which means they start with 2 less health. Stronger Enemies is now More Enemies, which means waves 1-4 have an extra 1-star enemy. I also considered having a 1-star enemy be a 2-star enemy instead, but having another 1-star enemy sounded more fun.

The Faster Player Cooldowns cheat was too good with the player abilities that granted extra turns, or stunned enemies. Now it’s Slower Enemy Cooldowns, which means when enemies use an ability, it gets another turn of cooldown (like permanent happy). Since luck is now different, I got rid of No Enemy Luck and turned it into something else: Knight can attack elevated enemies. Finally I turned Enemies Stunned into Extra Enemy Turns, which means when a new enemy is created, they automatically get an extra turn. I actually don’t remember what caused me to changed this, but I like it better.

Quite the lengthy change log huh? Especially for a game I mostly considered to be done many months ago.