Slow Progress (Jan 09 2026)

Continuing work on the game I’m making right now. I think one issue is that enemies and abilities don’t have much that they can do. Enemies have different ways to move and can potentially spawn enemies, but I doubt that’s enough to go off of to make a variety of enemies. In Relentless Waves and Plants vs Zombies, the enemies each have different ways of attacking, but here there’s nothing for them to attack, they just move to the edge of the screen. While I want to keep the game as simple as possible, it’s possible I need something else here. The attacking abilities are also in a similar position. My initial design is that they have different shapes but all just deal damage. But there’s the question of, how many shapes can I really make that feel different from each other? I don’t know if there’s much I can do here though. 

I started doing this 2 weeks ago, but I had been playing Ultimate Custom Night. I watched a video that explained how to work your way up to beating the hardest mode, and I thought it looked quite doable. Plus the game’s a free download. Most of the strategy is about stalling the enemies and spending as little time in the cameras as possible. The first steps (40/20 and 45/20) didn’t take too much time, although more practice was needed to beat 49/20. 50/20 was hard though, I had to work my way up to it by doing the basic strategy, but disabling a few enemies until I could figure out how to handle them. Even then, 50/20 was still annoying to grind, as there’s still a lot of RNG, and not in a fun way (sometimes it’s impossible to survive). Eventually after 40+ hours of play I beat it on tuesday, and I don’t want to do it again. But also, now that I’ve done 50/20, there’s nothing else to do in this game. Which segues into the next paragraph.

In addition to the presentation about simultaneous vs consecutive turn games (which I haven’t forgotten but haven’t made progress on), I had another idea for a presentation. It’s relevant to the games I’ve been making recently, which is: games that have a lot of randomly selected content (like Dominion), or games that’s a fixed series of content (like Celeste). Both games have their advantages, but the main reason I’ve been making more games like Dominion is because: it’s way better effort to reward ratio for the game designer; you can’t cheat these games by looking up a guide; they have much more replayability than a series of fixed levels. That last point is relevant here because: there’s a reason I have no more reason to play UCN, or even Celeste: I have nothing else to do in those games. I would have to download fan mods to have new things to do, and I don’t want to do that. Meanwhile I’ve been playing Dominion for years and am still continuing to play it.

However, games like Dominion do struggle in other areas. One downside is that you have to make sure most games are even possible to beat (an issue I’ve run into before), and also make them fun. They also struggle in telling narrative stories. It’s not impossible to have a story / narrative in these games (Moon Colony Bloodbath sort of has a story in what goes on with your engine), but then games like Dominion have barely any plot, and my games don’t either. Like the turn-based games one, this presentation has the issue of: this topic is about comparing 2 types of games instead of deeply analyzing one game, and I’m not totally sure how to do that. 

Brainstorming Next Game (Jan 02 2026)

This week I updated Randomly Generated RPG with all the new translation features. This took many hours of work, as the game has a bunch of text. There was also a lot of sloppy code that I wanted to change in the process. One thing I had to figure out was a way to determine if a translated line was in an enum or a function, as enums have no substitutions while functions do. I found a way, but it’s not very pretty. Then I decided to do all of this again with Swords vs Shields, which didn’t take as long, but was still annoying to do. 

This week I was also planning on making more content for the games too. More levels for All Shapes and Sizes, more cheats/challenges for Relentless Waves, more player abilities for Randomly Generated RPG. The bad news is that I didn’t come up with anything for any of those games. Which suggests the actual thing to do is to come back to those games later, after I finish up another game. Now the question is, what is that game? (The game I tried in December isn’t happening.) One genre I haven’t tried yet is tower defense, and considering Plants vs Zombies was probably the first time I had a favorite video game growing up, I thought I really should try a game like that. 

My initial idea for a tower defense game was that you get handed a random amount of multiple defenses, and those are the only ones you can work with for the entire level (and the enemies are randomly chosen too). The game would have to carefully work out the power level of all the defenses you’re given, to make sure it’s enough to fight anything the game throws at you. But I didn’t know how to make those defenses and enemies feel different from each other yet.

While thinking of this, I realized another game I liked a lot as a kid. Okamiden lets you draw directly on the screen, and what you draw affects the world. I tried to program something like that, only to quickly realize this is very hard. Registering where on the screen you were drawing is doable, but figuring out how the game recognizes what you drew (a line, a circle) was much more challenging, especially since humans can’t really draw perfectly straight lines, or perfect circles. And gameplay wise it would be much simpler if instead of drawing, the things you could draw were automatically given to you. 

Then I realized I could combine these 2 ideas for very different games. Instead of being given defenses, you were given different shapes that damaged enemies when you dragged them onto the screen. It’s like Plants vs Zombies but everything was an instant-kill. You would have to use the correct shape to damage as many enemies as you could. I could also have some things deal damage, while others do things like move enemies around. So far this is what my brainstorming has come up with, and maybe I can make this fun. 

I should probably explain why my mind went to having a limited supply of things. The main reason is it’s the most different from the games I’ve made so far. Games need things to make sure you can’t just spam the most powerful things over and over. Randomly Generated RPG had cooldowns on abilities, which meant I shouldn’t do that here. Swords vs Shields have different payments to use abilities on cards, which means I shouldn't do that here either. Plus Slow and Steady also had energy costs and cooldowns on the 3 abilities, and I don’t want to make this game too similar to that (since they’re both about killing enemies before they reach the edge of the screen). Plants vs Zombies had some levels with a conveyor belt that gave plants in a random order, but to me that sounded a lot like drawing random cards, and I already made a lot of those games. A limited supply was the most new of all the options.

Finally on wednesday I played Pacific again. This time the other players understood the game a bit better, although they had to keep checking what the 4 tokens did (even though the tokens never change). It was probably less overwhelming when they only had to read 2 other player’s cards instead of 3. This time I won by getting a ton of fish with Breeding Program and Proliferation, then turning all of them into hotels. Later I added factories with Expand and profited with Pet Rocks and Brochures to win with about 95 money. Pacific's fun, I like it.

Review of 2025 (Dec 31 2025)

At the end of every year, it’s time for a quick review of every game I made this year. If you don’t count updates to Randomly Generated RPG and All Shapes and Sizes, I made 5 games over the year. That’s less than 2024, which had a lot, but 2024 had a bunch of smaller games, while all 5 games in 2025 were fairly large ones.

Relentless Waves - tier 1. This is pretty obviously my favorite game this year, as I’ve updated it several times over the year. I think it’s a very fun twist on the genre, and I like the variety of enemies I made. I think my only issue with it is that it doesn’t really have an official level to beat and replay, and possibly the existing ones are just too hard. But maybe I only think that because I’m testing everything at the highest difficulty. 

Fortress Siege - low tier 3. I think this is the card game that aged the worst this year. It’s consecutive turns, which I don’t really want to make anymore, and I did parts of it better later on. The AI opponent was better programmed in Territorial March, and the concept of a card fighting game was done better in Swords vs Shields. The aura mechanic is sort of cool but not really a standout, especially since it’s pretty directly copied from PvZ Heroes. I did learn things from making it though.

Territorial March - high tier 3. This game was better, but there were several design flaws that I would’ve really liked to have fixed in a better way. Specifically with how you could go negative in actions and coins, which isn’t very intuitive, and I did it better in Swords vs Shields. That’s one thing, my opinion on games can decrease if a future game does a better job on parts of it. I think Camp and Road also make the game feel too similar to Temporum. This was also my last try at trying to make a spreadsheet-programmed game work, and I think I’m mostly done with it. I do think the scouts worked well though. 

Memory Tiles - low tier 3. Probably the worst game made this year. It came after a summer of not succeeding with a different game, and while the concept of a minigame collection in a memory game is kind of cool, it isn’t really the kind of game that I want to play or make again. Pretty much the only useful thing I learned is how to load scenes on top of other scenes. 

Swords vs Shields - tier 2. The 2nd best game of the year. I’m glad I was able to make a game in this genre work simultaneously, and I think the turn structure is unique as well. I think this game did the concept of spending actions to play cards for free better, since there’s less need in making effects that make you lose actions/swords/shields (because I could instead make effects about damaging the other player and their cards). I also learned a lot about multiplayer features, and improving how the log works. I once said this game had my best code in it, but less than a month later and no, there are definitely flaws in it. This only drops to tier 2 because I’ve come down a bit on making online multiplayer games.

Overall, I did learn a lot from making these games, and learned a lot about systems that will make future games easier and better (like translations). Despite all the code I wrote, I don’t really feel like I have a game where I can say all the code is as close to perfect as possible. Some are better than others, but even for games like Randomly Generated RPG, I would be implementing them much differently nowadays. Anyways now that I spent this month updating previous good games, I need to actually start a new game.