New Antiquitus (Jan 16 2026)

Bad news on the current game I'm making (which doesn't even have a prototype name for some reason): I've kinda stalled on the enemies. I just don't really know what they can do to be interesting. Which means I'm probably shelving this game until I figure out what the enemies can do (although there's been a trend where shelving a game is the same as abandoning it forever).

While sleeping on monday night, for some reason I kept thinking about Antiquitus. I know I said I wanted to take a break from multiplayer games due to playability, but if this game can also work for single player that may be fine. Now there were a few things I wasn’t a big fan of in Antiquitus, but a big one for me is the game isn’t simultaneous. I was wondering if there was any way to make the game simultaneous, given the system of taking tiles from the excavation site. Also, the tiles have effects when you take them, but they can be hard to remember, especially since they were just tiles, with no instructions written on them. And when playing Pacific with mom, these issues were apparent too. But the tiles can’t all be identical, cause that would be a boring game.

The simultaneous gameplay issue is the one I focused on first. In theory for a computer game, there can be infinite copies of each tile, which would allow multiple players to take the same tile. But there didn’t really seem to be a way to preserve the mechanic of revealing/discarding cards from the site, or letting players interact with the site (when taking bones or weapons). Then I realized, maybe I don’t need the excavation site at all. There are several games where you deal out cards, and when a player takes one there’s a new one. I’m not sure I like them very much, as usually the cards you want are constantly taken away from you. The excavation site is like that, but even more complicated. One idea I considered briefly is, the game can present multiple tiles at once, and after each turn they’re all discarded. But I think it adds way too much luck, since now you’re at the whims of randomly drawn tiles, with nothing you can really do to get around it. Also this idea removes all player interaction from the game.

To solve all of these issues (in addition to the issue of making the tiles different), I could add a new gameplay mechanic. By default, the tiles don’t do anything special. But an idea I had is, there can be special Rules cards that give each tile an ability, and these abilities can do things like give extra points/placards, interact with other players, and also gain/change tiles you have. It also gives the game more variety, as the tiles will all do different things. I’m not yet confident this is a good solution though, due to 1) a beginner’s game, with no Rules cards, still has all the issues that the Rules are trying to fix, and 2) it may be tricky to make the Rules cards (especially the ones that give points, they don’t want to make you skip the gameplay loop of submitting placards). So still some thinking left to do.

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.