Changes and Edits (Dec 26 2025)

As expected, I changed the Boxer enemy in Relentless Waves. My first attempt to replace it was an enemy that rotates independently (instead of just rotating towards where the player is), and occasionally it will fire a giant beam at where it’s rotated to. My brief testing with it showed it was either super easy to avoid, or just completely unfair. Then I had the idea of, what if an enemy tried to attack you from the sides instead? I tried it as an enemy that shoots bullets that move to the opposite edge of the screen. It picks a location on the edge of the screen, then fires a stream of 10 bullets, all from that location, before picking a new location. This worked out better, and I like that it creates patterns where you have to move between the bullets. Giving this enemy a name and design was really hard though. Eventually I decided to make it a factory shooting tires at you, which sounded funny.

Then for All Shapes and Sizes, I first made a few minor changes. I changed the animation for shapes spawning, instead of just popping into existence, they grow into the shape, which I think looks better. Then I tried to add something new, which was a struggle. The first thing I tried was an upgrader, it turns the first shape it touches into the next shape. The idea was that it could be a wild card shape, but it ended up being way too strong, instantly turning hearts into crowns. I briefly considered having the ability to drop a star, except the star would fade away over time, which would mean you have to quickly merge it with another star to make use of it. But I didn’t see how to communicate this with just a visual design, so I scrapped it. Finally I came up with something, an item that warps the first shape it touches to the other side of the level. This worked great, it’s very helpful when you have 2 of the same shape, but they’re nowhere near each other.

I probably would’ve gotten more done on those games this week (I wanted to find a new cheat/challenge for RW, and a new level for ASAS), but instead I spent a few days figuring out more improvements to translations. The first is how to get the information from google sheets. The initial code for downloading it and converting it into a format that can be read by the code was very messy and confusing. I realized an easier way to do it: the code can just download it directly as a tab-seperated-value sheet, which is so much easier to work with.

Another thing was improving on how to share and upload the translation file for other people to work with. Now the game lets you download the base English tsv file, and then let you upload your own tsv file into the game. This was tricky to do because browser games don’t let you do things like this. It turns out I needed to use an entirely different programming language just to handle this, but I didn’t want to learn that, so I just had ChatGPT code it for me. I don’t like using ChatGPT to write huge chunks of code for me, but I’ve found it’s not so bad when it comes to fixing quick code errors, and it did do this upload/download thing for me (I would’ve never figured out how to do it myself).

On sunday I had to play Guandan again, which I learned is the name of the card game my mom plays. I have to say, after playing it a 3rd time in one year, I’m pretty much done with it. Every time I find it harder to tolerate the flaws in it. The leveling up system and supposed co-op-ness still feels completely pointless and too complicated. Another issue with this game, and with consecutive turn games in general, is that you have to remember a bunch of things: the turn order, whose turn it is, and if they’re done or not. People constantly forgot all of these things, and this is a game where each turn is like a couple seconds. It shouldn’t be hard at all, and yet it was. Also the game takes too long to set up (even with machines to handle shuffling and card dealing). I also dislike how the game keeps going after someone’s won, as now the winner has to sit there waiting for everyone else to finish, which is very boring.

I bought Pacific months ago, but sunday was the first time I got to play it against other people. I don’t remember every single card I chose, but I started off with some fish and boats, moved them to Peru, and then someone played Holiday in Peru, so I ended up with 10 hotels in Peru and played industry cards every turn for +$10. I had fun, but the other players struggled with how complex the game is due to having to read multiple cards all at once, and how the 4 tokens worked. This experience made me think, maybe I should make a game for this kind of audience. For sure some of my games are not easily accessible for kids, non-gamers, non-English speakers, and/or older people. Randomly Generated RPG is complex and has a lot of reading, Relentless Waves requires fast and precise movements, etc. I think All Shapes and Sizes is the best fit, but it’s possible I need a more simple game that anyone could play.

Next week, there will actually be 2 posts next week. On Dec 31 I’ll write a retrospective on all games I made this year, and the usual weekly one on Jan 02.