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.