Moving On (May 23 2025)

2 months in the making (even though the 2nd month didn’t feel as productive), I finally finished the game about soldiers and scouts. It’s called Territorial March and it’s on itch.io. I spent 4 days doing nothing but trying to come up with names and art. I named all the player cards after verbs which worked out, although if I had to get art for them it would’ve been near impossible. Verbs are very specific. Then I had to come up with a game name and logo which were hard and eventually I just threw together something fast for it.

Anyways thoughts on the game. I like it, but since the economy of the game has limitations I still think something like Battery RAM is the better design. The negative coins and actions are definitely more of a bandaid than anything. The troops and scouts are great though, and after all that was the inspiration for me making the game in the first place. It’s also possible that having the classic “pay cost to put a card into your play area for abilities” is actually a better fit for this game, but I really wanted to make a different style of game instead. Maybe there can be a way to combine this game and Battery RAM but that sounds like something for the future (plus how do I avoid that game having too many rules to learn).

This week I went back to All Shapes and Sizes to give it an update. I thought the game mode where you have to minimize your score took too long, which is why I changed it so you drop fewer shapes, but you have to reduce your score even more. I also rewrote some code for it because the code is from 2023 and it aged poorly. Not everything (like the code for changing gravity), but some parts could easily be improved.

I’m also starting work on Relentless Waves again. I rewrote how the game generates enemies and now the game can handle levels where the enemies are fixed instead of random. I’ll see if I can come up with tutorial levels and such, like a campaign. (Randomly Generated RPG is not going to get anything like this, because it already has a tutorial mode.) I also experimented with a new gameplay challenge where you have to juggle balls. They fall down and you have to touch them to bounce them up. If any of them touch the ground you take damage. I also tried a mode where you never get any bullet recharge items; instead the only way to get more bullets is to kill enemies. I didn’t like it, it was too hard and if you wasted bullets (which is really easy) you were dead.

Finally there are some newer versions of Photon, the package I’m using for multiplayer games. I’ve been using an older version since that’s what I started with and it was sufficient for my card games, but I should probably try out some of the newer versions just to see what they can do. And maybe from there I can figure out what my next new game is.