Early Release (Oct 23 2026)

It’s the 3rd anniversary of this blog, just one day late. Unfortunately the rest of this post isn’t too happy. First, an update on the experiments from last week. Creating shapes in a row worked great. Creating shapes one by one was not interesting enough. Instead I made a new shape that’s a combination of a Bomb and a Star, which I was happy with.

But the depressing thing is the lack of game design progress. I’ve been working on this All Shapes and Sizes update for over a month and still only have 5/10 new shapes. But starting from August, when I tried to make that platforming season game, I haven’t felt satisfied with my game design abilities. Other than that 1 week I made 10 new cards for Area Control, every other week has been sluggish. It doesn’t feel good to struggle for what’s about to be 3 months in a row!

For now I want to give myself a clean slate. I decided to go ahead and release the All Shapes and Sizes update with the 5 new shapes, and then come back to it later for the extra 5. Then for the next week, I’ll try to make just 5 new rules for Time Attack, and no new enemies yet. And then after that, start a new game. I just want to feel productive again. Probably I will try to make the game about placing path cards onto a map.

I don’t know if I’ve made this joke on this blog before, but: all games are a combination of numbers changing and objects moving. For example, all the abilities in Randomly Generated RPG mostly change health or stats, and positions/moods are both enums, which are fancy numbers. I have more experience making games that are mostly about numbers changing, to the point where I wrote a presentation about how to use math to balance games. But I have a lot less experience with a game that’s mostly moving things, which would be something like Time Attack. This I think is why turn-based games are easier to make content for, as they have a lot of numbers. Meanwhile All Shapes and Sizes and Time Attack are action games, and are tougher for me to figure out.