Welcome to Friday Fun, the blog where I poke my head up from underground, let you all know I’m still alive, and hopefully entertain you with some bits about my project progress and game development experience.
Dehoarder 2 Story Events Migrated
The big beast to slay this week was migrating all 194 already-existing story events from the old XML-based Story Event system to the new Lua-based system. If you recall last week, I had successfully laid the groundwork for this effort.
This undertaking was well worth it. There were many cases where I was able to simplify things greatly, just for being able to use a proper variable or do a tiny bit of string concatenation. This allows me to add more depth to story events without increasing the cognitive burden and maintenance associated with managing a less flexible and more verbose system.
Steam Coming Soon Page + itch.io = More Wishlists?
The sooner I can get the Steam Coming Soon page out there for Dehoarder 2, the better. Yesterday the page was submitted for review, so hopefully next week I will be able to go live with it.
By the way, here’s new Dehoarder 2 screenshots showing off how things look roughly “out of the box” after the recent upgrade from Standard Render Pipeline to Universal Render Pipeline.
In conjunction with the Coming Soon page, I also seek to increase my visibility further by creating an itch.io profile, leveraging my back catalog of free games that have been deemed fairly decent. My back catalog is an asset that I should be taking more advantage of. Many of these are jam entries from back when I was entering Ludum Dare on an annual basis, or games that used to be available through Unity Web Player. They will all be released as is since I am not made of time. They will all also still be free, though with a suggested nominal donation of $2.
So the plan with the itch.io launch is to grab some eyes using the visibility boost that itch.io provides on first launch, and then make sure to show them as best and tactfully as I can that Dehoarder 2 is coming soon. Hopefully I can generate enough buzz and wishlists for the algorithms to take notice. Will any of this work? I don’t know, I’m not a marketing guy; I’m just forced to play that role for survival here. But it seems pretty logical to me. Feel free to let me know if I’m about to wreck my trains or if there’s something better I should do here.
Games definitely being put on itch.io: Dehoarder, Deific’s Guide, Werepenguin’s Escape, Dirty Fork, E.A.R.L.’s Warehouse
Games failing to make the cut: Thrust or Bust, Snowflake, City Beneath the Surface, Roll Playing Game, Chroma Invader
Games that will come to itch.io later: Prepare For Warp, Breaking Block
New Games? I Mean REALLY New
After reading “A Theory of Fun for Game Design“, I’ve come to realize one of the reasons why I play fewer hours of games than I did years ago, aside from being frightfully busy all of the time. The root of the problem is that at this point in my gaming journey I’ve “seen it all”. No, I have not literally played every game out there and yes, there are still likely unique game experiences that I’ve yet to enjoy. But I have definitely reached a point where most of the games I pick up get rejected pretty quickly by my brain as “already played that, learned it, and finished it”. Even with compelling story behind it, if the gameplay becomes too rote to my brain, I’ll lose interest even in going through the motions of the gameplay to unlock the story further.
Taking one example: I loved Factorio. I hadn’t played anything like it before, and it really engaged my brain. I still have mountains of spreadsheets and planning documents for factories and folders of browser bookmarks to calculators and blueprints. I even really liked Satisfactory, because, wow, Factorio in 3D combined with Ark! I’ve played both games for hundreds of hours each. But no other factory/production chain management game has been able to hold my interest for more than a dozen hours. At this point, even though I might still have a few of those games on my Steam Wishlist, if the Steam algorithms suggest another new one to me I might scream.
The problem is, all of these algorithms out there are telling the big money to just churn out more of the same, and development of new concepts gets neglected and replaced by standard feature checkboxes. The big weakness with using algorithms on past data to predict the future is that nothing new happens in the past. That’s not to say that algorithmic analysis is useless, but it shouldn’t be the only analysis tool in the toolbelt.
Yes, as a game developer I am just as guilty as the rest of the industry of copying a formula and tweaking it (Breaking Block). And I do admit that even though our discipline has only begun enumerating them, there are definitely core gameplay elements from which games are composed. But to me it seems less and less frequent that these core elements are combined into new patterns that cause my brain to say, “Oh! This is different and delightful and I can learn something new from this!” I think as game developers, if we want to cultivate lifelong game players that won’t eventually get bored and wander away from gaming entirely, we need to do a better job at provoking that reaction. As a game player, learning something new from a game is a craving that is satisfied far too infrequently.
I hope to make Dehoarder 2 a game that is novel and worth playing, both for gameplay’s sake and for story’s sake.
So, will leave off for the week with a call for you to tell me what games break the mold. What games have forced you out of a rut of playing the same-old-same-old and really gave your brain something new to chew on?