bulkpaint.bsky.social
Industry veteran from the late 1900s. Solo Indie Dev. Design Consultant. Game Dev Dinosaur. Lord of Bullfrog anecdotes. Playability, pitching and prototypes a speciality.
Got a project that needs poking with a stick? Let me know.
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Get in there, Anna!
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It is sound advice - that no-one ever listens to (myself included).
It's all to easy to get swept up in the 'wouldn't it be cool if...' part and ignore the part where you actually have to Do The Thing.
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Scope.
Scope will mess you up.
Think small. Then polish to a mirror shine.
And don't forget to sleep.
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I mean, I reckon they're going to save a bunch on Mel Brooks' Yogurt makeup, but that's about it.
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Anyhow. Shortly after this, that company and I parted ways. (I was sacked as it goes - largely for saying things like you can't run a project like that).
Is it worth noting that the game never came out and most of the team moved on to pastures new?
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Another way of looking at it was that this was a classic death march. You just work on this thing and the end is never in sight. I've seen my fair share of those things and let me tell you - that's a sure-fire trip to Burnout Town.
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It shows a stunning lack of planning or any kind of cohesive vision of either what the game was going to be or how we'd be able to build it.
The "keep showing me things and I'll tell you when I like it" approach. Or "I don't know what I'm doing" in so many words.
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It's important to note that a development cycle of three years isn't a Bad Thing at all. Nor is one of one or two years.
A development cycle where it *could* be any one of those options is terrifying though.
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I should have been thrilled at this prospect.
But the red flag was flying when the project lead told everyone that we should be prepared to work on this thing for the next "one, two or three years."
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And then, one day, it didn't.
Now usually this heralds the end of a project but in this case, production continued. In fact, it was granted a new lease of life and we were able to pivot to something... better. Bolder? Bigger?
I'm not sure - but the main takeaway was that we now had ownership.
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How many did you whittle it down to in the end?
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What sort of lap time are you getting?
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Hearing it from your friend pre-release is a gazillion times easier and less destructive than hearing it from the gaming community whilst requesting refunds and doing their level best to dissuade others from trying your game.
Chances are you won't get an opportunity to address the concerns at all.
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It's also so valuable to have someone that you trust challenge your assumptions and designs. Feel free to defend and justify the originals, but if they're not landing you need to know about it and be prepared to finesse, alter or otherwise abandon them for something else.
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It doesn't have to be about what you did in the game - it can be about what you remember of it. Or what you were doing at the time. Or who you were with. Or whatever you were going through.
Basically, what does it remind you of when you see it?
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Of course you can.
That's not to say I'm not going to try and take a huge dump on Restless Ruins when I start my own marketing machine though...
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Evergreen tweet
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Liberation Sans, I believe. Ariel would require a license.
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I look back upon those days with fondness. Sure, it was hard - the sleepless nights, the teething troubles - and there was an awful lot we had to learn really quickly. But seeing you grow into the game you became made it all worthwhile.
I'm so proud of you. -x-
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“Ooh. Can’t be too happy about that one”
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The Angel of Tetanus.
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I'm going to have the Adventurer's Guild confer a bonus should your exploration percentage exceed a minimum value. I can make that scale up as well, depending on what your rank is.
It'll probably be an additive reward - a multiplier most likely - applied to your gold.
Should be a decent incentive.
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Right now, it's any delve where you make it back out of the entrance. So you could, in theory, just loot the first room then back straight out.
For the most part, this is fine, but I think I'm going to introduce a minimum requirement - exploration percentage.
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Of course, that needs to be balanced out with the payoff for success. So now I need to do a ton more stuff to reward the player for a successful delve.
I'm also going to have to go a little deeper [sic] into what actually constitutes a 'successful' delve.
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To see that then collapse away from you, just out of reach, should make the player feel... sad. Bad? Sure Frustrated? Maybe. But also it should steel their resolve to do better next time.
It's a gamble, for sure. Might be a shelf moment for some.
But I like it.
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From a design perspective, the idea is the break down each element.
Even though it's a failed mission, I still show the rewards - a real "Let's see what you could have won" moment. (Or, as certain people of my age and country might refer to as a Full Bowen. You can't beat a bit of Bully...)
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Of all the markets to sell books to, I’d figure it would be better to choose the demographic that doesn’t have a history of burning them.
Although if they’ve already paid you for them…
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One should probably not base foreign policy on a gag from a Dudley Moore film from the 80s
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Back in the day, Jeff Braun who founded Maxis, used to exist only on carrot juice.
Dude was orange AF.
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In turn, that particular system was inspired by the coin pouch mechanic I saw in the Kingdoms series of games, albeit less physics-based.
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Thankfully, in 2 Delve 2 Deep, I'd already implemented a maximum gold collection capacity thing. Along with the diminishing light source, it's another soft time limit imposed on the player.
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In dev terms, you simply scale the pitch up by how full the thing is. Of course, this implies that you have a maximum value (full) to work with. Otherwise you either have to set an arbitrary max value or continue scaling until only dogs can hear it.
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Basically, it revolves around the fact that we can feel when a glass is full based on the sound the water makes as it's poured into it. It's not something that we explicitly look out for, but it's something that's pretty obvious when it happens.