To recap last week:
Outer Dark
After learning the lessons of Plamo vs Plamo's hyper-granular customization, I knew I wanted Afterglow to have Ships that were customizable, but in much tighter boundaries than PvP's units allowed. This was necessary for a few reasons:
I always design this stuff by the seat of my pants instead of trying to develop an algorithm to cost things out. But because of this, my intuitions often produce some odd (shitty) results. Update on last week's goals: Outer Dark
Outer DarkHere's the new campaign map.
I've finally released Plamo vs Plamo: Scale Model Mecha Combat on Wargame Vault. This game has been in the works for two and a half years now and is the first game design project I ever undertook with a serious effort towards releasing a finished product instead of something me and my friends could just fuck around with. I have no expectations that this will be particularly commercial successful or anything, but I think it's a very good game and I'm very pleased with it overall. However, it did take a long time, and it was a complex project. Tackling it as my "first" game probably wasn't a great idea.
I'm going to record some of my closing throughts here so I don't forget them. Recap of last week's goals:
Outer Dark
It was a highly productive week. As you can see from my splash page listing all my games, I'm a very fancy and productive game designer. Placeholder Productions is a one-person operation other than playtesters and proofreaders; I do everything, for better or for worse. Since I started being reasonably serious about developing games with Plamo vs Plamo around two years ago, I have had dozens of game ideas and some of which I've developed into more than ideas. I've developed a process for this now which seems to be working I'm going to discuss here. As you can see from the image on the right, I have a lot of potential projects at various stages of development (most are just rough ideas right now). But at some point I have to actually focus on a few and make them into games. I don't know if most people will get anything out of this, but I really only write this stuff to help clarify my own thoughts, so I guess it doesn't really matter. Assessing last week's goals...
Afterglow
2/3, but there was a lot of extra stuff done. I swear! I like solitaire gaming and consider it to be an important part of my projects. This is because I think a lot of games that are designed to be multiplayer end up being solitaire regardless of what the initial intent was. There's a lot of room for solitaire games and there's clearly demand (hen a new product is announced I often see "is this solo compatible?" asked as one of the first and most frequent questions). I also personally like playing physical games more than videogames, despite the obvious barriers to use (setup, components, manual calculation) because I like the look and feel of game pieces in front of me. It's rewarding.
But solitaire games present unique challenges, and one of the most fundamental ones is providing an appropriate challenge. The essence of most games is trying to reach the victory state as a preferred end condition. But ensuring you have the right end state in a solo game is hard! It's been a while since I wrote one of these because everything has been the same for some time. The goalposts have remained static because of the work I'm doing on Afterglow and Outer Dark. With the increased restrictions on social gatherings, I'm having less opportunities to test Afterglow's competitive game so I'm stuck testing Outer Dark. But I want to avoid making adjustments to Afterglow's mechanics or components (like the Ship parts) based on Outer Dark, because it's not reflective of the "main" PvP game. The automata for the Biocraft is pretty much where I want it after a lot of testing, and it all works pretty well in my view. The Biocraft work well in tandem with each other to make challenging tactical puzzles (the support Biocraft make games very interesting). Any more work on Outer Dark done, at this point, is meant for the campaign mode. So, Afterglow's progress is stalling out a bit, but there's still a few things I can do. They're mostly technical revisions but I'll take what I can get. Those will be the goal for the week. Goals for November 2 to November 9Afterglow
The last thing is a "sure, why not" move. I don't expect to hear back from my proofreader at this point and I've gone over it so many times myself that at some point I just have to push it out the door. This week is as good a time as any. |
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