"Dozens of rivers have been used up in paint, and yet, this mad artist has never completed a single work. Every time a near-perfect masterpiece was about to be completed, it met its fate drowned in an ocean of white colour, soon to be covered by yet another ephemeral creation."

  • Flavour text of Purpizug, Painter of Blank Canvasses, a Legendary Artistic Soul

The Games Foxes Play

(github | view all previous posts | play 0.3 online in browser on itch.io!)

I am hitting a bit of a roadblock, and I only have Onei's Random Idea Generator™ to blame.

The version 0.2 of my game that I had previously uploaded on itch.io was a short and fun experience - according to my esteemed playtester and composer friend, that is. He mentioned his appreciation of the slider-puzzle-like design, and how he really enjoyed using his brain and thinking through each step of my deterministic combat system. A simple but interesting gameplay loop.

Now, because I can't ever stand still or conform to a plan when it comes to personal projects, I then proceeded to pull out of my metaphorical hat an entire map generation system, and then also the new knockback-based combat that I showed off last week. I find these very interesting on their own, but they have both mangled the basic game system that I had in place.

This week, I started work on a tutorial (in my own style, with zero text!). The structure is simple: start with the absolute basics. Immobile target, essential controls displayed on the screen, elementary objective: slurp up his soul. Should that be done, the challenge intensifies: the target is now (slowly) moving and trying to attack you back. And so on, progressively introducing mechanics with increasingly difficult puzzles. While I find much promise in it, I couldn't help but notice a mildly significant problem:

I don't know how to play my own game.

By this, I mean, there are so many design parts crunching upon each other that I struggle to find the "core loop" once again. What should the penalty be if the player gets hit? Should encounters be composed of multiple weak and simple enemies, or few strong and complex ones? The knockback combat pretty much makes any room with more than 4 enemies extremely difficult to defeat, so I am inclined towards the latter, but then, with so few entities on the screen, that "slider-puzzle" experience that made the original game fun is lost.

I was tempted a few times to scrap my latest additions and restart from 0.2, but this isn't the Onei way. I have faith in myself, I trust that I will find some adjustment that will make my new features click together. There were many times this week where I just stared into the window, thinking up of all the game mechanics I have ever observed, and letting my mind dance to the song of a thousand "What if?"s.

Maybe I will have to backtrack my steps a little bit. However, I have one very central idea first and foremost - I want this game to be about mind over matter, and thus, the classic concept of HP points, wounds and physical death simply doesn't cut it.

They say that ideas are a dime a dozen in game development, but I'd gladly buy a batch or two right now...