Things Happen in a Place

 Negative consequences are a great space! They can even be enjoyable when wallowing in them is visceral, memorable (things like the wrath of chickens in Zelda); but they can be just plain annoying if they're mechanically crippling (things like Resurrection Sickness in WoW; experience-loss-on-death in Diablo 2).  My proposal is basically that punishments should provoke more of a smilingly rueful feeling than a frustrated or stymied one. In a game where social interaction is a big important loop, and characters react  to you, I think there's a lot of room for fun. Here are some ideas for harmless oofs you can have. Things that can happen (a)when you tweak off an NPC, (b)when you fail in a way or condition that demands consequence, (c)when you behave like a general ass, or (d)when foul things conspire to roost in your life. In many of these cases, there's an opportunity for NPCs to recognize what's happening to you in funny ways. Punishment shoes: For a real life minute,

 Valheim does a decent job of being a Viking architecture simulator. You can build whatever you want with the logs and stones and walls and roof pieces provided, and it'll even fall down if you try to cheat physics too hard. Then you can walk around inside your structure and see the views and the way the light comes through, and it's lovely. We're probably not doing that, so I'm not sure why I'm mentioning it. It's just to peek out at one end of a spectrum. The other end of the spectrum is... shoot, I don't know. SimCity? You put down pre-made buildings (when you're not just zoning land), and you don't customize any of them. The choice lies in how you're laying things out on a grand scale, and how many fire stations you think you need or whatever. We're also not doing that. Then there's... I'm reaching my limits here. Animal crossing? Where it's not about the architecture per se, but much more about how you decorate a given space?

 I'm eager to start getting into things. I'm thinking about a testbed where we can just walk around, start tuning movement and messing with visuals. Unfortunately I have some important actual work to get through first :-P But yeah I'm looking forward to making a pleasant little place, and then to start working on combat, building, terrain, and resources. There's a lot to learn. Oh also multiplayer? I'll need to figure that out. I'm excited. I am curious about how to build a proper multiplayer action game in Unity. By "curious about how" I mean "wondering if it's even possible or a good idea" but I'm sure we can make something happen. Ooof. Itchy fingers. But have to do real work...

I derive joy from a game when I am swept up in it.  I imagine this is widely appealing: you move among the art, and catch a glimmer going that way, so you trace its path, and follow it into strange territories, and those territories are brimming full, maybe inscrutable, but rewardingly loved out by whoever made them. Unnecessarily beautiful. Unnecessarily beautiful. This is, I think, what's essentially captivating about Breath of the Wild, Might and Magic,  and  Stardew Valley.   Spanning geography in BotW and Might and Magic  will put you in exhilarating locations, in front of chests and troves that feel as if they were hidden just for you. These games give you viscerally thrilling opportunities to safely observe titan creatures you have no hope of fighting. You'll discover artifacts and pieces to stories that you may not fully understand, and these make the world vivid to you, and real. In Stardew , following some of your initial play-experience which feels more like the a

I've been playing a lot of colony sims to see if I can squeeze some juice out of them. It's a mixed bag, but I think I can say that a lot of these games rely (way too much, but nevertheless it's at least effective for some players) on the systems. Learning systems is interesting (again, to some players more than others) and the complexity, novelty, and applicability (or mappability to the real world?) of a system can make it more interesting. So, I'd like to start thinking about what kinds of systems to include. One thing that I think it pretty important  in a system game is getting the complexity and granularity right, and another thing I think is important is novelty. Everyone is familiar with the minecraft breakdown of the universe, so if you copy that you get familiarity, but you lose novelty, and therefore the system won't be fun to learn. Oxygen Not Included succeeds in some ways by being a bathroom simulator. it's a lot about sanitation and designing sani

We want to make another game, as a studio. And it's not the same as when we started working on Wildermyth, because with Wildermyth, there was that convenient shared spark. Fantasy X-Com, hell yeah, I'm in. We wouldn't have done it otherwise. But this time, there's already a studio here with half a dozen team members. There's an audience, there's a reputation. And for some reason, that is totally paralyzing/wrecking me. So I'm trying to find a place to explore—figure out what I'm excited about making. Maybe some other people can explore that sort of thing too, if it sounds fun to them. This is the No Pressure Zone. I don't want to start off on the wrong foot by listing things I'm scared of, or things I'm not excited about. I'm not going to forget those things; they're stomping around in my head all the damn time. But I do want to draw places that I would want to spend time in, or weird creatures I would want to tame, or a house I woul