GameDev

One of the things I don’t like about many “clicker” style incremental games is that they require too much clicking. I’ll literally make my wrist sore trying to click faster.

If I’m playing with an audio slider, I want to hear the feedback immediately so I can pick the right level quickly. So I set out to make my settings apply immediately.

I currently have a few types of resources in my game, such as InventoryItem, and Upgrade that store basic data and textures for these concepts. I have found several use cases where trying to access specific resources or resource values has caused me problems. Most of these use cases arise when needed during dynamic access at runtime to these resources, meaning that they are not embedded into a node or resource’s @export property. Resources attached to a property are managed well by Godot’s editor. ...

I’m going a bit more technical than usual with this post as I’m going to be sharing some of this information with others anyways. Two birds with one stone and all of that… Resources are data containers. They don’t do anything on their own: instead, nodes use the data contained in resources. I won’t be reviewing Resources themselves, so if you need more info, please read more from the Godot documentation. ...

My partner doesn’t play any video games, so explaining them can sometimes be difficult. The genre “Crafting Survival” doesn’t mean much to someone who doesn’t game, even though just about every parent knows what Minecraft is. So I started saying that I’m playing a “tree chopping” game—because you chop trees and build stuff. I’ve played a lot of tree choppers, and honestly, the amount of effort put into making the tree chopping feel satisfying is really important to the game. On the low end of the spectrum for satisfying tree chopping is Timberborn, a game about beavers chopping trees and building a city. The beavers aren’t chopping or even gnawing the trees. They just kind of stand there until the wood is collected. ...

I subscribe to the notion that everyone has ideas, but it’s the execution that is difficult. Well, sometimes the ideas are difficult too.

I’ve been talking about my struggles with board game design. I really like the appeal of the board game design space. Its dependence on physical objects constrains the space in a meaningful way. I would think this might make it easier to design something interesting, as the scope is typically limited by what individual people can or are willing to deal with in order to play a physical game. There may be some truth to that idea; however, it certainly hasn’t helped me. I am always impressed at game designers who are able to abstract really concrete ideas, like flying a spaceship or cooking food, into the movement of cards or small components around a table ...