"Oh," said the beautiful woman who moments ago had been a frog. "Okay."
"I'm confused," I said. "You told me you were a prince?"
"I was. This is... new."
"Did we mess up breaking the spell? Did I kiss you wrong, somehow?"
"No, I think things went right. Very, very right!"
Now Completely Voided
- she/her, it/its
Pen name: Delila H. Smith (the H is silent). Thirtysomething trans lesbian, snugglemuffin, girlthing. Devil but in like a catgirl sort of way, perennial emotional wreck, too gay for this. Minors, please don't follow.
carrd with social media links (always up to date)
dizzythevoid.carrd.co/fediverse
goblin.band/@DizzyTheVoidsoundcloud
soundcloud.com/user-615514421
i touched on this a bit in my rollback post, but to me this is the defining problem of game dev and i wish we talked about it more. here are some partial solutions i've found:
- tool momentum
you get faster at making stuff when you stick with the same tools, whether that be an engine, framework, or level editor. in my case it's haxepunk.
- code reuse
greatly facilitated by tool reuse!
- asset reuse
i love asset reuse, and you can do it cleverly (see: MBAACC). love eternal weaves asset reuse into the plot in a way i think worked really nicely.
- collaboration
this can help a lot, but you have to design your game in such a way that collaborators can slot their work in easily. there's also additional overhead from having to coordinate stuff between people. that said, being accountable to other people and getting to share your enthusiasm with each other goes a long way to making the creative process more sustainable.
- multiplayer
like collaboration, there's some upfront work it adds, but i think depending on the design of the game you can milk a lot of meat out of multiplayer (impressing myself with how gross a turn of phrase this is). see my rollback post for more on this.
- sequels
aka the touhou strategy. this is kind of like the final form of code/asset reuse. i never actually do this (besides car cowboy 2 lol) but it seems like a very viable strategy.
- genre specialization
this is sort of a softer version of making sequels, but you get quicker at making games when you work within the same genre. the downside is you can get bored with it...
- procedural generation...?
ostensibly an obvious tactic but from my experience it's very hard to actually design a good procedural game... and i've only truly enjoyed like two or three roguelikes tops. still trying to crack this nut.
- user-generated content
making good tools is actually a lot of work, so you need a decently sized community to break even. i haven't had luck with this so far, but maybe someone else could.
- designing for repeat play
kind of adjacent to the roguelike thing, but i think this is a wider umbrella of ways you can design games that make them conducive to repeat play, whether that's speedrunning, alternate endings, difficulty options, etc.
these are just ten strategies i've come up with over the years, but i'd be really curious to hear what other people have to add. lemme know what you think!
The Yurivania series has only been possible because of the efficiency gained by leveraging these.
And as a bonus, each game is leaps and bounds better than the one before it since skills, knowledge, and many hours of work get carried forward!
The other night I had a dream which tried to recreate one of my Jenny Everywhere WIPs from first principles. The Man in Grey ended up as a hostage from some unspecified and possibly nonexistent villain. 2B and 9S were there.
