GB Studio Central just published a post mortem I wrote on Yurivania 3: Circle of the Polycule!
In it I extol the virtues of markdown as an all-in-one game production tool and I lament the dangers of conflating "easy" with "quick"!
#life after yurivania
Coming away from my #life after yurivania research, I've had some practices validated and I've set some new goals.
Current practices to continue~
️ Keep making queer comfortcore monster content.- ⏳ Keep my games short, 30 minutes to 3 hours.
- 1️⃣ Keep my games single player.
- ∑ Keep my games in ongoing series.
- ⚒ Keep making games consistently.
- 🎼 Keep working with others on soundtracks.
- 🖊 Keep creating plugins and how-tos to help the community.
🎯 New goals to seek~
- Focus on my players.
- 👥 Get to know who they are and how many of them there are.
- 🌿 Give them more options to support me.
- 💬 Be more accessible online.
- 🚇 Get more involved locally.
- Build my skills.
- 🎨 Train my visual art abilities.
- 🔊 Put more focus into sound effects.
- ⌨ Work on porting.
- ⏱ Find non-monetary metrics to track my growth.
- Sharpen my game designs.
- ① Design each game to have one main point.
- 🧰 Design no more than 9 mechanics per game.
- ✂ Design around not implementing features.
- 📅 Design games that can be finished in a year or less.
Old practices to revive~
- 👟 Start using sprints again.
- 👀 Start using code review again.
- 🔁 Seek player feedback early and iterate.
In my last post I examined the scope of a subset of NES games in detail to see what solo developers could learn.
Now that we have a better understanding of what these games did, I want to talk a bit about what they didn't do.
After this, I want to re-ask myself if using these games as a guide makes sense for bedroom devs, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on the subject.
tl;dr 👈
Here's what I learned:
- ✂ Set limits. Preproduction includes identifying modern features to not implement.
- Including anything that they didn't means doing work that they didn't.
- ⏱ Less is more. For solo devs, short games beat long ones.
- ① Promise only one thing. Identify what is most crucial in your game to minimize time and money spent elsewhere.
- 🔁 Polish what you promise. Know what you're delivering, and put your time and money there.
- 👥 Know your players. Ask what assets and content they care about, and put your time and money there.
- 🙋 Be sure you like this approach. Early NES games don't always mean small or quick!
In my last post I began looking at a subset of NES games as potential scope models for solo game devs, especially bedroom devs.
The idea was that modern tools might balance out a lack of budget.
In this post we'll break the monolithic data table down and see if we can draw some focused conclusions.
tl;dr 👈
To match Black Box Era games a developer should expect to:
- 💰 Move fast. Spend no more than one year on any one game.
- 🦠 Focus efforts. Promise either a great narrative or great mechanics, not both.
- 🖌 Put effort where it matters. Downplay environmental detail in exchange for detailed player characters and enemies. Emphasize sound effects rather than music.
- ⚖ Scope by Genre
- 📘 Narrative Games (including RPGs and MacVentures) are always big, with 2K to 10K words and more visual and audio content than other genres.
- 🛡 RPGs need at least 400 screens-worth of explorable space, at least 40 distinct enemy types, around 40 items/equipment, and 10 or fewer NPC types.
- 🏰 Metroidvanias need at least 500 screens-worth of explorable space and at least 14 well-defined mechanics, but don't require RPG elements.
- 🦘 Platformers (non-Metroidvania) need 200 screens-worth of playable space, generally across 12ish levels, with about 30 enemy types and around 16 collectables/power ups. Expect to write less than 500 words and to have few NPCs.