sharks + planes as formerly seen on Twitter

rules of game development

• "no artistic skills" isn't real. you have an aesthetic sense and the necessary tools to act upon it. ignore the flinch and find your own good-enough
• "no budget" is very real tho. godot is free and good-enough in most cases (though i refuse to use it because i'm cantankerous and think nodes are bad); unity is free in the same sense that objects from a cursed shop are free; monogame/fna are free as long as you're willing to pay six months of your time up-front.
• for non-engine work, my toolset is audacity (free), bfxr (free), glimpse (free but defunct), aseprite (20 bucks and worth it), visual studio (free), notepad (free). if you wanna do 3d modeling i hear blender is Fine
• 3d isn't necessarily harder, it's just a different skillset. the big caveat with 3d is that you have much less control over what the player sees and where they go. level design is an exercise in signposting. learn how to graybox; play with cubes a ton.
• start small. no, smaller. no, even smaller than that. your first game should be no more than 30 seconds; your second, no more than three minutes; your third, no more than fifteen. finishing a project is ten times as important as starting one, and scale is completely unrelated to quality. my best piece of pure design work is a project that takes less than four minutes to play.
• read A Burglar's Guide to the City by geoff manaugh. then The City & the City by china mieville. then Going Postal by terry pratchett
• a game only exists in the player's head. the systems you create do not matter; only the ways in which they are interpreted by the player. any sufficiently complex backend system is indistinguishable from a random number generator
• games which only exist in conversation with other games are boring. steal from every aspect of your life, every tiny fascinating thing, and use that as fuel to create something wholly new. you're still allowed to make a mario clone for practice tho
• good luck!

Rarely have I ever been so grateful to have a late Tết, this year I might actually be able to relax, reflect, and prepare properly???

"Humanity" is the best game I played this year. It is so good I am making this post just to tell you about it. As a one-sentence summary, it's "Lemmings" except that the lemmings are the entire human population of Earth. There is a Shiba Inu (you). The game is available on Steam and Playstation.

The game is a collaboration between Tetsuya Mizuguchi (from Rez), Yugo Nakamura (a legendary graphic designer and Flash artist), and Tha (the firm that designed this public toilet in Shibuya, Tokyo). The music is by "Jemapur" and is a reactive soundtrack that constantly surprises without ever distracting (okay, one song distracted, but there's a button to skip to a different song). The visuals are so simple they're practically a Unity default project but the game finds ways to make its very simple primitives look constantly stunning, and delights in finding as many ways as possible to use "a particle engine made of people" for a cool visual effect. You are also allowed to give your humans hats.

In the game, you (a Shiba Inu) drop various kinds of barks that direct an endless stream of walking humans in various ways. The game allots you different barks in different levels, which allows it to achieve one of my favorite game design tricks: emulating many different genres in a single game without ever altering the mechanics, only the dynamics. Depending on the level structure and the available verbs Humanity veers between a clockwork-building tile puzzle game, a freeform 3D action puzzler, a stealth game, or an action RTS. Almost everything it tries works, and bouncing between all the different ideas the game has is a real roller coaster. Meanwhile the humans themselves keep surprising you, moving like an organic crowd of people or a fluid in ways that constantly pull you back from viewing the maps as just tiles and blocks. The game constantly surprises and even once it's done there's a wealth of optional levels and a giant repository of online UGC puzzles. I played this game months ago but I'm still thinking about it.