It is a lovely night at the observatory and horrible things lurk in the woods….

Over a year ago I was playing Signal Simulator and was wondering to myself about the idea of making a game like that. While jotting down some ideas I stumbled across The Librarian’s playthrough of Voices of the Void on YouTube. I hadn’t heard of it before and I was very intrigued by what I saw. After watching some episodes I eventually downloaded and played the game myself. It was a huge burst of inspiration and I immediately got to work solidifying my idea.

The thing is, I’ve not produced a game before. At least, I’ve never done anything public, and nothing more complicated than a few simple experiments and one-offs for school projects that will never see the light of day. Despite having formal education in game development and software development, this was new territory and it was incredibly daunting. But I’m not about to let that stop me.

I’m creating this in the Godot Engine and there is a demo in the works that I really hope to put out soon. The banner above is a screenshot from the current iteration of the demo. The job simulation part needs a bit of a rework though. The player does all of their work on these in-game desktop computers, using a mouse and keyboard to plug in coordinates and scan for signals.

The thing is, that’s not very satisfying gameplay. What sounded good in my head and on paper did not translate to actual fun in practice. The other two games make heavy use of more physical affordances. You flip switches to turn certain things on and off. You turn a dial to home in on a particular frequency. You press a button to switch polarity modes. And in the case of Voices of the Void there’s physical storage mediums to insert into the consoles to copy and process data and send back to headquarters for money.

There’s a lot to be said about the physical actions one takes to perform a task in a game. There’s a huge sense of satisfaction from interacting with something as simple as a button that has an immediate impact on the task the player is performing. You feel like you’re actually accomplishing something and moving progress forward. Compare that to just clicking a few buttons on a simulated operating system to make the numbers go brrrrrr. It might be accurate, but it sucks for immersion. That said, I need to figure out just what the setup is going to look like.

You might be wondering about the title. It’s obviously just a placeholder until I can think of what to call this project. This post was meant to be partially an announcement and partially a way to get some thoughts out of my head and maybe get some feedback if anyone out there has any thoughts on what I’m doing.

And that’s about it for now. I’m very nervous about all of this, but I’m determined.

So many ideas. So much work to do.

Until next time.