itch.io

This is really cool, it’s a great proof of concept

There is only try, success is unnecessary

Check again~ there’s like 27 more days (and 4 hours) Just, yanno, try to start everything inside September.

Do you intend to make an earnest effort to release 19 more games during Sepjember?

There is a feeling that is easy to have when you go to write a game, that you’re going to write the whole game from scratch, 100% novel; and this is a neat thing to try, “outsider art” is capable of escaping the extant perceptions that limit artists working in a genre. It’s also the hardest path, because you can’t learn from existing theory and practice, you have to create the metaphorical universe where an artist inside the space can just buy a bag of flour, a tub of butter, and some apples. If you still want to take the hard road, be my guest, I’m sure you’ll make something cool, but if you want a rest, here are some things to help you build

SRDs

A System Reference Document is an explicit attempt to offer the theory behind game design for others to use. A very useful element of an SRD is that it’s existence explicitly grants permission to use the design work

Here Kyle Tam has compiled 9 SRDs for Dicebreaker, including Lumen, a lightweight fast paced videogamey action system; and Caltrop Core, a hyper lightweight d4 general purpose system. https://www.dicebreaker.com/categories/roleplaying-game/best-games/best-rpg-systems-hack-custom-game-srd

Using an SRD does not mean creating a “clone” of some other game, instead they give you access to a set of tools that will solve many problems, so you don’t have to solve all of the problems yourself; and usually there is a community around the SRD which has tested, refined, and experimented with altering those tools, giving advice and examples for how to use and bend the SRD, again without doing all of the work.

It’s important to remember that we live in a society, and that means we help each other, actively and by existing in other people’s past for them to learn from, stand on, climb above.

Icons

In Sepjember it’s important to keep goals in mind. You could absolutely make a PbtA or FitD game, but those are big systems that ask you to produce quite a lot of stuff to make them work. It is impractical, but not impossible, to make such a large game given our constraints. Also, there is no literal PbtA SRD, instead you look at Apocalypse World and use it as if it were one; or you might use something newer that has already evolved on the ideas in Apocalypse World. This gets a little tricky. Apocalypse World declares itself willing to be derived from, not all games do.

Here are some:

• Alone Among the Stars by Takuma Okada

… I’ll get some more

I like how at a few points new technologies let you totally redesign your board. I ended up with mine mostly empty and even spent a few rounds just tweaking aesthetics. The final board size upgrade seems largely unnecessary unless there are going to be even bigger buildings in the future.

Overall I wish there were more building interactions. Solar panels get better when they touch at least one other solar panel, and farms grow more when they touch a water source. I think you could break the water synergy down into tech unlocks for each water source or farm type, and that could make the tree a little smoother, especially towards the late game when you can unlock a 400 science node every turn or two, with only two observatories. Having synergies for windmills could make them worth building, I built four. You could even have synergies that reduce costs instead of increase products, like putting windmills next to oxygen buildings reduces power consumption, or something.

For a hard mode, you could have building conflicts, like putting a mine next to a water source is bad somehow or contiguous water sources are less effective “because the water table is getting depleted” or something.

I did have a performance issue just before I unlocked the geothermal power, where I had so many solar blocks that picking up, and more so placing every building would take upwards of a second, and if I tried to pick up another building too fast, it would grab the last building again even though the cursor was far away. This went away when I was able to reduce my building count.

Easily 10/10

There isn’t a dedicated discord and I’m not currently in a place to moderate one. However, I am active on the Stop Hack & Roll Discord, which is not really focused but among it’s foundational interests is making games. You don’t need to listen to the SH&R podcast or Protean City Comics (podcast) to be there, but I do think they’re great.

I want to end up with a premade website system that self-assembles, starting with the base game and taking expansions as drop in extensions.

My current intent is a website of 3 columns. Left is a navigation bar, center is game text. Right is split, with an in-browser cards+dice thing on top, and a journaling space below. Ideally in the end this could be played on itch as an embedded game, but protecting the user’s text is a concern.

Activating a pull+roll will cause the center column to reveal only those parts of the game text, and there will be function to insert forms of these into the journal.

The system should facilitate combining atomic chunks of text from all releases, so you could play with WASO’s divisors, MAwU’s ranks, and MAU’s suits, etc; and it should enable changing this configuration on the fly.

Mobile version? I don’t currently know how to release HTML stuff so it is readily accessible to mobile, so until this system is embedded, that’s not an option I am concerned with.

Maybe 6 was too many, maybe it’s christmas. I finally got my first expansion out, We Are Seeds Ourselves. The next new moon is in about two and a half weeks, I don’t think I can get much done in those weeks so I’m complicating the schedule

January 2nd is a Gigadeadline, anything released so far counts towards it, so I’m good, thanks. March 2nd and April 30th are also Gigadeadlines. There are 3. If you need a slower pace, aim bigger.

I’m also going to mark February 2nd as a Gibideadline, which uses powers of 2. This doesn’t mean anything. I’ll try to put a table on the front page.

Fabricate a sense of obligation to motivate you~ 100% voluntary~

I am very excited about the ways this game differs from my assumptions about lyric games while still undoubtedly meeting them!

This site has a huge amount of stuff to do pretty much any kind of thing from web based synth engines to project management systems, to sites that help generate complex diagrams to making websites with various degree of necessary skill and effort. It’s not all free, but a lot is, and there is at least one adobe product in there and some non-adobe plugins for adobe products. It’s highly not adobe though.

https://tinytools.directory

Hello!

I was wondering how you feel about submitting games that are either finished and released prior to joining the jam, or were started before the jam but will presumably be finished during it