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First blog post, year – 2024,

I have a lot to say about games, but I’m not sure what I want to say. To start I’ll keep it simple — Favorite games, I’ll follow that with what I want to design in games.

Favorite Games! For me favorite games are simply the ones that gave me certain intensity of feeling. All of them include a mix of *This is novel and amazing*, *This is done so well*, and a draw that I’m not going to put it down for a few hours, or days…..

In order of remembering them.

Myst
The Outer Wilds
Warcraft 3
Hades
Guitar Hero
Shadow of the Colossus
Final Fantasy 9
Half-life Alyx
Demon Souls
Morrowind
Phasmophobia
Portal
Valheim
Hollow Knight
Inscryption
Space Engineers
Overwatch 1
Orcs Must Die

There are more but this is enough. Any thoughts on any of them? Do you hate any of them?

Now for what I want to design. Some of these are discrete and some are larger concepts but every one of them are important to me in a game.

Continuity, things that make sense for the world, character, story, or mechanics. It’s the worst when I’m reading a book series and 3 books in the main character develops a habit that contradicts who they are. All of a sudden they have intimate knowledge of computers when they have never touched a keyboard in their life AND made a point of saying so in book 1… This is an important point. Typically you box yourself in with these things. Don’t do it, say more about what people already know and less about things that don’t matter. Then! assert something new, surprising, and that perfectly fits the world. This is the cabbage man rule.

A magic system, one day, in one game (at least), I’ll give players a soft magic system they deserve. (I’ll do a post on this someday)

Mechanics and systems, I have fun working through how systems could be improved or give a novel experience. I like thinking about what is random? How can we introduce random into a game without using a random number generator.

Feelings I want to put into games, -Bittersweet -Calm focus -learning something that makes sense -Finding something curious. All of my favorite games do this and I don’t think I’ll directly be able to make the elements game that induce these feelings until I work on a few short stories.

The genres I like to work on are Fantasy, Sci-fi, Puzzle, Exploration. Along with most of the sub-genres that fall under sci-fi or fantasy. Mechs, I’d love to make a mech game.

Ok, that’s all for now. Catch’ya later