It's not a disaster.
I have a few announcements to make regarding the future of my game in development, Bound City. First: Bound City has a trailer! Behold. Second: Bound City has a store page up on Steam! The current estimated release date isn’t for 2-3 years yet, but I believe the amount of game which exists now is … Read More
For reasons some of you may be familiar with, September was a hell of a month. Along with many other independent game developers I was knocked significantly off-track by Unity’s antics, and it’s something of an open question exactly how big of a problem that will continue to be. I’ll dive more into that a … Read More
Most of this month was taken up working on tweaks and changes to the dialogue system, which is definitely not how I had hoped to spend this time. One fix to the system required another more fundamental fix, which led to bugs, which required fixes which themselves required other fixes to the core system to … Read More
Around the start of July, I went on a trip for a couple of weeks. I mention this to explain why this is another two-month DevBlog: When a trip like this coincides with the start of the month, it’s easy to get distracted from posting updates while I prepare for the trip, and then once … Read More
I’ve been feeling a little unenthusiastic about writing these posts recently. By “recently” I mean that I’ve been feeling it gradually over the last few years, and more acutely over the last few weeks. There are a few reasons for this: One reason is that I can’t escape the sensation that I’m repeating myself a … Read More
It’s been an exciting and frustrating month as I keep running ahead and getting pulled back. This is the first time in quite a while I’ve gotten to focus on seriously expanding the game rather than just refining and polishing a narrow slice of it, which is both exhilarating and mildly panic-inducing as I struggle … Read More
One of the most hazardous unquestioned assumptions of game design is that a game should be balanced. Don’t get me wrong, it certainly can be an issue if one tool is too strong, or many tools too weak, particularly in competitive settings. However, it isn’t inherently so: An option can be seemingly useless and still … Read More
I find randomness a fascinating topic. Core to many game designs, a hint of randomization can cause the possibility space to explode in many directions, create a sense of mystery and possibility, and convert simple puzzles with straightforward solutions into complex challenges with many varied strategies and angles of approach. The most interesting thing about … Read More
After Slay the Spire released into Early Access in 2017 and was one of the best-designed games ever made, a wave of roguelike deckbuilders inevitably followed. Most of these were, I would say, pretty uninteresting — Slay the Spire excels not just due to its solid core mechanics, but the complex finely-tuned interactions of its … Read More
Well, my assumption was that after finishing the demo, I’d be mostly taking the month away from Bound City to focus on other things. That didn’t happen so much for two reasons: First, the feedback from the demo and bugs uncovered in playtesting felt like they needed to be addressed, so a significant portion of … Read More