“9-5” by Dolly Parton
This week is very busy. I am still looking for the next right role in infrastructure (games or non-games); however, I only spend about 15% of time searching/interviewing. I was incredibly lucky to talk to the amazing Alessandro Penno on his podcast, “The Party is Full,” which was a therapeutic look at games and a real joy.
I also started an Alumni Discord for anyone who used to be a member of the TTWO Interactive or Zynga family and the reachouts are now averaging about 3 a day with the Discord up to 30 people and more who haven’t yet joined.
Truthfully there are a lot of opportunities I come across that don’t make sense for me (location/domain being the biggest factor), but make a lot more sense for others. If you want an invite please ping me on LinkedIn as it is easier to get you into Discord with others. Another 20% of my time has been fixing my house. Thankfully I am now in the “7 dehumidfiers have been removed and the floor has been torn out” stage. And another 15% is diving into GPUs in Kubernetes – real deep learning.
Back to the game… I spend 50% of my time using agentic workflows and Claude because I really want to understand what this future looks like. While my use case is games in this post, ultimately what I am studying is inputs, outputs, workflows and, well, trying to search for the truth in what engineering really looks like across the board – frontend, backend, you name it.
Wonderlum Now has Cooking
Not dissimilar to Tomagotchis, if you do not feed your pets in the world of Mossbloom they become very unhappy. Here, pet stats drop by 50% which make battle expeditions hard unless they are decked out.
Cooking solves this problem by enabling players to create treats that give both health and wellbeing. You can make cakes which give slices you can feed all your pets as needed or can be eaten by the party to feed everyone at once. You can make treats which are about as much sustenance as a Disney treat, and you can also make hearty items that must be eaten in 2 hours yet fully feed a pet.
What…are…Battle Expeditions?
Oh right! Wonderlum now also has battle expeditions which are more like “stupid simple dungeon pet battles.” Intended as a casual experience, you can defeat mini-bosses for prizes. There are also easy and hard modes represented by day and night. I plan to build more of these and expand on the concept but for now they represent the entire reason you’d want to raise pet stats.
I had the wonderful privilege of talking to a player of pet games for an hour to better understand what people like and it turns out simple person-vs-npc experiences is still ideal for this audience. My goal is to get this right and it is probably the hardest thing in the game so far to design so I am taking my time. More iterations to come.
2 New Mini-Games: Egg Rescue & Pyramid Tarot
There are so many mini-games you can make in a game like this, but I’m honing in on the ones that tend to work well casually and excuses to play with different libraries. One is a physics-based, procedural puzzler Egg Rescue where you must save owl eggs. If you’ve been following along, this game needs more owls because my daughter said so.
If you get to level 10 in Egg Rescue you specifically get ingredients in addition to charms (the currency) which aid in cooking.
The other mini-game is a twist on classic Pyramid but with a 78 card deck because it’s mixed with the major and minor arcana of Tarot titled Pyramid Tarot. I prototyped many different variants of this and landed on still doing the classic “pair 13” model but due to that you get a super fun slot-machine like chaining effect that had my husband playing up until 9 PM.
My favorite part in prototyping is you can immediately also run simulations using Claude (Opus 5.5) and got a simulated win rate of 51.4% with Pyramid Tarot and 24.9% with classic tarot. And of course, you can also win a chest for clearing the pyramid.
What’s Next
Realistically, I will be spending more time on my job hunt soon so we will see how fast development goes when I adjust for that. However… if you asked me what I still want to build it is quite a lot. Everything from forgecasting, which is enchanting items so that their impacts affects mini-games, battle expeditions and more. To “less-intense” farming to more battle expeditions, another mini-game based on string puzzlers, and making pets more customizable (arguably the largest time sync) – it is not a small list.
All this to stay I still haven’t picked out a real name for Wonderlum that I want to trademark, so let’s just go with a big shout out of ye olde “Copyright Molly Sheets 2026” on all things related to Wonderlum until I get this sorted. To those who sent me referrals for sound designers – you rock. That part needs so much help.
