“Watch Me“ by K/DA, League of Legends, Mimi Webb, Sophie Powers
It has dawned on me that working in the client is not conducive to going back into an infrastructure job, but it is certainly fun – and well it’s on my own dime.
I had a few amazing conversations with industry friends about where the future of games is going and what is the future for its people. It seems there are only two options offered – leave the industry to still do some of what you love if you can or find a job under someone else in games while US jobs continue to be punted out of the country.
This is a new frontier – find money wherever you can demonstrate value, keep learning, and make whatever you want. You deserve to work for people who see the full scope of who you are and who you can become and accept nothing less than that as a finality. It doesn’t mean it is easy to find or that in this moment you will. Hang in there.
The thing I’m most disappointed with right now is AI has given us all this potential to create new, bolder, and more imaginative experiences while supporting each other. Instead we’re seeing, in some cases, the worst of the worst – every man for himself. I know it’s a phase, but good products no matter what tools we use – they take time. They take time because engaging with people and building trust takes time.
I sure wish we hadn’t stopped paying for that by breaking so much of it with each other. That’s probably the core to what I’m hoping to find out. AI is staying – what is the trust economy after a world where we broke it?
Slowly building and using AI in every side of the stack is helping me understand that this isn’t where it ends. Perhaps after a lot of forgiveness and apologies across colleagues, friends, players, and companies we will find a world where things are more secure than they ever were, more stable, better performing, everyone is more educated about what each person ever even did, employed, and better quality because we invested in the people and gave them the time to care about each other instead of trying to do more with less.
Building Pensively
Back to the “I am warning you this will be renamed” game Wonderlum – it now has another mini-game called the “Astronomy Tower” which is for fans who like to untangle knots in real life and all the layers of meaning that phrase includes. Players have a lot of freedom to reshape each constellation since points are not locked.
This design allows for each puzzle to be procedurally generated and get progressively more challenging, while it can still be played as a meditative experience. Time taken only denotes bonus points and extra currency.
Mechanics as Customizations instead of Customizations for The Sake of Them
When I look at a lot of AI generated games right now, many are shotgunning short “hyper-casual” experiences out the door over a weekend or a few weeks – not necessarily thinking through the value of a mechanic or how to build on it for the player. I hope to change that.
Forgecasting is part of that goal – it is an enchanting like experience that lets you modify mini-games, parts of the world, or experiences based on what a pet is wearing by “casting” a spell onto an item.
For example – “Time Cycle” makes the chance world events can happen to every 15 minutes in the game instead of every 30. There are scrolls that give you an extra draw slot in Pyramid Tarot or an extra egg in Egg Rescue. All of these dramatically change the player experience while leaving it customizable.
Designing for Serendipity
I’ve learned from pet-game player interviews that what they are looking for are habitual experiences, and that anything too negative can feel extra punishing when tied to things out of their control. For example, players really hate the stealing mechanics in Neopets from random events because they are too punishing.
It dawned on me that games could be doing a lot more with random events to drive serendipity, so the game now has 9 of them that can occur during day or night depending on the event and most of them are beneficial – for example you can learn a new ForgeSpell (Inspiration) or you can wish on a shooting star (Void Star).
I still kept some bad events – but they are mitigate-able permanently when a Puffcoon is in your party or preemptively by beating expeditions. I want to thank my friend Seth & his mom for helping provide me with the perspective that let me know how to move forward with this feature.
Continuous Improvement of Expeditions: Enter Boons
I’ve been trying to build out the complexity of expeditions which to me still feel too simple. I’ve added “Boons” to the game which are not dissimilar to healing spells or damage spells in other games, but, instead of them being tied to a talent tree, they are consumable items players can only use in expeditions and go away.
There is still more to do to make these give real “ah hah!” moments instead of feeling like disappointing end game experiences, but I think that’s okay. To create a boon you must “attune” it which is a digital translation similar to the mechanic from the Wavelength board game if it was somehow in a magic-cat-owned-traveling-mender cart. I’ll let you interpret that how you’d like.
Bad Ideas In the Real World Make Great Games
There are some rarer items in the game you cannot buy and the randomness in the more arcade like experiences of “spin the wheel” do not leave enough agency. This is why I created farming. I didn’t want it to be like your typical farming mechanics which at this point is overdone. Most folks do not know that I am a huge fan of Clarkson’s Farm due to its dark humor about farming.
While watching the latest season I was reminded of Jeremy Clarkson’s absolutely idiotic idea to get creative with his tram lines in one of the previous seasons wrecking the ability to properly fertilize his own harvest and thought, “This would make a great game mechanic” which is the secret reason behind why the UI involves tracing – what if that had actually been a good idea?
And of course because farming is now a thing, world events also impact how long it takes for something to grow, whether it is automatically watered, or you can fill a glass bowl to save for later for watering and recipes.
Key Moments to Clench
People who love games know that time-sensitive moments often provide something to look forward to. “Sneak Garden” is best described as a blend mix of reverse-minesweeper mixed with the Snowager from Neopets. You can only enter it three times a day and then you must look for the bugs, which if you are able to get past, you get better and better items…or you may fail like me and just get some cookies.
I want to shoutout to my husband for playtesting this one and suggesting that you should be able to keep going if you are lucky enough to not fail as epically as me with 4 attempts to find them and get extra items if you find multiple bugs in four attempts.
Molly, Go Get a Job
I know. I am going to have >another entire game to release< (gasp) and have to file all the freaking paperwork for it. This was supposed to be for fun not money. Don’t worry, it’s no where near done.
Friends, this is more about my sanity. If this is what it is like between job hunts imagine when veteran game developers attempt to retire – every time I see a game developer say they’ve retired, they just go make more games. That’s not retirement. Epically failing at farming thinking it is an easier job instead of one that is 1000x harder than what you’ve been doing for the last few decades of your career is retirement. Sailing around the world on a lifelong cruise is no longer an option due to gas.
Anyway what’s next is closer to what I’ve been doing in the last 6 years – I plan to put player analytics and performance observability into this game as it now needs a proper FTUE. I think this might be a great opportunity to play around with OTel which I am super looking forward to and the next blog will probably be a little more in that lane than feature-focused for those who are here for the technical specifics than the design.
