Inspirations and exploring new ideas
I’ve been feeling tired today. I did a casual 12k run in the morning at a not-too-hurried pace of 6:10 minutes per kilometer. I’m sure it adds to my tiredness, combined with not-so-great sleep lately. At least I ran 28k this week, which makes it an average week for running.
I read through the devlog series of Mars After Midnight by Lucas Pope. It’s not a long series, but it’s full of interesting details about the game’s development and how Pope approaches problems. For instance, I had never thought about scene graphing with Blender or Photoshop. This is an approach I’m going to consider using myself in the future. I’d also love to write such a technical and detail-oriented devlog. Especially because this Substack has evolved more into sharing my experiences of moonlighting as a game dev while having a full-time job as a software developer. When I get the Valley development for Playdate properly rolling, I might turn it into a similar devlog series. I’m quite excited about the idea.
An idea for simulation/strategy/management game where you lead a city state has been going around in my head the past few days. In the game, you collect and allocate resources for farming, construction and military and handle trading resources with other nearby cities. With procedurally generated story events which will create a bit of narrative and history for your state.
In terms of gameplay, it’s very inspired by King of Dragon Pass, but I’d make it more visual by bringing in elements from Civilization and Old World. Since Old World also has story events, the idea is kind of a combination of King of Dragon Pass and Old World.
The plan is to test the idea quickly and implement a simple prototype to see if the basic loop is actually fun and engaging enough for me. I was recently reminded how rough the early Slay the Spire prototypes looked. If you’ve forgotten, check out this YouTube video:
For the prototype of the city state game idea, I’m going for stick-figure-level roughness. I drew a limited tileset in under three minutes and got my LDtk exporter into good use for this project. Remind me to post about Godot addon management in the future. I think there’s a lot to improve and it could be loads better than it currently is. I’d like to take a deep dive into it and figure out the details and future plans for it.
Valley development hasn’t actively progressed. I’ve been casually reading and checking out Playdate development but haven’t done any actual work on it. I think the next step would be to figure out the technical limitations the project might have on Playdate and whether those affect the design of the game.
Cheers and until next time,
Markus