float on

getaways

I have a hard time relaxing and doing nothing. Well, that's not precisely true. I can certainly spend time achieving nothing; playing games, scrolling endlessly, pottering around the house. But actually allowing myself time to let my mind be unoccupied is not a regular activity. Often it requires me literally transplanting myself away from my house, to sever that connection to the regular timesinks. When I was working on game development in the Northern Territory, I spent a bit of cash renting a room from Salty Games (developers of upcoming muster simulator, Pasture. Then I left all my dev stuff in that room so that I had to physically leave my house and go to the room to do any dev work. Distractions still existed, of course, but they were welcome ones (always fun to have Nathan and Luke around to talk game mechanics and old-school RTS).

Anyway, all of this is to say that sometimes it's good to get away from it all, which is what I did over the Easter weekend when we were invited to go out to Rottnest with my wife's family. For those not from around Perth, Rottnest (Wadjemup) is an island off the coast of Perth around an hour or so by ferry, which is full of little marsupials named quokkas. It's a fun place to hang out, go for walks and rides, and just generally chill out. So, when I wasn't doing the above, I spent a couple of hours thinking about what to do with WLDiG.

th-ink-ing

To be clear, I don't want this to sound like a LinkedIn lunatics post: I genuinely only thought about WLDiG for a couple of hours. The rest of the time I was having an excellent time with Lou's family (who are awesome). But I did have what appears at first blush to be a little bit of a breakthrough in terms of theming and context for the game, which is something I've had trouble with so far.

Generally I've thought of WLDiG as a system-based game. Something like a Satisfactory where the lore is kind of there, but only as a means of spicing up what is fundamentally a game about finding cool ways of mining, making factories, and and generating electricity to do both of those things better. The problem is that WLDiG will by necessity be a much smaller game in scope including mechanics, so theming and lore will play a much larger part in keeping players invested.

For the theme I've previously thought that a generic wizard/sorcery/fantasy tower with a slight MTV-ish, 90s theme would be fun to play around. And it still might! I actually think that kind of hipster vibe works. But I've also started thinking about making this an art gallery-themed game, and it centres around the idea of ink.

art and/is pain

Ink as a resource is a pretty compelling solution to both theme and lore. This is how I imagine some of the systems may play out:

Introduction and painting creation:

Small activities while the painting(s) are looping:

Main activity while painting(s) are looping:

Sliiight left turn on that last one, huh. I think that having a high-tempo or different activity to perform while things are being chipped away in the background is an interesting mechanic for games. Village sim/hack-and-slash Cult of the Lamb does this, as does factory maker/survival exporation sim Satisfactory. It seems a very smart way to push and pull players. I'm very aware that two great tastes do not always taste great together, so I'm going to be developing the shooter and idle parts of the game compatibly, but separately for now.

Hopefully soon I can have some more to say about it, but it's a bit late and I'm into the first weekend of my shift so things are getting busy. Sleep time!