Plans for 2025 (written on the week of Thanksgiving 2024)

2024's been a rough year. I'm American, so you might already know what I mean when I say this.

Sometime in the summer, I've seriously thought about quitting games. There were a lot of reasons why, but it all boiled down to my inability to connect with people. I've been saying/thinking recently "I'm DONE being esoteric!" My feelings on games mirrored my feelings on life, in which the most interesting people and things I've interacted with always had a type of "barrier" or non-traditional system. That "system" could be language, dress code, behaviour, sexuality, upbringing, etc. I've always appreciated people who avoid the path less taken. Personally, the way I design games is that I like adding frustrating elements. For Etehfowr Against 1, it was controlling two characters and the timer system. For Distopia, it was controlling two characters at once and managing a map. People still liked Etehfowr Against because of it's clear goals (beat the other team). People disliked Distopia because it's goals are very unclear (get frogs, lead them, manage a map, wait till time runs out.)

After some time with working on friends on game jam projects, watching movies, and visiting the Aureia Harvey exhibit at Museum of Moving Image, I thought "Maybe the first step to making a game, is not thinking in algorhithims, or what's popular, or what's considered 'good design'." So here's what I'm gonna bullet point as game design tips that I should do best to remind myself of when I'm working on something.

Good majority of people on reddit are extremely insular. go on r/Games or r/movies and you start to realize why that film meme of "Written by Reddit"
it had to take for a shitty fuckhead billionaire to buy twitter to finally get people (including me) to realize game design discourse is anxiety-fueled.
after visiting the exhibit, Aureia Harvey is one of the most underrated game designers of all time. I didn't like Sunset, but the racist bullying towards Tale of Tales has done a massive disservice to games. The Path is goat, The Endless Forest is goat.
just because it's on a browser or phone doesnt mean its not a "real game".
Keep it pure.
I remember reading an interview with a devloper from Falcom (creators of YS) and for ys 1-2 they really started with perfecting movement. Movement is important.
Try to see the good in a "bad game". Playing E.T for the Atari 2600 made me realize that game has a lot of interesting stuff no one gives it credit for. Open world, movement + scoring system that rewards being intentional, fun little sidequests. It's a tough game and the collisions + pits make it hard but the game is cool.
Kill your ego. It's not about you.

I will try to live up to these bullet points as best as I can going into 2025.

What Am I working on?

Currently I'm working on the next Etehfowr Against (EFA) game. It'll be a 2v2 puppet-fighter like the last one. I'm expecting to finish the prototype by the end of year, and getting into full production in January. I've been mostly touch and go with the input buffer during the whole year, as that was the one thing I was worried about the most. After my spring semester ended and a break from developing, I got back to work on it (a little in september, but heavy lifting in October). I'm currently in a reading/film intensive class so that takes up a lot of time currently. What I'm expecting for the prototype to have by end of year:

Ring out system

3 stage arcade mode

4 player functionality.

I've switched to animating in procreate dreams, an app for Ipad. Distopia was animated frame by frame with iArtbook, and due to the conflicting art styles between my stuff and Andy's stuff (AndyAndo is a great artist! I just gave really bad art direction!) there was a disconnect with the visuals. For EFA, The idea is to switch to a tween/rig animation. I've been looking at vanilla ware games + been looking at that Shank GDC video. In 2022, I tried to learn 3d modeling so that I can iterate on animating faster. This was for a chainsaw-man fan game that didn't work out. Also, the 3d model looked nothing like chainsaw-man. For a while, I was hesitant to do tweening because growing up in the 2010's newgrounds era, it was considered bad form to animate with rigs. Of course, the reason is that solely relying on tweens is just no good. The Idea is that it'll primarily be used for inbetween frames.