Potential game dev advice: COMBINE EVERYTHING
I was writing a personal timeline of my game development learning and history, and then got to this part:
### "Start small" but not pointless
Many advice givers tell you to start small instead of instantly trying to make your dream game. The problem is you may find it either meaningless or that you already are starting small. There's also something cursed about how it's more fun to treat the world and games as hugely unique 'megastructures' that can't be cut into their parts because you feel like you're so far from being able to make it yourself. But, you should split up the task into making 'minigames' for your dream game, you can even present it as a standalone product and combine it later.
That's when I felt I really understood what felt wrong with the 'start small' advice to me. It's that it downscales your ambitions for no reason especially for people shooting for a really big game idea. Many big games can be thought of totally separate 'minigames', and you can gain twice by releasing small parts and being able to reuse them later.
Without a combined universe a one-hit dev's audience is attached more to the game than to the author. My personal body of work has this problem where people even play my games without knowing I've made them, and none feel like a series (unless you really play many of them) because my prior work has no thematic relation or shared universe (except, in a way, for my most recent work). And so I'm thinking that if I had just made a combined universe earlier this would improve the sense of a large work, and that I should not have worried so much about a low quality cringe one. (since if you succeed big they will be thought of as small footnotes)
Now, despite this article being something that's supposed to argue for the value of having all your work be part of 'one whole', there is one hole in the thought process: I did not have good theming or confidence in making characters (nor art skill) for a long time, even my 'big' story-based ideas, even if they had powerful moments, had huge holes in more 'filler' worlds with no idea what they could be, and an overwhelming sense of perfection of what they could be thus it was never capable of being finished. So how could I have created something that felt big? I can imagine that many of my 'earliest' pieces of work were mods that wouldn't be easily thematically tied to your newer work, and even being too attached to your favorite media to make something original (like 10 years ago+ I created "VVVVVV in Talos Principle" easter eggs and loved the idea of the mashup but it contained none of 'me' in it).
And also sometimes I think of making short projects that couldn't be 'as easily' ported into my shared universe, which, to somehow have many recent projects with a unique format that would be socially beneficial to tie in, but somehow doesn't artistically feel right, it's actually quite cursed to still think that now.
So here are ways you may be able to get this effect without needing writing skill:
- Hosting everything on the same personal website
- Having a personal 'hub world'
- Think about the effect of Penn & Teller: Fool Us, the show where other magicians come to show tricks, specifically that it's a huge branding win-win but on the Penn & Teller side (and I think the expertise aspect is also more value-adding than like... talk show late night hosts
) - if you think about how you're attaching your name to someone's work, but in a way that draws attention to yourself as well, and in a unique good way it's great. - Being an 'aggregator' social media site (often people's usernames are sidelined here, so this on the other hand, often does not feel like a great value-add for society)
Other thoughts on combining a game
I used to be a low-decoupler when it came to games and media, and I think everyone is. So such a big work was a highly 'combined' and unique thing that I considered its own Thing and couldn't even conceive of making as a result. So to think about some of those games and how they actually had very different mechanics and constantly changing gameplay, only 'tied together' by story and theming wasn't consciously noticed by me. It seems much more noticeable when watching this video which I recommend, AurumAlex's "Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story Is the Perfect Chimera" video.
How I'm applying this to my recent projects
(note: if this paragraph feels too ungrounded don't worry...)
There is a second sense of "COMBINE EVERYTHING" that I've recently developed. Having so many project ideas overflowing after having played so many games, I wonder if it was strange my past self didn't seem to have as many ideas, and I wish I wrote down more game ideas even if I wasn't able to execute them. What this has resulted in is that I have like 50 ideas and that they should be combined into one. Unfortunately this means this could be quite unrelatable if you're not me, but I hope it makes sense in the future. For example Lingo Multiverse is a game that is inspired by like 6 concepts in one:
- Expansion of Chris Souvey's unfinished "Lingo Multiverse" map
- "Typeryder" (described in a previous article I wrote)
- (a realization from watching 'fake' Minecraft ARG documentary videos)
- (FPS-related concept from 'failed' Unity gamejam project I made 3 years ago)
- The 'Opanker Roguelike' called "Slippery Key"
- A superior realization of "Slippery Key" that could be a great culmination of all Lingo maps to execute
I wonder if the seeming randomness of ideas would be comprehensible to my past self or just feel unrelatable. Or maybe I had lots of good game ideas but never wrote them down because they seemed out of reach to code, and then forgot??? In any case, I find looking at this list quite interesting to think about how it feels like this game almost has too much potential, and "even if one aspect is weak the rest can fill it". Not a feeling I ever had before.
Teasing: "Poker ALL Toads"
I have showed this game to a group of my fans in a multiplayer session for 1 hour, and it's using the game-combination philosophy maximally as well. This time combining an open world model experience with Poker ALL Toads, and trying to execute the design of various autobattlers and incremental games as strongly as possible.
I wanted to make a game that has less of the problems I see with crowding around buttons and negative addiction patterns with constantly pressing incremental-game buttons, something fun to look at while also having active elements of skilltrees, choice, and dueling incentive with other players. This puzzle element of dueling other enemy players could be incredible if executed well. As well as the wish of having a world for people to hang out in of course.
This game takes so much from older projects (including some CSS I wouldn't do nowadays and is still generic but uses too many helper functions and such to change). You may recognize one as the 2D "Poker ALL Toads" here:
I was able to port over all the code of the real looking playing cards, which I mostly made 3 years ago and some 1 year ago and I think is really satisfying to look at, oh right I'm too tired today to film a video of the cards animating into play, well please just imagine drawing cards and scoring is satisfying.
Please enjoy and I wonder if I can request someone to make fanart for the J/Q/K of Toads even if it's MS paint art.