I'll be at Anthrocon from Thursday to Sunday! I usually spend a lot of time in the board game and video game areas, last year I brought Wits And Wagers and we made up our own questions. I had no idea the dealer's area of the David L Lawrence Convention Center was 150' high!?! Anyway hit me up on discord (argonvile) or telegram (@ArgonVile) if you want to say hi~
I'm still playing around with new game ideas to make. I'm really proud of how Turbo Fat turned out but if Monster Mind was a lesson in "be passionate about what you're making and others will enjoy it," then Turbo Fat was a lesson in "what's fun for you isn't always fun for someone else." Turbo Fat was a crazy ambitious game which reinvented Tetris with brand new rules and techniques -- but most people don't want to relearn Tetris. If they are good at Tetris, they just want to play Tetris. If they are bad at Tetris, they don't want to play something similar to it.
I've made 2-3 little prototypes over the past few years, but I haven't committed to any of them yet.
I put a casual adult game "Five Six Bang", a deceptive complex game which imitates casual games like Candy Crush but centered around setting up huge combos like chains of dominos -- and the frustration of setting off your combos early. But, the adult sequences were both too complex to make and too unfulfilling to watch -- shown on the side of the gameplay, with dialogue sequences that went by when you weren't looking. It also felt like the gameplay was only compelling for 30-60 minutes, and I couldn't imagine how I'd stretch it out.
I've been working on a nurikabe game "Monster Connect" where there's like 10-15 puzzles scattered around a world, with a bunch of monsters running around and solving them without you. And you join two guys on a puzzle, and chitchat and finish the puzzle and earn money and buy a new hat. It's the formula that worked for Monster Mind, but I don't think Monster Mind would have been successful without the adult stuff and without the Pokemon.
The last game I'm experimenting with is a single-player party game with monster friends. It's still in super early stages, and while I'm optimistic there's also the question of like... would people have fun playing a party game with computer players? I think it's fun if the computer players are interesting enough, but again "what's fun for me isn't always fun for someone else" so it's not a slam dunk either.
Anyway when I have something new and cool I'll let you know! Hopefully late 2026 or early 2027 I'll have a new playable thingy to try out. See you around~
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