The other night, I had a disconcerting dream.

Well, not a dream exactly. It happened in the space between sleeps, when, despite my best efforts, I find myself lying awake waiting for rest to find me once more. It was three, four in the morning, and there were fifty people watching me.

Somehow, I awoke in the middle of the night to discover a door in the back of my head, and dozens of people were peering through. They all had very strong opinions on how I should sleep: wear this, take this position, do not use that blanket. If I wanted to fall asleep again, they clamored, I would have to follow their every instruction.

I, ever the nighttime contrarian, did the exact opposite. I (having fallen asleep in my clothes after a hectic night of watching other people play Vintage Story at a LAN party) changed into my normal sleepwear, assumed my normal sleeping position,¹ and did use that blanket thank you very much. The watchers did not approve of this! And so I stubbornly laid there, ignoring the tut-tutting of my sudden audience, until I realized they were right. Somehow it was more comfortable to wear this, take this position, and kick off that blanket.

Hey everybody! It’s me, Heather Flowers. You read the title of the newsletter? Cool. I’ve been watching a lot of Sex and the City recently for semi-gender reasons. I’m in the middle of Season 4 right now and it’s wild what they do to Miranda, right? Like, the A-plot will be “Carrie debates what it means to commit to someone after getting together with a guy who really likes jazz” and the D-plot will be some shit like “Miranda gets haunted by ghosts” or “Miranda eats out of the garbage.”¹ Absurd!

Anyways, I’ve been playing with a lot of very goofy game ideas recently. After last newsletter’s conversation about zero-player games (which I got a lot of lovely emails about!!), I threw one together in a couple hours, called SISYPHUSES.

Had a lot of fun making this! Maybe I’ll make a few more and put together a collection. Unfortunately a collection can only have one game that sucks like this, so the rest of em would have to actually be good, instead of just funny.

Hey y’all! Heather Flowers here.

In lieu of social media (I finally kicked myself off Bluesky), I’ve recently fallen down a mild rabbit hole of “satisfying simulations” on YouTube.¹ A set of simple rules, set up in a particular way, and you watch them play out. Watch these marbles race. Watch these blocks break. Do they do it in the way you expected? Finish. Adjust your priors. Watch the next one and “try again.”

There’s something fascinating about it from a game design perspective, isn’t it? If a game loop is the iterative process of experimentation and evaluation, isn’t it possible to have a “loop” where the player doesn’t touch the game at all? This ball deals twice as much damage with every hit. This other ball deals damage according to the Fibonacci sequence. Which will break these blocks faster? You can guess in your own head, but it doesn’t change the outcome.

These videos have thousands of views, and hundreds of comments each discussing various “strategies” — what matchups are optimal, how close the match was, what the randomly bouncing balls could have done better to improve their performance. A game is being played here! In the same way that watching a sport is a form of play, watching random balls and numbers bounce around is a mode of engaging with a system. Just because the system is completely pre-rendered with a preordained outcome doesn’t mean it’s not a system.

Hey, y’all. Been a while.

I’m sure you’ve been wondering where your dearest darlingest Heather Flowers has wandered off to! I’ve been wondering much the same. So, a quick set of updates:

• Unfair Flips recently passed 1,000 reviews on Steam, at 92% positive!! This confers no algorithmic benefit but it makes me feel nice. Thank you to everyone who reviewed my horrible coin game!

• I helped run a megagame at Pax Unplugged! That was a ton of fun. If you haven’t played a megagame before: you should! They’re a blast!

• People seem to really like my new Fallen London story (The Shape of Infinity)! People have been saying very nice things to me.

• I got long COVID and now everything in my life is harder.

That last one is kinda the big one! I’ve been learning over the past couple months how to cope with significant chronic fatigue. Fortunately, I’m far from the first person to cope with this kind of thing, so I’ve had a lot of good reading to do. I’d like to specifically shout out:

Hi everybody! Because of a series of interesting decisions and coincidences, I have FIVE major things all happening on Thursday of this week (the 25th). This has been a very exciting happenstance, and also tremendously stressful because I had covid for three weeks and only started testing negative a couple days ago. Basically I got knocked out for a good while and got to experience being tied to the traintracks for five simultaneous deadlines. I’m doing better now but did experience several weeks of Quarantine Madness. ANYWAYS!

Let’s talk about those five things! Some of them are surprises, but I wanna enumerate em anyways.

#1: FISH FEAR ME: WOMEN WANT ME

Have you ever discovered a Basilisk? No, not the “thought experiment” about how if you ever think of the world’s meanest computer, it’ll travel back in time to kill you.¹ I mean more along the lines of the “Basilisk Image” from David Langford’s short stories: a concept or image which, from mere exposure, seems to deeply affect the human mind in unexpected ways.

I think I’ve found something similar. (It won’t kill you, but I did post a gif of it further down the screen.)

It’s pretty obvious at this point that humans are really, REALLY bad at probability. Any game designer will tell you that our basic intuitions of probability are flawed; that we narrativize “unlikely” outcomes as shocking even as repetition makes them a near-inevitability; that nobody has any idea what “80%” or “20%” or “99%” really feels like. Many games fudge the numbers towards what players expect, rather than what the numbers actually mean, because otherwise players will think that the real numbers are wrong.

So, the other day, I started thinking about coin flips. This isn’t my first time chewing on the subject; I got a couple months deep on a Balatro-like about flipping coins last year, before dropping the project for being too complex. This time, I decided to try out the most dead-simple version of the game imaginable: here’s a coin with an unfair probability tilted towards tails. You get to see exactly what that unfair probability is. You’ve got to get ten heads in a row to win. Good luck.

THE BIG NEWS: I wrote a subscriber-exclusive story for Fallen London, and it’s out now!!! Check it out!!!!

I’ve been sitting on this secret for the better part of a year! I’m really excited that I finally get to talk about it!!

The story’s called THE MIRROR HEIST, and it follows a pair of thieves attempting to steal a lost relic. You find yourself embroiled in this heist after a case of missing identity, and must untangle the mystery of the Doubt Street Phantoms…

That's right: 20% off! Two dollars off! $7.99! The normal price but smaller!

Tell your friends! Tell your enemies! Tell a stranger on the street! Whisper it in the ear of a lover! Watch that lover whisper it to a fish! Throw the fish back to sea as a warning! Let them warn the other fish of the tide of death to come! The tide of fishermen rising from the waters below! The moon pushes and pulls, as does the price of this video game! We are at a HIGH TIDE OF SAVINGS!

FISH FEAR ME on Steam

A top-down action roguelike about catching fish, fighting them, selling their bones, and catching more fish. Upgrade your boat and weapons, hunt down sea monster bounties, and try to become the greatest battle-fisherman of all time.

Happy fishing,
Heather Flowers

(P.S. I’ve got a normal newsletter in the queue as well; there’s just been a lot happening in my personal life that wouldn’t make good newsletter fodder. Hope to have a regular update out soon!)

Hi everybody! Wow, what a week!

It’s been two and a half weeks? Huh. Anyways, what a week!

The FISH FEAR ME launch went really well! Um, really well. Like, “an order of magnitude better than anything else I’ve ever put out” well. We’re talking “six days on the New and Trending list on the front page of Steam” well.

It has a 20% launch discount, so check it out now!!!

FISH FEAR ME on Steam

A top-down action roguelike about catching fish, fighting them, selling their bones, and catching more fish. Upgrade your boat and weapons, hunt down sea monster bounties, and try to become the greatest battle-fisherman of all time.

And if you feel so inclined to leave a review, please do so!! The Steam algorithm is heavily based on how many reviews a game has: anything less than 10 won’t show up at all on Steam, so reaching that threshold swiftly is vital to a successful launch.

That’s all this time! I’ll have many more Thoughts once launch is complete. Right now I’m a buzz of nerves.

Wishlist it to get notified on launch:

FISH FEAR ME on Steam

A top-down action roguelike about catching fish, fighting them, selling their bones, and catching more fish. Upgrade your boat and weapons, hunt down sea monster bounties, and try to become the greatest battle-fisherman of all time.

Yeah that’s basically it. Game’s coming out soon! It’s good!! Please buy it on Friday!!! Maybe review it if you feel so inclined!!!!

Bye!!!!!

FISH FEAR ME comes out in exactly one week. If you haven’t wishlisted it, I recommend you do:

FISH FEAR ME on Steam

A top-down action roguelike about catching fish, fighting them, selling their bones, and catching more fish. Upgrade your boat and weapons, hunt down sea monster bounties, and try to become the greatest battle-fisherman of all time.

There’s a lot I could talk about with this game, and a lot I will talk about. Today, though, I want to talk a little about the process of getting here.

It’s finally time!! FISH FEAR ME will be coming out in two weeks, and I am EXTREMELY excited.

MORE DETAILS:

• The game will be launching on February 21st for $9.99, with a 20% discount for the first two weeks (so $7.99 in practice).

• It features three maps, fifteen biomes, sixteen boats, thirty weapons, and 150ish fish to catch. If playtests are anything to go by, this results in somewhere around 30-60 hours of content for completionists.

• It ALSO features a storyline exploring the Fisherman’s cosmic debt. To resolve this debt, you’ll need to delve into the eldritch waters beneath the earth, learn arcane rituals, and slay the Leviathan before it consumes you.

• It’s about… five times larger than SNAKE FARM? At least. There’s a LOT of content here, including fourteen separate game-bending lures which augment builds and give access to special ultra-rare bounties.

• If the game launches well, I have plans for multiple free content expansions with new maps, boats, weapons, and more! The first content expansion will be called WOMEN WANT ME.

• I will be taking down the free demo when the game launches. This isn’t because I’m opposed to free demos, but because the demo will corrupt newer saves and completely erase 90% of your progress if you try to open it after opening the main game. There’s no way around this outside of completely remaking the demo, which I… do not have time to do.

• That being said, if you played the demo, the game should remember your progress when you start the full game, and unlock anything you would’ve unlocked at your current level of progression!

• I have genuinely no idea how this game came together so well. By all means, it shouldn’t be nearly as good as it is! But it is.

Hi y’all! To start off, I want to let you know about a Kickstarter that’s near and dear to my heart: Crucible of Aether! It’s an extremely crunchy Morrowind-inspired TTRPG about, among other things, a Victorian society built upon an eldritch landscape of living metal; a group of people trying to end death by removing people's souls; and Roman werewolves doing WWE opera. It’s already over 200% funded, and the next stretch goal is a short story written by Cohost’s own Jess Levine!

Check it out, it’s sick as hell!

Hey y’all! I’ve been working long and hard on FISH FEAR ME these past few weeks, and it’s time to start testing the new content out! This beta test includes:

• Two new maps (Shipwreck Bay; Shadow Sea)

• ~90 new fish

• Five new boats

• Like ten new weapons at this point

• Tons of weird secrets

• Inscrutable altars demanding sacrifice

• An area that just straight up kills you if you stay there for too long

• And more!

I’ve been putting a lot of work into making the game as big and weird and special as it can be, and your feedback is a huge part of making it all those things! Check it out!

HOW TO JOIN

Hi everyone! Wow, what a year! Right? What a year. What was your favorite part? Yeah, mine too.

It’s funny, writing a year-in-review post at this point in my life. This year has been extremely eventful, while also having very little I’m able to talk publicly about. I have my sights set on a publicly-exciting 2025, though, full of events that I can’t talk about yet but will hopefully be able to talk about once they happen!

So, what can I talk about? I can talk about snakes, goats, fish, wolves, and cockroaches.

SNAKES

It’s less than a dollar for the next week! That is SO little money!! You can get it for yourself, for less than the price of a soda in some hospital vending machines!!

Save 70% on SNAKE FARM on Steam

A top-down action roguelike about buying snakes, fighting them, selling their oil, and buying more snakes. Upgrade your weapons, get stronger snakes to fight, and chase down a high score with only ten days to live.

WOLFCLAW is a first-person eat-em-up game where you play as a werewolf ghost, killing/eating/possessing as many people as possible until your rampage is brought to a bloody end. We made it for the 7DFPS Jam, and it’s out now!

WOLFCLAW by Noé, Heather Flowers

A FIRST-PERSON EAT-EM-UP GAME

The primary thing I wanted to experiment with with this game was a nonstandard FPS camera, which is normally considered the “eyes” of the protagonist, but here it’s situated squarely in the main character’s mouth. This way, when you eat people, you actually get to see the whole thing happen! None of that Skyrim “you’re in 3rd person now” bullshit!

Hi y’all! I’m excited to report that I’m doing 7DFPS with my friend Noé!! We’re doing an ultra-gory game where you play as a werewolf ghost trying to kill/eat/possess as many people as possible before you’re eventually torn to shreds.

Technically 7DFPS starts in a few days, but we’ve got schedule conflicts for that week, so we’re doing it now. Anyways, some features we’ve got going on include:

• Moon-phase-based difficulty where your abilities are somewhat determined by the phase of the moon

• DOOM-style sprite billboarding (it looks very cool in motion)

• First-person eating-people-alive sequences

• Lock-on dashing

• Sick blood particle effects

Hey, y’all! I’ve been hard at work recently putting together the second area in FISH FEAR ME… Shipwreck Bay!

This area comes with:

• Five new regions

• One new weather condition (Ash Cloud)

• 40-50ish new fish

• A ton of weird opaque mechanics to discover