Hi Friends!

November was strangely fine. Looking back at things, I'm actually quite surprised how much has happened and how much I managed to get done. So let's talk about it all!

Gamedev-News

JRPG game is back on track! I think I was a bit stuck in a trap where I both wanted to make sure that the systems I build are mostly "game-agnostic" (meaning that whatever I make can be transferred between different projects in the future), while also having to deal with the fact that they are supposed to work with the project I'm currently setting up.

I spent most of this Summer building out the Dungeon Exploration and Battle System, but other than vague ideas, I did not do much thinking about what to do with all the stuff you do in these games, mainly what to do for map-exploration and town interactions.

For Towns, I wanted them to feel like Downtime sequences in some Tabletop RPG systems feel, in that they work in a very different rhythm than the rest of the game. However, aside from a very basic "here's a menu and some example interactions", I quickly realised that I had to be more specific to actually build something that's useful and related to the current project. The big idea here was to create something that's sort of like "The Yawgh", but deals with characters doing everyday interactions. The current version now is much more simplified, mostly because I don't want to throw myself into a whole branching text and stat check system.

The overworld map was a different, but also similar problem. Here I wanted something where I could be pretty flexible with scale and abstraction. The issue with "normal" JRPG overworlds is that they are pretty big spacially, which means you need to have a lot of room for travel to feel significant, while also offering not a lot of space to challenge the player, aside from occasionally throwing a monster in their path. I wanted travel to feel like an extension of the dungeon and I want overworld exploration to feel perilous.  Strangely enough, overworld traversal is superficially similar to Final Fantasy Mystic Quest/Mystic Quest Legend (which is funny, considering the dungeon and battle system also takes a lot from that game), but also mixed with Hex-Crawl like elements. Basically you have a bunch of unexplored locations scattered around the map, and some of them are further split into additional sub-locations. Exploring these leads to extra encounters, or discoveries and all other kinds of things. I'm actually quite proud of how I build the technical implementation of it all, because it's fairly easy to set up and manipulate within the game, to reflect specific outcomes and player actions.

I'm currently in the process of extending the "playable thing" to include an example downtime/town sequence, as well as a small-scale overworld exploration phase that also has an additional, smaller dungeon that you can find.

The goal here is to have something that's a bit of a miniature version of what a full-scale game might look like. Both to have something tangible that I can show people who are able to fund a full scale development, and for myself to see how all these elements fit into another.

This unfortunately means that "JRPG Game Dungeon Test" will not be released this Month, but on the flipside it will be a bit meatier and more interesting, once it's actually done.

Blogpost-Shares

I have written about "Evil Game Design" this past month! It's not a very detailed explanation of what I understand of that term, but I was really struggling to find a proper format for this, and I also started to feel that maybe I don't need to be able to explain it all at once. I hope it's useful for folks, for me personally it really helped to put down some broad ideas of why I like some "difficult" games, while intensely disliking others, and it was also useful as a way to summarize where I'm currently at with my own approach to game design.

I also just like calling this entire collection of thoughts "Evil Games", to serve as a counter point to the idea of "Good" game design, which very often includes elements that are deeply manipulative built around commercial interests.

Anyway, here's a link to the post in question:

https://mokkograd.net/posts/2025-11-25-Notes-about-Evil-Game-Design

Interesting things I played/watched/read

After eating an entire barrel of CRPG games (and being rather sick of them at the end), I went and started playing through FANTASIAN Neo Dimension.

This game is strange. It starts out and feels pretty much like a fairly standard JRPG with some interesting ideas. I honestly like their spin on the "here's how you can sort of skip random encounters" system, though I feel like they could've done much more with it (it gave me some ideas though). Then about 10-15 hours in, the game gets mean. Not the random encounters, the boss fights. Then at the 20 hour mark, you suddenly unlock a whole skill tree for each of your characters and I've since learned that starting a New Game+ unlocks a whole second skill tree for each character.

I also like how the entire second half of the game doesn't really deal with the game's main antagonist at all, but is mostly centered around figuring out how to make your party ready to face them.

I'm having a great time with it, honestly. It also looks neat, because all the environments are (as far as I know) digitized versions of actual physical dioramas.

In Tabletop RPGs, I'm currently in a Stonetop Campaign. Stonetop is a variation of Dungeon World, but made by different people (important considering that one of Dungeon World's creators turned out to be a creep) and centered around a singular community in a sort of Iron-age level fantasy world. It's a game I've been wanting to play for years now and it's such a blast. I have no luck at all, to the point where I started keeping track of my dicerolls. It's gotten better, but for a while I was at an almost 60% failure rate. I'm about one and half levels ahead of my other party members because of that (you get XP when you fail rolls).

I know that the Powered by the Apocalypse system is a bit old at this point, but I still get so much enjoyment how failing rolls in these games can lead to incredibly wild narrative swings. 

This goes back to both what I want to do with JRPG game, but also what I've been trying to express with my "Evil Games" post in that games should give players space to take interest in their own misfortune. In a sense it's similar to Dwarf Fortress's saying of losing being "fun", but I don't even need failure to be fun, as long as it offers me with a space that I can explore. "Good" game design often dictates that failure should be obvious and have immediate consequences. But what if the consequences are obscure and delayed? What if the game gives you what you want, but twists it? Sure, this is much easier to do in a tabletop game, because you can improvise, but I think videogames and their players should be less afraid of failure states.

I've also finished another book, and while I do have to say a lot about it, I don't want to, because most of it would be very mean. Sometimes you get a book and it turns out that it's not for you at all. It happens.

See you next year!