Hi Friends!

I knew that my clock was ticking when my brother's two year old coughed in my face on January 31st and wouldn't you know it, I got sick a few days after and spent most of February in such a state. Yet, things still happened. 

Gamedev-News

Everything in JRPG game is now connected with each other and theoretically it's possible to play through it from start to beginning. My first attempt at it however failed, because of a combination of status effect shenanigans and attempting to "help" a Door in a fight.

I still don't really know what to do with the project once I'm "done" with it. The idea is to try and pitch it to publishers, but do I also release it to the public? Something to think about.

I'm also happy to tell you all that I have actually made and released a small videogame! It is called "Ten Battles to Destiny" and I made it for the "Cookie Cutter RPG Maker 2003" Game Jam. The goal for that jam was to make a game in RPG Maker 2003 using a pre-built set of maps and tiles that you were not allowed to change.

This has been the first time in over a decade since I made a game in something that wasn't Game Maker and it was pretty interesting. I wrote a bit more about the game and my experiences on my blog, and you can find a link to it in the next section.

You can play the game here:

Ten Battles to Destiny by MOKKA

10 Battles and then the game ends.

But please also take a look at the other submissions. It is really interesting to see what everyone else has done with this idea:

Blogpost-Shares

In early February I wrote "Waste is for the Dead", which is an attempt of mine to collect a bunch of thoughts I had about the connections between life, death, waste and how we attribute historical meaning to things and how it all connects back to Capitalism, which claims to be about efficiency and progress, but really is a religion fully dedicated to the reverence of waste.

It's one of those topics that I keep coming back to every few months, and this was basically my first attempt at putting it down into proper writing.

You can read it here:

Something I didn't mention in it, but what should be fairly obvious is how the current trend of feeding every piece of human culture into generative AI models is kind of the epitome of Capitalism's obsession with waste. These things literally eat our stories and turn them into infinitely reproducible mush without connection and meaning. However, I don't want everything that is inherent to Capitalism itself to circle back to Large Language Models, because it makes it sound that the problems come from them, when it is the system that created them that's responsible.

The second post I published this Month were my design notes on Ten Battles:

I want to stress again, how much I liked the idea behind that Game Jam. I hope there will be more jams like this in the future, I really do.

Interesting things I played/watched/read

This Interview with Austin Walker on unwinnable was very interesting:

A Dialogue with Austin Walker - Unwinnable | Unwinnable

Austin Walker is a writer, game developer, and a prolific podcast host.

I also enjoyed this blog by Doruk, about the differences between "Problems" and "Puzzles" in videogames:

I like solving problems, not puzzles | doruk balcı

Puzzles annoy me, that is not really a problem, many things i love to do are built on tension, being annoyed comes with the territory. The suspense of not kn...

Obviously I immediately went and put this framing around JRPG battles, because that's all I can think of right now apparently, and I think it helped with understanding what type of them I enjoy, which also kind of circles back to one of the games I've been playing: The Final Fantasy 4 Free Enterprise Randomizer.

I'm not a huge fan of FF4, but I do immensely enjoy the FF4 randomizer. Because abilities in FF4 are very much attached to specific characters, you can end up with very different party balances, which can greatly influence the way in which you progress through the game's boss fights. Furthermore, because of some quirk within the game, Bosses take the stats from the locations they appear in, which can lead to very wild swings in difficulty, where a "harmless" boss in the wrong location can be rougher than the game's final boss fight.

First of all, I think it's with this randomizer where I first realized that an Enemy hitting one of your characters for a ridiculous amount of damage is actually pretty funny. It is also a good example of how I enjoy JRPG battles when they are presented as "Problems" and not as "Puzzles". A "Problem" JRPG battle is one where the Enemy has some kind of vulnerability to it that you can exploit, but it's unclear whether or not you actually have the tools at your disposal to exploit said vulnerability. It's the same reason why I like the Final Fantasy 5 Four Job Fiesta. It gives you a tool box, but it is likely that what you have will not always be what you need.

This type of approach also means that it is quite possible that you end up with characters that may not be all that useful in most situations. 

To go back to the FF4 Randomizer: I once had to fight a Boss that does a high damage, party wide attack every few turns, and my only source of party wide healing was Paladin Cecil. Cecil is a great attacker, and though he does have some spells, he is not good at those. In that moment he was very useless, but all I had. It was painful and terrible, but I still remember that moment, even though it happened years ago.

I also noticed how much I've been following this kind of logic with my own RPGs. You can actually see this quite well in Ten Battles. I've built the Final Boss fights completely independent from the skills and items you can find in that game. So none of the fights are clearly built around a "this enemy is vulnerable to Ice damage" mechanic, but instead present you with a situation that forces you to apply whatever set of tools you have at your disposal. These might work, or might not work, but it's up to you to figure out a plan and there are no clear answers.

What else?

I finished watching Legend of the Galactic Heroes and while the show does kind of fall on its face towards the end, it still was incredible.

RIP to Admiral Wagenseil.

See you in March!