Tad Cordle

Playtesters starting to make it into the late game and oh god oh man I have a lot I need to edit 😅

stop it

My biggest pet peeve so far about Stranger Things season 5 is that everyone is always like "what if <guess>" and they're correct on the first guess every single time

Obviously this is not a small fix, but if the cool part of your game is the rule discovery and meta-puzzling, penguins and walruses being the first thing you show people might be working against you. Just my 2 cents.

It seems like you wanted to make a game revolving around arctic animals. But then there are all these random tools like hammers and bombs and canes. And there are portals, and force fields. And meta stuff. None of this really connects back to the whole penguin thing aside from the sliding mechanics.

My biggest issue with the game is that it doesn't have a consistent thematic identity. People checking out the game and catching a surface-level glimpse see this inconsistency immediately in the trailer and might be turned off assuming the rest of the game is similarly disjointed.

screenshot from the website speedrun.com of the page for My Little Pony PC Play Pack

i havent done shit for the past two months but at least i got first place in my little pony pc play pack

Sometimes you'll even get one of these

After ruminating on this for a couple days I've come to the conclusion that I should just remind myself more that games are allowed to be games for the sake of being silly games.

Nah, this game is a lot more niche - I wouldn't have a problem leaving a negative review on a game with as much popularity as Blue Prince.

(That said, I have issues with Blue Prince as well, but for more forgivable, understandable reasons 😄)

Monkey Island did not come out this year :D

I'm not sure how to end this thread but I feel a bit better typing it out. Sorry for rambling, I'm just going to try not think too deeply about it and keep pursuing what I think makes my game interesting. Even if it ends up being aimed at a small, pedantic minority.

I think it also bothers me because everyone's reactions to this game makes me feel disconnected. I'm doing my best with my game, but dislike this other game in a similar genre. But people love this other game. So, if we follow this logically... yeah.

I think the reason this bothers me so much is because people just don't seem to notice or feel or care about this missing "why". That hits me at my core because it runs counter to why I want to make games. I want to inspire people in a very real way.

Rule discovery isn't exciting because you're uncovering weird edge cases, it's exciting because you're uncovering some hidden truth that was always there. That's at least why it's exciting to me. I don't feel that at all with this game; I just find myself constantly asking "why?"

Discovery in Stephen's Sausage Roll feels the same. Nothing fundamentally changes, every discovery is a natural consequence of the moveset, enabled by nothing more than small twists in the level geometry.

The best rule discovery games are so because the consequences you discover appear so naturally. Every Baba Is You discovery feels like, "oh of course that would happen if I arranged the words that way". It was always there, and not just because it was programmed that way.

It's full of mechanics that lead to whacky discoverable interactions, but those mechanics are so arbitrary that I feel like I'm not actually discovering anything. It's the same feeling as playing a backyard game with a 4 year old who's making up rules on the spot. Complexity for complexity's sake.

It's not even that I disagree with the reviews; the game is snappy, the level design is impressive. But the game is missing something, some holistic theme, some reason for the game to exist aside from "because the dev made it". When I play it, this makes me unmotivated and dissatisfied.

A puzzle game came out this year that everyone adores (100% positive on steam) but I find really boring. I don't want to be the first to leave a negative review, but I want to explain why I dislike the game *somewhere*, because I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I see the reviews.

The Game Awards Is Missing One Very Important Genre Category Also: when is it okay to boycott a game's launch?

Remakes, remasters, and boycotts on the latest edition of Morning Checkpoint: https://kotaku.com/tga-game-awards-goty-puzzle-mimesis-poe-2000640780

I've not been consistent with sharing progress lately, half due to avoiding spoilers, half due to introverted laziness. Maybe some day I will post cool clips again.

I've not been consistent with sharing progress lately, half due to avoiding spoilers, half due to introverted laziness. Maybe some day I will post cool clips again.

I've officially been working on A Little Perspective for 2 years.

Been watching a few people playtest the full game, and there's feedback to address, but a lot of the cool moments of the game are getting the reactions I've been hoping for.

Getting close, just a matter of closing things out now!

... we don't have backups?

Might not follow through this time, the idea I have in my head probably won't work in practice...

Guys I want to redesign the hub a third time

I remember beginning to setup an EGS page for Sensorium a little while ago, hitting a minor roadblock, realizing it would probably reach about 1% of the people it did on steam, and gave up

I would have believed it to actually be impossible (and that being the point) if I hadn't seen people online had beaten it already