Monthly Blog Post: June 2024

I’m starting to regret calling these “monthly” blog posts, since I haven’t done one of these in, uh… I don’t even want to think about how long it’s been. But we’re here now. So let’s begin.

Bee Magic

I’m working on a new game! It’s called Bee Magic.

It’s a game where you activate spells by moving around in the world. This is an idea I’ve had for a while. About 4 years, if memory serves.

The basic gist is that it’s a puzzle game where you unlock new spells to progress through the game. So I guess it’s a puzzle metroidvania, though I personally think of it as a “Broughlike” of sorts.

One of my goals was to make a new kind of game structure. Instead of there being many different levels/areas to explore, there’s a single decently sized level which you can complete in many different ways.

If your goal is to just “beat the game”, you can do that fairly quickly (I hope.) But if you want to tackle some of the optional challenges, you’ll find that you need to beat the game under various restrictions which change the experience in interesting ways (I hope.)

I’m currently planning on releasing this some time in July. It’s intentionally on the smaller side (or at least, small for me,) though I am planning on doing some rather fun things with this that might delay it a bit. I’m sure you’ll understand, though.

As a vague hint for what the “fun” might entail: do you think that “Nuvo Bloggo” is a weird name for my blog? Well, it will hopefully become a little less weird in the future.

Improvements!

Production wise, I think this is the best game I’ve made by a wide margin.

There’s a lot of quality of life features and general polish. Plus, I’ve implemented gamers’ favorite graphic effect: BLOOM!

Don’t worry, the bloom isn’t actually this intense. It’s very subtle, but I think it makes the image look better, even if it’s not very noticeable.

On the technical side: I’ve made a lot of improvements to my game engine, which I plan on copying over to The Words In Your Mouth. Speaking of which…

The Words In Your Mouth

For those unaware, The Words In Your Mouth is the big back burner project I’ve been slowly chipping away at for the past… six years or so? It’s a visual novel puzzle game that replaces dialog trees with puzzles, and you can play a rough demo of the game to get a feel for it.

…Oh, did I announce the demo yet? I guess I technically haven’t. Surprise, there’s a demo! People seem to like it.

Anyways, I’m still working on the game. Currently, there are around 7 or 8 completed chapters, but given the lack of polish, I’d hesitate to truly call them “complete.”

Since the last time I wrote about the game, I feel like I’ve grown a lot as a game developer. Remember when I wrote that my skills weren’t good enough yet to do this game justice? No? I don’t blame you, and it doesn’t matter now, because (in my opinion) my current skills are good enough to do this concept justice!

One of my goals for this game is to have an overall aesthetic that isn’t very STEM-oriented. Yes, it’s a thinky puzzle game, your player character is a computer science student (or he would be one if he was going to college,) and there are a non-zero number of machines that are very important to this story’s plot. Despite this, I try to make the game feel more like a piece of literature than a piece of technology.

Having said that, let’s take a few minutes to nerd out over the game’s “rat race” system, and yes, it’s as bonkers as it sounds.

“Rat race” is a system that enumerates all the possible choices/paths you can take through the game. It might not seem like much, but there are lots of subtle choices you can make, and there’s a lot of things the game tracks. Mapping out all of the possible runs turns out to be intractable (computer science jargon for “theoretically possible but practically impossible”), though I can get a very representative sample in about five minutes or so.

How is this possible? The short answer is “compartmentalizing all ‘important’ variables” and “hashing ‘important’ variable modifications and XOR-ing them together to maintain a hash of the entire game state.” That’s probably too confusing, but I plan on making a video/presentation about how it works in the not too distant future.

The end result consists of roughly 30,000 distinct playthroughs of the game. For each playthrough, the game takes the final value of every variable (that isn’t temporary) and writes it to a csv file.

Most of the variable names are spoilers for future chapters, so here’s an out of context screenshot of what the data looks like:

And here’s what the histogram of confidence points (basically your “score”) looks like:

I sort of get why the histogram looks like this, but I sort of don’t at the same time.

If you didn’t understand all that technical jargon, then you can have this work-in-progress sketch of Jimmy Kettleman instead. Yes, he always looked like this. His name was always Jimmy. His parents are not white collar criminals. Please stop asking questions.

Cool Links

I don’t have any this time, sorry.

That’s all for now!

Hopefully, I’ll make more blog posts soon.