Hey friends! Spring is here, but it feels more like early summer. I’m happy to say that mental health is up! Today we’ll talk about some fantastic games I played in quick succession, celebrate some Bibidi-related stuff and dust off some old projects. Also, something went wrong with my mail client, so if you see this a day late or received it multiple times, my apologies.

How Am I Doing?

I’m doing great! The sun really pepped me up, and it’s been inspiring to play so many quality indie games in such a short time. Back to back I finished: Grunn, Mouthwashing and the Case of the Golden Idol. All of them exceptional and quite tiny indie games. I think I’ll start using Mouthwashing as an example of games as an art form whenever that question comes up from now on. It’s the type of unreliable narrator story that can only work well in an interactive format where you preform the actions of the protagonist.

Also, that interview I did last week is up as well. It’s definitely a bit rambly and we go on a lot of tangents, so it’s more two guys just hanging out and talking about stuff we like. It kind of gave me a taste of talking about Bibidi on the internet though. I would love to come on more long form podcasts/interviews/whathaveyou to talk about design decisions we make. I guess, if you’re reading this and you host that kind of stuff, please contact me!

What Am I Doing?

I’ve been quite busy with a lot of little things this past week. I’ve done a lot of little quality of life improvements and bug fixing for Bibidi Bibidi! I reckon we’ll probably be able to launch the update this week, or next week at the latest. Also, we passed the 1000 wishlists on Steam! ✨🎉 It is generally speculated you need at least 7000 before launch, but the fact that the game doesn’t even have a proper demo yet and we managed to slowly grind out a 1000 is a pretty big deal.

I also to finally manage to finish the first draft of a short story I started writing way back in 2024, if not earlier. I’m still ironing out some style, spelling, grammar and pacing errors, but will soon send it out to my creative peers for feedback. It’s funny, it ended up… not particularly good. That’s not from a place of judgement or unnecessarily harsh self critique. It just feels a bit like early work, you know? Like I haven’t found my voice yet. I still like it, and I’m glad I finished it, but I reckon I won’t revise it all to try to make it better. I’d much rather go off and make new things!

I’ve also dusted off an old narrative game project while porting some of my notes to Obsidian. I probably won’t get into it too much, but it’s a narrative deduction game that you play entirely through virtual email clients. It’s one of those projects I know I don’t have the writing chops for right now, but hopefully will get stuck into at some point.

The Case of the Golden Idol

Speaking of deduction games, as I mentioned before, I played the Case of the Golden Idol. People recommended it to me many times when it came out, because I’m really into games with interesting deduction mechanics. It’s been in my backlog ever since, but I finally managed to boot it up and get stuck in. It’s good! It’s a really good example of how to make a great game with very little fat. Just information and context really. Essentially, the game consists of a bunch of relatively static vignettes that you can pour over to find clue, like character names, dates and hidden objects. You then have to piece together the plot by slotting those things into the a sort of timeline where the crucial information is redacted. It’s simple, it’s effective and with about a 4 hour runtime, it doesn’t overstay its welcome.

It also made me think back on Rumorweaver, which was intended to have very similar deduction mechanics. At some iteration of development, I thought about having similar static vignettes and a more visual novel-style setup. In the end, I opted for a more immersive way of exploration. But now that I think back on it, I think it actually hurt the game design. Even if I somehow would have managed to cobble together an interesting enough environment to explore once, backtracking would become extremely tedious very quick. In fact, even in the tiny vertical slice, that was already the case. Simply put, making a world that’s enjoyable to explore gradually cannibalized the core concept of the game.

I still think fondly of Rumorweaver’s concept and story, but I don’t think I’ve ever properly thought through what exactly the best version of the game would be. In a lot of ways, it was a patchwork of disparate ideas that had been on the back burner for a while, and then suddenly I had all this external inspiration I channeled into it. If I ever pick it up again, I reckon I’ll move it away from a historically accurate, immersive narrative game to a weird little deduction game with interesting mechanics, a tight plot and rely way more on my experience with fantasy world building. But, that’s for another day.

Why Am I Doing? (this)

I’m glad I got back into doing weekly newsletters. It’s cool that I can point back to a week in 2024 and see when I shared a snippet from that short story. Ok, that’s all I got for this segment. Bye now!