Hey friends! Lots of small things to talk about today, including: my guest appearance on a radio show, some games I played and some nitty-gritty design stuff I’ve been up to. Strap in!

How Am I Doing?

I’m tired but good! Had a pretty social week and will have one again, so I’m trying to take lots of breaks to wind down a bit. This week started off strong as I had a guest appearance on the (self-proclaimed) oldest game industry radio show: One Life Left. I got to blabber about Bibidi for a bit and touched briefly on the Method. Good fun! It aired yesterday night, I believe, but the episode will be available later as a podcast on any place where you can listen to podcasts.

I’m also popping by an indie dev meetup in Paris this Thursday. I don’t exactly know what format it has, but I believe you can introduce your game, so maybe I can recruit some playtesters there.

What Am I Doing?

And then for Bibidi, I’m currently deep in the weeds with redesigning and expanding our basic set of cards. The way we went about this is to take a look at what kind of gameplay styles are already possible with out current cards, and try to fill in some of the gaps.

I essentially stole the Combo, Aggro and Control play styles from trading card games like Magic: the Gathering. Even in a PvE deckbuilder, however, these concepts stay relevant. I was able to map our common popular builds to that triangle and identify what’s missing. For a while now, we felt that we missed some “chain reaction” or “set-em-up, knock-em-down” card combinations, and this map does seem to confirm it.

The red names are new mechanics I designed to cover some of those holes. The mechanics were interesting enough, and definitely cover the type of playstyles described they’re supposed to. The problem, however, is that they might be too confusing for new players, even though they’re supposed to pop up in the very first run a player ever does.

So now, we’re practicing subtractive design: can we streamline these mechanics, trim away fat, and fold them into existing ones more cleanly? I think we’re on the right track, but it’ll take some time and effort to get it right.

Why Am I Doing? (this)

Last weekend, I had the entire Saturday off and spent it playing Crow Country from beginning to end. It’s a perfectly executed little love letter to the survival horror genre, taking clear inspiration from Silent Hill and Resident Evil. It’s beautiful in that early PS1 way, atmospheric, and surprisingly funny. It gave me a good two or three frights as well! It took me about 6 hours to beat, and I was enraptured the entire time. It’s currently on discount, so I highly recommend getting it.

On Sunday, I helped out my friend Joris with some work on his game Something is Wrong. I promised to do some pen and paper prototyping (because it’s my favourite thing to do) somewhere this week. I’m just adding it to this newsletter as a sort of accountability. The game is very much in its early phases of development, but if the premise and atmosphere look promising to you at all, make sure to wishlist it!

So yeah, busy week! It feels like I’m juggling a lot of small things, and hopefully I can update y’all about some of them soon.