Heya friendos! Today we’ll take a look at some ideas I’ve been juggling in my head, both political and game-related. It’s a relatively short one because I’m a bit under the weather. Let’s dive right in.
How Am I Doing?
I’m doing pretty decent! Had an eventful social calendar the past week, which helped me get out of my head a bit. It does seem like I’ve caught another cold, which is at least the third one this winter.
I still dip my toes in and out of anxiety surrounding the political and economic landscape. It’s slowly getting better, however. It’s now clear that a lot of people share my anxiety, and take whatever news flies over from the West seriously. It’s also reassuring that Europe is not sitting on its hands anymore and took, at the very least, a vocal stance against blatant fascism instead of silently condoning it. Better late than never I guess.
This information, paired with my renewed motivation to learn skills that are of practical use when things go south, assuages the more existential anxiety.
What Am I Doing?
I’ve worked a bit on extending my FeMoViCo framework to accommodate card games easily. The framework has been thoroughly battle-tested now since I’ve been using and improving it during my development of Rumorweaver. It’s a pretty decent design pattern already that stimulates separation of concerns but also allows some flexible easy-of-use features like input remapping.
Everything that I’m doing at the moment is preparatory to speed up the development time of whatever is coming my way. I’ve now got the basic setup for card games, incremental/idle, and narrative games. If everything I have running falls through, I want to rapidly put out a bunch of games consecutively. Quick and lean is the name of the game.
Degrowth
I also worked on a little game idea I’ve had lying around for a long time. I got re-inspired to pick it up because I saw a video on urban planning. It’s one of those thousands of subjects I have a passing interest in, that rekindles every other year. The concept of the game is an inverse city builder. Instead of having a fresh plot of land where you build the bones of a city and then expand it, you start with a big, inefficient city that you have to help optimize and make liveable.
Initially, the idea was to stimulate thoughts of “degrowth”, the idea that infinite growth for the economy is inherently flawed and should not be the focus of societal measurements. Right now, it’s more about optimizing physical spaces with a bit of a green message in there.
What’s interesting is that you only have very limited ways of building on empty spaces, so I guess there’s still this idea of “not everything is about maximizing”. Conversely, however, the solution to optimizing urban space tends to be “build huge skyscrapers next to parks” which feels a bit icky.
Why Am I Doing? (this)
The current state of the world forces me to be more mindful about what message my games convey. I don’t view everything I do through that lens, I’m not a saint after all. But I do feel I don’t want to be a simple peddler of escapist fantasies anymore. I’m also not implying I’ll solely make heavily politicized games from now on, but if somehow a project I made makes a person think twice about something I want them to ponder on, mission accomplished.