David Stark
I just came across an utterly charming comic called Pepper and Carrot that really captures the sort of mood I'd like to have in my hypothetical Potions Game. This comic really contains a lot of what I'd want the potions game to be about: making potions and having adventures to get the...
David Stark
I would love to see more unusual historical settings in games. From what I can tell, there's roughly a dozen historical settings that get used again and again, such as "World War II" and "Ancient Rome", with century-wide gaps between them where apparently nothing sufficiently interesting happened....
David Stark
Something I've been chewing on for a while is how to make an "adventure" game that is more about travel than about fights or isolated puzzles. If you look at something like Tolkien, a lot of the adventure is about getting from A to B, rather than fighting things or figuring stuff out. But in...
David Stark
Several people have asked me for advice on how to use IndieDB to promote your game, so I thought I'd put it all in one place. I'm not a marketing expert, but I'd like to think my game does fairly well, so may this be of use to you. Ranking and Measuring First off, you have to pretty much ignore...
David Stark
I've been playing a fair amount of Don't Starve in the last few days, catching up on new things from the Reign of the Giants expansion, and I have to say I am in awe of the game's execution. The thing about Don't Starve is that none of its themes or mechanics are all that original - it's not the...
David Stark
This blog post begins a series of... snarky game ideas that may be rather dark humour, as you've probably guessed from the title. Proceed at your own peril. Still with me? Let me tell you about "Hitlergotchi". The game is a combination of two well-worn game concepts: the digital pet and the tower...
David Stark
A concrete demonstration of the kind of madness that is Greenlight just came past. I am going to describe it without naming names, because while I am kind of mad at the developer, this isn't about attacking them, it's about showing the perverse incentives this thing now operates under. A few days...
David Stark
So I make no secret of the fact that I am... wary of the games industry as an industry, and tend to think of it as a giant fleshgrinder using up young people and producing samey output. Independent games are less harmful, but as Jeff Vogel has repeatedly pointed out, asking indies to do all the...
David Stark
Some years ago, London suffered a bit of a cataclysm and fell into massive underground caverns filled with weird stuff. Sunless Sea is a roguelikelike where you play as a captain on the underground sea - or "zea", as the game insists on spelling it. The game's in early access currently, and I'd...
David Stark
Unsurprisingly, games don't come from a vacuum. There's all kinds of influences in terms of gameplay, visuals, and overall feel, some conscious, others not. These are the major ones for Airships: Howl's Moving Castle One of the best-known Miyazaki films, Howl's Moving Castle features a giant...
David Stark
As I mentioned before, as much as I like my Gods and Things concept for Civ V, it's really far too complex for me to attempt to build. So I've been thinking about a massively stripped down version that just introduces a bunch more beliefs, which are distinguished by having a downside as well as an...
David Stark
I just picked NEO Scavenger back up and decided it's time to write about it. It's a solidly difficult survival game played on a hex-based map. It's 2D and turn-based, which suits me just fine. At the start of the game, you wake up near-naked in a post-apocalyptic semi-wilderness. Your first...
David Stark
I've been thinking about my Gods & Things concept for Civ V again. I would dearly love to create it, or at least a simplified version, but as it stands, I don't have the time or the knowledge to do so. If anyone has experience with Civ V modding and would like to collaborate, hit me up....
David Stark
I confess that despite my mixed feelings, I've been playing Civ V again, and having more thoughts on how to improve it. In Civ games, you can build World Wonders, very expensive buildings with massive benefits that can only be built once. This generally leads to a race to build wonders, which is a...
David Stark
Want to try out game development? Have you tried out half a dozen tools and frameworks and engines, only to be overwhelmed each time? I am going to strip it down: All you need is a main game loop. Fundamentally, games work by keeping track of the state of the game world and then doing the...
David Stark
You can argue to what degree he was a product of his time, and how far he went beyond that, but it's clear that HP Lovecraft was pretty racist and all in all, firmly on the side of the establishment. The cultists in The Call of Cthulhu, apprehended by the police on a voodoo raid, are referred to...
David Stark
On the advice of Twitter, I have finally bought and played Don't Starve. I like it a lot. Here's how it fits into my earlier thoughts about survival games: I've been playing it pretty heavily over the last few days. Before I bought it, I was told that it's one of those games (like Minecraft and to...
David Stark
I've been participating in an increasing number of game jams, currently the Cyberpunk Jam, and am really enjoying myself. Restrictions breed creativity: being restricted in topic and time lets me try out different things. And the limited nature of game jams makes them a nice way of doing something...
David Stark
Once you have survived in a survival game, what do you do? You have found or made clothing, shelter, a steady source of food, means to defend yourself and heal yourself. You have mapped the dangers of your environment and can defeat or avoid enemies. What comes next? What I enjoy about the...
David Stark
I believe that a good dungeon to crawl in is built up of layers. Both in the sense that there are multiple levels on top of one another, and in that there is a sense of history. The dungeon didn't arise fully formed, orcs in rooms with chests at the ready - it accreted into its current shape. For...
David Stark
I always thought it'd be cool to be able to create your own coat of arms in a game. With Airships, this makes a fair amount of sense, as you play as one potential empire in a late-19th-century-esque setting. Of course, once I decided to put in heraldry, I wanted to do a decent job at it, so I...
David Stark
A decade-old review of one of my favorite games, which I've left as-is but added some comments to. Game Overview Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares (MOO II) is a turn-based space strategy game. What does that mean? Well, if you know Civilization, then think of the same thing but with the cities...
David Stark
The other day I caved in and bought the expansion packs to Civ V. I've been having a fair bit of fun with it, and definitely enjoying the new religion and trade systems. Of course, it didn't take me very long to give my religion a very silly name, and from there a concept was spawned: Gods &...
David Stark
On reflection, I think the adjusting prices thing is going to have to be a bit more detailed than just reducing everything by X%. The way to do it, I think, is to first establish reasonable conversion factors between emerald and raw materials. For example, let's say one emerald is intrinsically...
David Stark
Armageddon Empires is a card-based hex-based turn-based post-apocalyptic wargame. Its user interface is slow and unforgiving, music playback stutters whenever it's the AI's turn, and it's overloaded with game mechanics. And I love it. AE is the creation of Cryptic Comet, a one-man development...
David Stark
In this post I'm going to talk a bit about the concept of the game, and also go about setting up the project with CatEngine. I previously described the game as "FTL minus direct crew control plus ship design". I think the above sketch captures pretty well what I mean by this: there's a side-on...
David Stark
function showScreenshot(url) { jQuery('#trailer_yt').hide()[0].src = "about:blank"; jQuery('#header_img').show()[0].src = url; jQuery('#lead').animate({'height': '450px'}); } function showTrailer() { jQuery('#header_img').hide(); jQuery('#trailer_yt').show()[0].src =...
David Stark
This is an old game idea, based on combining a number of things I like in games: exploration, building systems and finding things out. The illustrations throughout this were made by Jenny Thorne, an enthusiastic supporter of the concept. In the game, you are a potion-making witch or wizard....
David Stark
I've been reading the introduction to Paul Graham's On Lisp, where he advocates a bottom-up programming approach for projects: instead of starting with what your program needs to do and subdividing it until you hit manageable units, you should think about what kinds of things your program needs to...
David Stark
The previous two installments left out ranged weapons on purpose, because the rules are rather different. Looking at the weapons table in Labyrinth Lord, similar problems as with melee weapons are apparent: if playing with simple damage rules, there is little point to the heavy weapons. If playing...
David Stark
On further reflection, here is a table of Labyrinth Lord weapons with both reach and variable damage, as well as adjustments made to bring up prices and make weights more historically accurate. The following table, except for the last two entries, unarmed and pike, is the same set of weapons as...
David Stark
Labyrinth Lord is a pen & paper RPG system that's roughly the same as the original Dungeons and Dragons. As such, its main draw is that it's a simple system, with flavorful rules. It is however not very balanced. In practice, pretty much everyone plays LL with some set of house rules. For...
David Stark
After it was linked on MetaFilter, I've been playing a fair bit of Dungeon Robber. The game is a pretty faithful implementation of the random dungeon generator from the D&D first edition dungeon master's guide, as recently turned into a poster. In the game, you start out as some hapless...
David Stark
You should go and play A Dark Room. Go! Play it now - it's not what you'd expect it to be from the start. OK, are you back? This is why I think it's brilliant: It slowly but naturally introduces gameplay elements. You're started out with the simple task of keeping the fire going, then new options...
David Stark
Commands in games should be at the same granularity as the meaningful decisions you make. I just finally got around to finishing the new XCOM game, many months after everyone else, no doubt. I kind of wanted to make it last, though, because I think it's an amazing game. I also recently had the...
David Stark
I've been catching up on Extra Credits. In the Moving Forward episode, they mention a whole bunch of examples of games which are not about shooting. What popped in my head just then was that there could be a game about being shot at instead. I know I'm sounding kind of Peter Molydeux here, but...
David Stark
My recent game, Patent Blaster, is getting more press than I expected, but is not selling at all. Here are some stats: The game has sold a total number of five copies so far. Three of those were to good friends and one to someone I know on a forum. Exactly one sale has happened to a complete...
David Stark
I really, really want a survival game that is actually about survival. Yes, there are plenty of games that purport to be about survival - but they're generally about survival in the sense of surviving fighting. Yes, there may be some nod to requiring food and medicine, but once you've got that...
David Stark
Papers Please is an upcoming indie game where you play an immigration inspector at a recently re-opened border checkpoint. You have to check paperwork and look for fakes and smugglers and terrorists. You have to support your family, so if you move too slowly or get it wrong and have your pay...
David Stark
How to prevent frustrating your players and giving them burns. Don't max out the CPU if you don't have to. In the olden days, when people mostly gamed on desktop machines, it was perfectly fine to just have your game claim all spare CPU cycles. Especially on slower systems with bad multitasking...
David Stark
I've been working on pinning down the encounter mechanics for SE:SS. (Yes, I'm working on it, but it's all stealthy-like.) I wasn't very satisfied by them until I tried blanket-reducing the chances of success by one third. Challenges that were previously near certain to be overcome became...
David Stark
This is not exactly a review, but rather a collection of thoughts/complaints about Civ V from both a players' and game design/implementation perspective. First off, the endgame is still slow as molasses: a dozen cities clamour for your directions, dozens of units want to know where to go next....