Going back through the earliest conversations about the development of JOKKA! Made me realize that… they were conversations. I didn’t know how strange this was until I started reading and researching gamedev, because inevitably there’s a chapter about alpha testing. It always starts with something like “Here’s how you find alpha testers!” and “here’s how you collect data!” and “here’s how you reconcile user feedback with the game you’ve spent months developing in your fortress of solitude!”
What was I doing from the very beginning? “Look, here’s my toy! It’s online! Come poke it!”
Obviously, this is an artifact of having chosen to develop a web-first game; it’s a lot harder to have this kind of interaction if your game is desktop or console-based. But I did what I did, and because of that, from the very beginning, I was working with alpha tester feedback. There are conversations with 10+ people asking me questions, reporting something weird, telling me what would be fun and what would be awful, reacting to my plans. This is, I’ve come to understand, not the usual way you develop a game.
It was a lot of fun, though.
The biggest and most obvious pitfall of doing this is dilution of your vision, which is just a fancy way of saying ‘you let other people pull you in too many directions, most of which have nothing to do with what you wanted in the first place.’ But I am stubborn, and I never felt obliged to implement every suggestion I heard. I picked and chose the ones I liked, discarded the ones I didn’t, and listened to the problems and concerns with particular interest.
But what a gold mine user feedback is!
What would the game have been like had I not been operating with continuous user feedback? I have no idea. But I probably would have created something cool, sprung it on a bunch of people, and then gotten swamped with everything from minor issues (“I can’t make a name with an apostrophe in it!”) to game-breaking (“this is boring”).
To wind things back in time, the early toy involved breeding characters and seeing how the offspring turned out. This was the point where I confronted the question: “So what?” Many pet-collection/breeding games have more mechanics than ‘pair off two characters, get a baby’, so what did I want to do afterwards? I had multiple conversations with my players about this; I said in one conversation: “The recursive loop was always “make more puppets and dress them” but I begin to worry about the art workload.”
Which led to “…it would have to be fun in some other way besides breeding at that point.”
This, I think, was the moment when the game design began to pivot. Looking back at it now, I thought I was building Flight Rising, Wolvden, Lioden, and would continue to think so for a long time.
What I’d actually be building, though, was Dwarf Fortress.
But for now, it was still a toy.
“I have a clan page that loads everyone, lets you rename, release (delete), and click-to-breed. Clicking on the character takes you to the character screen. And then there's the cavern screen where you can do the actual breeding and getting the baby. And all of it works! I guess even if it never gets much more complicated, it might still be fun. Like... maybe I can think 'it's okay to settle for wordle, you don't have to build multiplayer MMO scrabble.'”
Yeah, yeah. Keep telling yourself that, Jaguar…!
Or at least, I intend it to be relaxing. Hopefully it delivers.
4:22 minutes
Materials:
In which I talk about the paper, the paint, and the experience of oils versus gouache. Fun stuff, will do more.
Thank you Locals supporters! Your contribution to my art war chest here is what's powering these experiments and videos. For now I'm keeping them public but I may start doing some subscriber-only videos if you all are interested.💖
Thanks for your comments yesterday on the business post... all very provocative, in a good way. I'll try to respond to all of them today.
Some Alysha misc now, since I'm gearing up for the results of the Kickstarter!
Petrov is giving away coupon codes for every book in the Alysha series (and has some leftover coupons for Marda and the business book). You can pick those up here (and please do! The books are bought already, someone should use them!) https://twitter.com/PetrovNeutrino/status/1457344535843987461
Our own @JudasComplex sent along a sample of the Faith in the Service audiobook, which I've attached for your delight! I... haven't had a chance to listen to it. Don't ask me about my past week and a half or so. Putting it here will guarantee I get to it.
After hearing the amused comments during the livestream, I went ahead and added all the ship type illustrations I have inked from the 90s to the wiki. Glory in the rampant adorableness of their anthropomorphic stylings! See those ...
A little comedy today, at least in the link. Transcript follows.
Hi, all. Welcome to this episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.
A while back I was introduced to a comedy sketch about Cuban coffee by a Mexican comedian, Gabriel Iglesias. ( The sketch begins with him greeting all his fellow Latinos and then backing up to say ‘but we’re all different, aren’t we’ which is a segue into a demonstration of how different Hispanics speak Spanish.
It is hilarious. First, because I am a Spanish speaker and a linguistics hobbyist, and his portrayal of various accents resonated with my experiences in trying to make sense of them myself… Not always easy, since from culture to culture, slang and accent are often totally different (and sometimes grammar! Spaniards use a grammatical construct that has died out in many other Spanish-speaking countries, the plural “you.”)
I also loved it because the Cuban coffee part is real. I grew up with Cubans. I know how we are....
One of the most common things I hear (and say) right now is "the asymmetry is the story." Here's one about how none of us are innocent of the sins we hate in others.
Hi, all. Welcome to this week’s episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.
It’s been weeks since the Baen’s Bar incident and I’m still thinking about it... because the longer I do, the more I feel, overwhelmingly, that it’s obvious that the problem is deeper than “this forum was saying stuff that offended us.” We have to back up to the glaring fact that people on opposite sides no longer consider each other human. Nothing I say will matter because the people disagreeing with me don’t think I’m human. They have denied my humanity; they have not bothered to listen to my beliefs, or have fake-listened to them in that way that people do when they’re so ready to prove you wrong that they’re only using your speech to provide talking points for their own ideas.
We have forgotten how to listen.
Increasingly, we have also ...
https://mcahogarth.org/gallery/image/123-2019-42-ElementalJahir
Today's Wednesday Share is a little different... in this case, it's the first of a series, and you can see the other 6 pieces (plus a false start) linked from the annotation in the gallery. (Bonus: there's a link to another, similar series of Peltedverse Tarot images in the artist notes section).
I was inspired to do this one by the song Elemental from the Tears for Fears album. I was thinking of what the elemental symbols of each of the major Eldritch saga characters was, so I decided to chase them down. For instance, Jahir's has the unicorn, the amulet, the sword of state, the caduceus, and the net/spacetime of the seer!
If you're interested in seeing the rest of them, go check them out! Share your favorites if you feel like leaving a comment!
How wild is that? This one is fun because it's a "choose your champion" style competition between tea and coffee! And my daughter is participating to raise money for her college food budget with a design of her own! AND it will run through my birthday!
This might be more excitement than I can handle, honestly, lol. Anyway, come check it out!
Yes! Because tomorrow I am launching the kickstarter, so I don't want to clutter up your feed. So for your pleasure today, here is a color pencil piece from 26 years ago. Look at the water! And goodness, how hard I worked on those dark and forbidding cliffs. But I think my favorite thing is her hair, caught up in the jeweled caul.
I hope this one brings some beauty to the start of your week!
You can see it here on the gallery: https://mcahogarth.org/gallery/image/56-2000-055-NorthPoint
Today's short returns to the Le'enle for a comical urban fantasy published originally in Raconteur Press's Brim to the Dregs anthology. This was a potion-and-brew-themed call, and that made it a perfect fit for the Le'enle who have a special relationship with...
Well, just read on. XD
Returning to the freebies, here's the fantasy short I wrote for Raconteur Press's Goblin Market anthology. One of the things I love most about the Le'enle is that they're a meta-genre species: because they are immortal superbeings who choose to live among mortals, they are as at home in a scifi dystopia as they are in an urban fantasy as they are in a fairy tale. For this story, I chose to return to their medieval-fantasy-esque roots to tell a gentle story about magical inventory.
Okay, it's not about magical inventory. But I did have a lot of fun designing Prissa's potions, and I hope you enjoy reading about them.🧡
This one was originally published in Raconteur Press's anthology All Will Burn 3, the theme of which was "parents will do anything for their children." Most people went super-serious with that theme. I decided to go slapstick, and set this one in the Peltedverse. It's about the Guardkin, and eventually it will go in the Forecourt collection I'm planning. But for my locals supporters, here's your dose of fun for Friday!
