Hey everyone, and welcome back to the VV Eekly Update! I’m glad to be back writing this for y’all!
Today, I have a confession to make.
I’ve been really struggling with motivation. I’ve always known that this period of development is the most difficult part – that part of a project where it’s mostly come together, things are looking good, there’s only like a fifth of the work to do… and that last amount of work will take you longer than you’ve already been working on it. That last 20% will take most of your time! Of course, I still intend on completing Vyn and Verdan, despite losing motivation for now. I know this will be a slog for a little while, but I also know that this polish and finish will work out well.
But! I think it’ll be good for my motivation to keep in mind the goal. So, let’s talk about this today: my dreams, my ambitions, and my aspirations.
Goals (Dreams)
What would my ideal work look like?
If I could do anything in the world without having to worry about money, I think making games would be a top contender (after full-time living with my cats, of course). It’s creative work that encompasses many fields, and some parts of it build on my strengths as a hopeful game designer and software engineer. I’ve always wanted to be better at art and music, so I’m hoping that I continue improving at that too!
Game design is less “how does this game work” – e.g. how the pieces move – and more “how does this game work” – e.g. how the pieces interact with each other or with the environment. This sort of interactivity fascinates me. As I’ve said before on this blog, some of my favorite games include Slay the Spire and Factorio, which both take that level of “pieces interacting” to the next level. However, because I’m choosing to focus on small-multiplayer cooperative games, I think that’s a new opportunity there to make games that really take that interaction across different players possible. That’s why my unofficial motto is “Challenge through coordination”!
That’s my dream – to work on games that reflect both my creative side and my ability to design cooperative games that challenge players to work together.
Company (Ambitions)
What do I hope that Shrubb Games will have to offer?
Obviously, there’s the games that Shrubb Games produces. The first will be Vyn and Verdan, and I hope there will be many more. Ideally, I would get to a place where I can create a game every year or so. That time period is long enough of a production period that the game would be good, but scoped enough that I can take many tries at making games – and maybe find a hit!
In order to make games in that sort of time period, I want to build a solid foundation for making games. This foundation will include many utilities built in Godot, including a multiplayer system, a visual effect library, and a testing system. There’s also systems for making and exporting art, creating and exporting music, and everything else in between.
Furthermore, Shrubb Games should eventually build up experience with publishing games. There are other aspects to publishing games than actually creating the games. This includes things like marketing research (what do people want to play?), publishing (how do I get the games to people?), and advertising (how do I tell people this exists?)
Hopefully, in the next few years, I’ll be able to build up this foundational software and experience. This will take a long while, but, hopefully, this is where it’ll land: Shrubb Games will publish a polished game every year or so. Perhaps I’ll find people to work with consistently, or perhaps I’ll pay contractors to help with art and music. Perhaps I’ll move on from small-multiplayer cooperative games, or perhaps I’ll double down and focus on it. Perhaps I’ll make a hit! Or perhaps I won’t. Regardless of what happens, this is my ambition.
Future Games (Aspirations)
What types of games do I have in mind?
The very first game that I ever thought about making was a cross between Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, Sim City, and… this old dungeon crawler game called FATE that I loved playing. The entire game is based around a location in the middle of a beach, a forest, and a rocky volcano. You build a small village in this area, and you recruit people from around the beach/forest/volcano to live in your village. The villagers offer you various services, but they might be in better moods if you satisfy their requirements of how they want to live and do you better. You can venture out to the beach/forest/volcano for instanced adventures like in a dungeon crawler to gather supplies, which gradually get better and better based on how your village is doing. Your eventual goal is to gather light to create a lighthouse, but you can only start with collecting small bits of blue light from the beach, green light from the forest, and red light from the volcano.
Another game I thought about making was a variant of World of Warcraft‘s Mythic+ system. If you don’t know how that works, here’s a quick summary: groups of five go through instanced dungeons to fight various enemies and bosses. Each player has a unique set of abilities with short cooldowns that work via button presses, like how abilities are used in Dota or League of Legends. Anyway, the game I wanted to make is a dungeon crawler, where small groups of friends traverse different rooms with sets of enemies or bosses. Each player would have a small set of weapons with abilities that they could use. However, each player would also have a reserve backpack of weapons that they could switch in and out of active slots between rooms. The novel twist would be that each keybind would have a permanent list of upgrades. Think things like: “Every use of this ability reduces cooldowns on the next used ability.”, “Using this ability has a chance to reset itself.”, “Using this ability gives you extra resources.” These permanent upgrades would shape what abilities do, and make choosing what ability to equip and use more interesting.
The last game I’ve thought about making is a mix between Vampire Survivors, Stardew Valley, and Factorio. If you don’t know about this, Vampire Survivors is a wildly popular game that spawned a whole new genre of games: survivors-likes or bullet heavens. You have a set of abilities that automatically trigger, and there are a LOT of enemies around you. All you do is move around, dodge bullets, and occasionally choose new abilities. Just walking around and collecting the resources is very satisfying. My game would be an adaptation of that, but with farming built in: You have a large area where you can plant things. Your abilities vary widely, but some of them automatically plant something nearby and some of them automatically harvest. You move around, chill, and watch your farm get planted and harvested. The harvesting and planting animations and sound effects would be MAXIMALLY SATISFYING!
Anyway, that’s just my entire heart and soul laid out for you. It’ll be a long time before anything in this post is realized, but this is what is driving me forwards. To paraphrase one of my favorite books, “The most important step one can take is always the next one.” I feel inspired again, and I move on towards Vyn and Verdan‘s completion!
If you have any thoughts about this post, please leave them in the usual Discord!