Since my last blog posts, working on this new game was going really well. Key word: WAS. For the entirety of a few days! It was great!

If there's one thing I really, passionately, way-too-strongly care about in Online Multiplayer Games, it is the ability to customize my character - or "character", as the game may be. If there's any kind of representation of The Player[^1] (and in an online multiplayer game, there pretty much HAS to be, right?) then I want customization options. But not just that: I want to be able to get more customization options. By playing the game[^2]. This is incredibly important to me, and if a relevant game fails to give me that option, it drops a giant anvil on the negative side of the scale.

I've been posting on here about Browser Games :tm: and Cozy MMORPGs, right? They have been, unsurprisingly, high on my mind when it comes to thinking about game dev, with any given day being more on one side than the other just based on, I don't know, my mood. What I was looking at most recently. And then, about a week or so ago, I was mulling over my "but if I made a browser game, what would it BE" dilemma once again, when the obvious solution struck me.

In an unsurprising but disappointing move, I'm already back to making games in Godot. Why? Well, it turns out that even though Godot is less fun, less typing, and more clicking, it's also... faster. A lot faster. Not in performance, mind, in development speed.

For years now, I've held that one of the key ingredients for a successful online game design is allowing - and rewarding - players defining their own gameplay goals. Instead of laying out a single primary progression track and leading players down it, creating a more varied buffet of gameplay that are all equally valid and rewarding, and letting the players try, define, and freely swap between their own long- and short-term goals within the gameplay.

It went great, actually! Had a little bit of a rough start, but things went pretty well and I enjoyed chatting with those of you who showed up. Then the week after was extremely busy and I only just found the time to post about it... a month later... haha....

Recently while not feeling well, I picked up a new free incremental game on Steam. (It's nice, it doesn't try to micro-transaction you to death, like all the others these days.) And that reminded me of an interesting exchange I had on Discord, and that got me thinking... There's several different "start the game over" type of mechanics, and you'd think they'd all be pretty similar, but in practice, they feel completely different. So I asked myself one of my favorite questions: why?

I've been learning how to work with Godot 4 for the past few months, and honestly I think it's a great engine. I like the whole modular design of its scene/node system - it suits the way I like to structure mechanics and stuff really well. GDScript is incredibly easy to pick up if you have any previous programming experience. It's got a ton of useful tools for setting up your 2D (and 3D, but you couldn't pay me to make a 3D game) environments and handling collision physics and all of that stuff. And it's Free and Open Source! Theoretically and philosophically, it was a perfect fit.