I'm finally getting into the actual mechanics of the game! I always like to take the approach of building from the "bottom" up - which means, in this case, the first order of business is building all the "go out and gather raw materials" mechanics. These are usually the simplest, but ironically, as a result, they take the most thought to put together. (Unless you want one of your core mechanics to just be "go out and click on a bunch of things until you run out of inventory space", in which case it doesn't take any thought at all.)

In my last post, I had a section about playing Critter Cove and my opinions on it. Since then, I've "finished" the demo (as in, I got through all the main progression line that the demo covers - the game lets you keep playing as long as you want and there's still stuff to do) and... honestly, I'd say my opinion is substantially more favorable than it was before.

WELL. It's been a fun week! Somehow I've managed to have pretty much all my domain renewals/expirations coming up in the January/February time period, so I've been having to deal with some... unexpected systems admin stuff as a result of one of them. Nothing dramatic, just annoying. But I've managed to do some stuff, anyway!

Great news, everyone! I can work on game dev in my IDE again without my entire computer locking up and dying! I'm so happy.

There's a phenomenon that I personally find super interesting - especially since my main interest in creating games is online and web-based games - and it lies in the key difference between those online games, and offline games. With something like an MMORPG, you might expect that the fundamental difference is in the size of the playerbase - but it's actually not. The M-is-for-Massive part is just a flavor, a concern of scalability of design. No, the fundamental, key difference is: content.

It's been a busy month, what with The Holiday Season happening and having to troubleshoot my computer issues, but nothing can stop me from working on game design stuff - even if it's just the thinky bits. And I've been doing a lot of thinky bits! Specifically, I've been thinking about what I want to do with the overall setting, theme... let's call it "vibe" for this cozy browser game.

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 Player³ (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 game⁴. 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.