well, 298 hours in, I finally finished Noita for the first time. my god what a game. interestingly by the time I got to the end, my damage wand just melted the final boss in seconds, I didn't think the build was even that wild. time to read some spoilers!

UI Micro-interaction Challenges episode 494: selecting which dice to roll at the start of a turn.

This was a lot more elegant in my head, i'm not gonna lie. feedback welcome. This part of the game is like mario party where you select a character die. Needs clarity.. this aint it

#gamedesign

Honing my turn UI really slowly of late, but every screen of the experience I lay out is a literal step forward. I'm really glad that I did a bunch of physical prototyping on this system purely because just trying to figure out how to execute the UI is a challenge

#gamedev #gamedesign #penpot

This makes me unreasonably happy. Variants in #penpot ! ^_^ will make my #gamedesign a lot more efficient. Just last night I was looking at my card layout and deciding not to change it because going back over the ~50 instances would have been a drag... I'm changing it all over TODAY!! :D

my kanban. in my day job, I'm deep in jira and project mgmt tools.. don't like 'em. I try to keep the fun and the admin, everything in one file for projects so everything is together. these are just rectangles with text. so no burndown chart 😅 but it works.

#gamedev #gamedesign #admin #boring

More on user journeys - this time for the start of the game. Zoomed out to show the scale.. I have a lot of work to do here, but this is the meat and potatoes of this game. There are about 7 different processes and they all need this kind of detailed mapping.

#gamedev #penpot #gamedesign

Menu screens for v0.1 prototype. Visual user journeys are by far the most efficient and easiest way for me to express my functional (and non-functional) requirements. It's good because people immediately look at them and say you're missing this and this and this.

#gamedev

The idea for the ground to be in a bend in the river comes from Carlisle Cricket Club in England. I saw it on an episode of Time Team, an archaeology program. They were excavating something at the side of the ground and it just looked so darn twee I had to use it as inspiration.

Added some more river, and filling out the tree spaces.. it's tough getting this balance right, I want the background to look full of life. Birds overhead, boats punting themselves gently down the river. As this is a strategic game, there will be room for a lot of 'fascinator' elements like that.

Here's some process content, if you're reading this feed in a couple of years thinking 'is this game just AI slop' then I am showing the working pretty comprehensively ^_^ this is my current workspace in #penpot , I like having reference shots nearby when I'm concepting to keep the vibe going

Adding to my game board design, roughed out some more medium fidelity stuff like the river shape, changing the trees and clubhouse. i say medium fidelity - what i mean is this gives overall shape and visual/colour impression but not polish.

Just noticed this with Noita - the control overlay in the pause menu ignores remapped keys, here I have remapped kick to z but it's still displaying the default. another bit of scope creep for you there 😂

more hand display and activation mechanics. this is what you do at the start of a turn so it needs to be super obvious from a usability perspective what you do here. It's not there yet, definitely still WIP

Working on the hand display in penpot. This is my happy place, it's where my #gamedesign happens. I have always used vector tools since early 2000s. figma is pricey now and I have been crossing over to #penpot. loving it, some interface quibbles but otherwise perfect for me rn.

The physical prototyping process was great for evaluating what was fun and what wasn't. But the more serious the project got, the more I started to wonder if I was going to be able to get the game to the table, purely from a logistics level. Making this simple test copy of the game took months.

At this point I was setting out to make a board game, I enjoy board games as a hobby and like getting away from screens with my family. You need to make a million versions of a board game too, just like in software. figma & sheets worked great, made it simple to do iterations, so I did a LOT

I've been through a process with this game already. I'm a designer in the software world during the day, so I did start with some paper and library cards. but it was time consuming making changes which i wanted to do a lot. so I *really* started in figgy synced to a google sheet to make some cards.

i'm a fair way into my first game release so joined bluesky to share some of the progress! at the moment the prototype looks like this. I'm going to share some of the WIP as well, follow along for updates