Design Diary Triple Feature

Design Diary Triple Feature

15 December 2024

Over the last two months I made 3 games, but I’ve been so swamped with uni work that I forgot to write Design Diaries for each of them! In this post, I want to talk about my process of making each of these games, in the hopes that it can be helpful, or at least interesting, to you! So without further ado…

Late Night in Limbo

Late Night in Limbo was the game I wrote for David J. Prokopetz’ 200 Word RPG jam. Last year I wrote Trivia Heroes for this jam and I really enjoyed it! I love the challenge of this tiny word count, and it always gives me an opportunity to explore a weird mechanic that I don’t quite know how to fit into a feature-length game (yet!).

I knew I wanted to write something for this jam but it took me a while to come up with an idea that could work. The first thing that came to me about this game was actually its title, and it quickly spun off into an idea about a talk show designed to judge whether the guest deserved Heaven or Hell.

In Late Night in Limbo, one player plays the Departed, one plays the Host, and the others play characters from the Departed’s past, come to aid in the judgement of which afterlife the Departed deserves. Over the course of the game, the Departed and the Host will discuss the Departed’s life, bringing in the other guests over time.

I watched Late Night with the Devil earlier this year, a movie about a talk show that is disrupted when a real demon is summoned. I definitely brought a lot of that into this game idea, the juxtaposition of the supernatural entities and a down-to-earth talk show set really captivated me.

I was also inspired by the Inside No. 9 episode “How Do You Plead?”, which is mainly set in an old apartment but with a supernatural twist about the afterlife at the end. And I think there’s a bit of the Good Place in there too, especially season 2. Inside No. 9 and The Good Place are two of my favourite TV shows of all time.

Mechanically, this game was heavily inspired by a LARP called Long Time Listener, Last Time Caller, which is about a radio DJ running their show during the apocalypse, and the various people who call in during this terrifying time. Late Night in Limbo follows the same basic structure of Long Time Listener, but with one significant change. The majority of players in both games spend most of their time as audience members, occasionally “calling in” to roleplay with the host for a period before swapping out with another of the players. But while Long Time Listener only has one player constantly roleplaying, the radio DJ, Late Night in Limbo has two, the Host and the Departed. Hopefully this takes a bit of a burden off one player, since a second recurring player makes it easier to banter a bit while waiting for the next guest to join the scene.

Overall, I’m really happy with how this game came out! I have so much fun with the 200-word challenge and I’m excited to do it again next November!

There’s Something About the Deep

I thought the 200 word jam was going to be the only game jam I joined in November, until Diwata announced the Deep Water Jam halfway through the month. It was a busy one for me!

A few days before the jam was announced, Titanomachy - the creator of Caltrop Core - released a new, sci-fi game called IMMORTAL GAMBIT, and they specifically shouted out my game Goodbye, World as an inspiration! I was absolutely honoured to be on the radar of someone I consider so much more popular than me, and the game is really really good! It has a beautifully simple mechanic where a dice is rolled, and then each player votes to either increase or decrease the value by 1 with a coin. I loved this mechanic so much that I took note of it to use in a game in the future. At the time I had no idea that day would come so soon.

Between the theme of deep water, this voting mechanism, and the fact that I had recently begun playing Iron Lung, I came up with There’s Something About the Deep, a game about horrible people in a submarine at the bottom of the ocean. Each round, players vote on whether they want to increase or decrease the depth of their ship, aiming to complete their hidden objective and surface the sub to survive (unless, of course, their objective is to destroy the sub). If tensions get too high, and the Pressure reaches its max value, the sub explodes, killing everyone inside.

When I playtested this game, it was a blast (literally, the sub exploded one turn away from surfacing). I think the mix of co-operative and conflicting objectives keeps the players on their toes and generates conflict really naturally, and the tension of trying not to raise the pressure lead to all the players in one game very calmly debating which player they needed to sacrifice to appease everyone else’s objectives. It was so much fun to run!

Pinball Wizard

And finally, my first video game on Itch! Pinball Wizard is a pinball roguelike where you build your own machine as you play. It was made for the first module of my 2nd year at the University of South Wales, with the brief “Experimental Games”. It’s a little scrappy (and seriously unpolished) but I’m really happy with my work on it and some of the team have talked about continuing working on it together, which is exciting!

The game was first thought up by my teammate Lucy, but she was kind enough to let me lead the project and see the game through to the deadline. We had 12 weeks in total to make the game, but, if I had to be honest, we really only made the most out of the second half of that time. But it’s a valuable learning experience for next time!

Lucy had pinball on the brain because she’d been playing Pokemon Pinball: Ruby and Sapphire for the Game Boy Advance, but when I heard this idea for an arcade roguelike, I was immediately drawn to Balatro for its satisfying animations and sound design. I also realised that building your machine had a similar feel to deckbuilder design, where you’re adding and removing pieces to optimise your play, but ultimately you don’t have complete control over what will happen next.

This was the first game I’ve made for a Uni project that I actually find fun to play, and I’m really excited to keep working on it some time! Keep an eye out for Pinball Wizard: Balls to the Wall Version, or whatever we end up calling it. But for now, give Pinball Wizard a go and let me know what you think!

Thanks for reading this dispatch of Jackalope Mail, I hope you found it interesting! I’d really appreciate it if you checked out any of these games, or subscribed here for more posts!