I'm not a game dev per se, but I am an artist freshly graduated from college looking to move out of his parents' house. If nothing else, I'd like to hear a bit more about this place and the possible costs.

Wow dude, this is looking fun. Love the oomph of the sword hits and the money UI, very delicious. Looking forward to seeing the rest!

Hey there! Glad to see some people remember me. c: I just graduated college, so now I'm off to the big scary world of adulthood. I'm still doing art, mainly comics- in fact I've been working on a webcomic that'll be starting up pretty soon. That being said I still wanna do something with games. I'd love to do some tiny collabs when I'm not totally swamped, if anybody's down for that.

Heya dudes. I've been gone a while, how's it hanging?

Also what is up with that penguin. I only have three episodes and the movies left, is there some reason they have a penguin waddling around their apartment with some fancy backpack. It's cute, but... what's the point?

Almost done with watching Evangelion for the first time. It's great approaching it as a character study that just happens to involve giant robots. Shinji's actually the most relatable character on the show to me, next to Misato. He doesn't come off as whiny most of the time, just emotionally traumatized, which considering everything the kid has been through is pretty understandable. I actually found Asuka way more obnoxious, although I suppose that's the point. I'm not really sure why there was ever much fan fervor over her or Rei, though; they're kinda interesting characters, but nothing that screams 'sexy' to me... especially since they're fifteen. Geez everyone.

Hi everyone! Been a while.

Derqs, your sprites look pretty cute so far. You got a devlog for your project yet?

I learned a bit about TWINE this weekend, this is the (very) rough draft of an experimental game I started writing in it. An exploration-based adventure game that uses a physical chess board. Not sure what to do with it yet, but I feel like it's got potential.

In connection with the stuff about physical objects being combined with games....

These are some incredible ideas. What board game were you referring to, with the tower? That just seems like a brilliant concept.

Something I might actually try to prototype this weekend is a game combining TWINE and a chess board. The board is used as a tactical map, where certain pieces represent enemies and others are static land markers (trees, rocks, walls, etc.). The game then turns it into a pseudo-interactive dungeon crawler, where the player chooses to move a certain number of spaces and fight and stumble their way through the board, adding more pieces to the area as they are revealed. That way, by the end, the player has a physical map of the place they just explored. I wonder how difficult it would be to program that...

Thanks! I'm thinking small-scale would be best for this sorta thing, and omigosh the potential with small-press works could be so cool. You could make a standalone comic with clues for a tiny Flash game that revealed more story bits and encourage a different reading of the story and omigod stop I need to start ftzing with this shit.

Some more ideas: Maybe a pre-existing text could be adopted to a new game, to cut down on time and money spent creating prose content. How about a wargame where the player can anticipate an enemy's attacks based on their monologues at a given point in the story? Or an adventure title that relies on unorthodox interpretations of passages from the King James Bible? Or a House of Leaves-style game where parts of the book appear to be speaking to the game, or directly to you?

What's really interesting is what you're describing is what I feel has made Skylanders so successful. It's a physical object that has value within the game and without. The games are designed for co-op, so you're encouraged to socialize with other players (I'm not even sure if the games have online play), which increases the value of the overall experience. The persistent leveling of the figurine and the simple branching paths makes your figure yours and yours alone, personalizing your experience and giving extra value to the physical object.

Man, we could do a whole compo around using a physical object alongside a game.

These are all fucking choice ideas. A video/boardgame hybrid could be crazy cool, and fulfill what all of those DVD boardgame hybrids attempted to do. Not totally sold on sealing a book to a single game, though- that's basically a single-use-install DRM. I like the line of thought, though, of personalizing the experience. Maybe the book would be better suited for it? Allow the user to sign a contract in it or something before they started playing, to get into character and make the book their own.

I'm not quite sure where else to put this, but I had some interesting thoughts about feelies.

In retrospect, they were a way of compartmentalizing a part of the game experience that couldn't be handled by the software alone. Where we now have access to full voice acting, cinematic cutscenes, polygonal 3D models and highly detailed 2D sprites, older games had none of this. Instead, they offloaded the visual aesthetics and the storytelling onto media that was better established and cheaper to produce. Game manuals are the most obvious example, and once you take this tack it's easy to see what happened. As games have gotten better at incorporating their story and visual aesthetic into itself, it doesn't need the manual anymore to prop itself up. Indeed, as games get better at teaching players the mechanics through tutorials and hint devices, it doesn't even need the manual to explain how the game is played. This is the reason why so many manuals for games now are paper-thin or even non-existent; they're no longer needed, their vital information has been absorbed into the game experience.

However, I think this relationship between the physical and the digital is a very interesting one and still worth exploring. That there is a revived interest in printmaking and book-binding as a craft is no coincidence; as more of society becomes digital, we are interested in the tangible, the hand-made. Indie game devs might not be able to afford to print cloth maps for every copy of their next roguelike platformer, but exploiting that relationship could yield some really interesting results. A short zine with illustrations of the baddies you're facing, or a hand-made diary with scribbles from the madman who placed you in this infernal maze, or a simple letter requesting your help to Save The World.

This is still a very loose idea in my head, but designing a game around that relationship could also be worthwhile. The idea that sparked it was reading a bit about the Book of the Dead. Here is a tome that guides the deceased through an enchanted realm, containing a list of spells that'll help them overcome obstacles and tons of information about all of the challenges they'll face. It's essentially a strategy guide for the afterlife. Now imagine a game with that idea in mind, the player depending on a small book for help- but what if the book is missing pages? Or some parts are translated poorly, and some are just outright fabricated? Now we have a metagame, where the player is interacting with the physical media to help them interact with the digital media. I have no idea if this would even be fun.... but it could be.

My friend and I came up with this: Roguelike Dating Sim. You're given a random set of physical features and fetishes and try your best to score. That cute girl at the bar might be willing to talk to you... or just wants to add you to her severed head collection. The guy with a strong chin and gorgeous eyes looks nice and wants to eat you out... because he's a cannibal. Try your best to survive and get laid. If you get a second date, you win.

Princess Tutu may be the single girliest thing I've ever seen and I love it. In a way I'm just glad that there is a place for ballet-centric magical girl shows with a creepy metafictional subplot.