orteil42:

i’ve got a draft somewhere for a horror game where this kid is stuck home with their grandmother while the grandmapocalypse is unfolding and it’s played completely straight

orteil42:

Cookie Clicker was initially made for laughs, the whole gameplay loop mostly expanding on the lollipop farm feature in Candy Box:

(as a sidenote, the reason i’ve promised a dungeons minigame for about 10 years now is entirely because Candy Box had them)

the game’s current presentation and design logic stem from the years i spent as a kid playing old macintosh shareware as well as my interest in skeuomorphic UI. if you browse through Macintosh Garden long enough you’re bound to find some of the stuff i obsessed over between 7 and 17 and i’m sure a lot of it has subconsciously found its way into the way i make my games.

some of Cookie Clicker’s major features originate from early player suggestions and from reading discussions about the budding idle game genre, ie. the prestige/ascend system was added after i read people discussing a flash game named Kaguya Table (which involves a feature called “mastery”):

the ascend screen itself takes after Path of Exile’s passive skill tree:

i’ve been asked before where the creepy grandmapocalypse body horror idea comes from and for the most part the answer is i’m just kind of a little freak like that. Cookie Clicker’s initial “made-in-4-hours” version ended with the grandma building going bonkers and replacing the whole background. i’d been into Junji Ito and similar things for some time at that point so turning it into a whole thing for the “i’m making this game seriously actually” version felt like a logical step. pretend the Junji Ito image i’m including is from his gorier stuff

finally, the kitten upgrades and possibly the whole “achievements grant milk” thing were added at the insistent request of a tumblr user who really really wanted me to add cats to the game somehow.

if you were specifically curious about the news ticker at the top of the game, i more or less directly lifted that from the one in SimCity!

orteil42:

as much as Cookie Clicker draws from various sources i think Nested is probably the “purest” thing i’ve made! i toyed with the idea of a complex interconnected text-based world during a lunch break once and started coding it once i got home. after i got the basic recursion mechanic working the rest basically wrote itself! (it didn’t it took me a while) in the end due to design limitations i didn’t have much of the initially planned interconnectedness (ie. finding some person in an office thinking about their spouse and kids, then exploring the rest of the town and coming across said spouse and kids at home) but that would’ve been a lot of work for something that hardly anyone would notice anyway. in Nested 2 i try to suggest a bit more structure and cohesion ie. each planet procedurally generates its own set of recurring brands, famous authors, popular drinks etc.

each category of animal in Nested has its own set of thoughts based on whatever archetype i thought was funny at the time, ie. horses are very confused, worms go squirm squirm and cetaceans are insufferable. cats, along with some lolcat quotes of the era, quote the Time Cube conspiracy website, to reflect their wise and easy-going personalities.

as these were the far reaches of 2011 i was fairly big on “lolrandum” humor which is why among other things there’s a 0.01% chance the game will generate a random kind of pasta inside someone’s butt, and 0.2% of some crustacean spawning inside a black hole, for instance. this sort of infantile nonsense is something i still stand by and i will try my best to maintain it for the sequel

HANAMUSA (JESSIExDELIA) MASTER POST

orteil42:

PSA ⚠️ due to the way our servers work, if there’s an outage somewhere that results in the http version not loading, it’ll serve you the https version instead! both versions use their own save slot, so if you were normally playing on http you’ll be greeted with a seemingly blank game! your save is still there on the other version. keep retrying the http url until it works!

in the future we’re considering phasing out the http version to prevent quirks like this (it’ll still be accessible but will periodically remind you to migrate your save to https, which is more secure anyway). for those who use this feature to have 2 different saves going on maybe we’ll just add the ability to have multiple save slots!

orteil42:

this motivates about 80% of my terraria/stardew valley/animal crossing-inspired projects