Valadria - From monster horde to charcuterie board

It's time for another podcast! Let's talk about:

1. Food inspiring game design
2. Cohost posts (with a theme)
3. Spelunky 2 notable moments
4. Steam Next Fest
5. Game dev comic

Listen and/or watch

You can also listen on Anchor or watch on YouTube.

Food inspiring game design

There's a problem in Witchmore right now. The monsters all kind of glom together in an uninteresting way. It puts pressure on the CPU without really increasing the danger for the player.

I've tried a couple different fixes. A flocking algorithm had some promise, but wasn't quite what I was looking for. Since I couldn't think of a clear way to push forward, I took a break, and had a snack.

A screenshot from Witchmore.

That's when it hit me: I could take inspiration from charcuterie boards! Ever had one? They're so pretty and fun to eat.

Charcuterie boards are usually well designed, with various areas of interest. Slices of meat, chunks of cheese, nuts, pickles, mustards & more playfully decorate an attractive wooden board. Each ingredient is carefully separated, but also harmonizes well with the other ingredients.

This is the sort of impression I want my monsters hordes to make in my game.

These images are all free-to-use via Unsplash! Check 'em out.

Mind you, I haven't actually implemented this yet! Monsters still end up together in clumps, but I now have an idea of what I want them to look like instead.

I'm not the only dev thinking about charcuterie boards. Check out Stop Getting Lost: Make Cognitive Maps, Not Levels (timestamped link) to prove that me and my food analogies aren't crazy:

Cohost posts (with a theme)

When you're in the mood to read, I've got THREE different posts on Cohost for you. If you're not familiar, Cohost is a Twitter-like that I'm experimenting with. I'm taking the advice I gave in How to handle the death of a platform and trying to follow the action.

To help avoid burnout from so much writing, I've given myself a theme, or a rule, for Cohost:

When I'm writing a book, I carefully choose (& often rewrite) every word. Paragraph by paragraph, ensuring it's the best I can make it. When I'm writing for this blog, I turn that intensity down a tad.

When writing for Cohost, I turn it way down! For me it's a place to just write. No links, no drawings, no polish, just ship them words. Try it, it's fun and freeing!

Here are those three posts:

Current projects

Four of them currently occupying 99% of my time. Read on.

Current projects

Gotta admit, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by all these social networks popping up. Cohost seems really cool, and I’d like to use it, but the idea of cross-posting stuff from Twitter isn’t exciting to me. So instead, how about a brain dump? It looks like Cohost lets you write as much as you want? S…

Matt Hackett on cohost•Matt Hackett

Being prepared when inspiration hits

In which I allow myself to get distracted away from Witchmore (long enough to miss it). Let's a-read.

Being prepared when inspiration hits

I like Unity, but I’ve been missing the lightweight purity of my old canvas games. It’s satisfying having control of every pixel and knowing exactly what my program is doing. And yup I even missed JavaScript. (Would you believe? I prefer it over TypeScript!) Last weekend I started hacking on an ent…

Matt Hackett on cohost•Matt Hackett

Climbing content mountain

I'm going to be talking a lot more about content mountain this year. I'll also be adding a section about it into Making Big Indie Games, my tutorial package. Read.

Climbing content mountain

I’m currently in the swamp. It’s OK, it’s a good place to be. (I mean many games come here to die, and mine easily could, but it’ll be fine.) The swamp is what Derek Yu calls the “middle” part of game development. The game mostly knows what it is, there’s a ton of work to do, and daily progress se…

Matt Hackett on cohost•Matt Hackett

Spelunky 2 Notable Moments

Sometimes you just gotta make stuff for yourself, ya know?

I've been stockpiling little clips of my Spelunky 2 games. But I never had any plan about what to do with them – until now! To keep it simple, I just grabbed a couple dozen of the most "notable" clips I kept, and added commentary.

You can really feel my obsession with the game in this video. If you've never understood the appeal of these brutal roguelikes, this might give some insight!

Steam Next Fest

I've been avoiding Steam for about ... 7 years now?? Since I launched Indie Game Sim in 2016, basically. Well, I'm finally able to head down that road again.

Steam Next Fest is a new(ish) thing, and it sounds pretty cool! I'll be getting my upcoming game Witchmore into one of these some day, so it felt like something I should investigate. Come along with me as I catch up!

Game dev comics

Sometimes I like to draw comics! Like those found in my book of course, but also just randomly. You know, for kids. This one really resonated with Twitter:

Matt Hackett 📙 @richtaur OK I updated it. Which ones describe you? 3:03 PM • Feb 7, 2023 1.8K likes • 217 retweets

So which one(s) describe you? I'm hopelessly all six. Any panels missing?

Give me your voice

Lastly, a request:

Participating takes ~2 minutes. Here's how:

1. Visit this page.
2. Press the "Message" button.
3. Record yourself saying, "Welcome to Make the Game with Matt Hackett".
4. PROFIT (just kidding, there is no profit)!

Of course, by submitting it you're also giving me permission to use it! Thanks.

Next up: how making pancakes can make you better at anything. Stay tuned!

Behind the Waterfall

Let's talk about pasta. Everybody loves it. It's easy to get. It's cheap. And it's quick to prepare.

With all these things going for it, why would anyone ever need fresh pasta?

I remember early in my career somebody talked about "bespoke" art for one of the games we were working on. "Do we actually need bespoke art for this?" It seemed so foreign to me. Like ... custom artwork for this game? Of course! It wasn't even a question to me. Naturally, it should all be bespoke. Created just for this. Unique, original, authentic. That's ideal right?

These days it's not so clear. Where previously I wanted to make every single thing by hand, these days I just don't have the time or inclination. Also, I've got thousands of sound effects in my libraries; why would I bother making new ones? Unless I've got some new idea to get across, why not use the assets I already have?

Sometimes you just need to be the one making stuff. I insist on drawing my own graphics. Writing my own source code. Sometimes it's just the way you want to do things. Sometimes it results in the best game. And sometimes it doesn't matter.

Anyway here's my inevitable analogy:

Dried pasta = asset packs (e.g. bundles of art, sounds, music, etc.)
Fresh pasta = bespoke assets (hand-drawn sprites, newly composed music, etc.)

Fresh pasta is amazing. If you visit a fancy Italian restaurant, you can bet on fresh pasta. It's just the best! Right? Most of the time ... but not always. Sometimes the inexpensive stuff gets the job done cheaper & results in happy consumers who don't care either way. Spend your time intentionally & know what you're making.

Pasta Dough

Ingredients

1. 2 eggs
2. 1 ¼ cups flour
3. ½ tsp salt

There are infinite variations on this recipe. Some folks prefer to measure using weight, and you can totally do that. One tried-and-true formula I've seen is 100g flour + 1 egg. The ingredients are so inexpensive, you can easily try different ratios and see what works for you!

Directions

1. Combine flour + egg in mixer (or just a bowl + fork), mix until combined (about 2 minutes).
2. Knead by hand until you get a smooth ball (2-3 minutes).
3. Cover with wrap and let rest (15-30 minutes).
4. Boil lots of water (4 quarts or so).
5. Shape into the noodles of your choice (I usually make fettuccine).
6. Add 2 tablespoons of salt to the boiling water.
7. Boil noodles for 1-3 minutes.

For best results, have your sauce cooking, and add your noodles to the sauce to finish it up. A half cup of pasta water or so helps marry them together.

My secret: semolina flour as a buffer. Since the granules are bigger than all-purpose flour, it works great in preventing the dough from sticking to your tools while shaping into noodles. There's also an element of texture and it adds a depth of flavor. That's what we call a win/win/win! TRIPLE WIN!

Next time you're making a game, think about it: what kind of noodles do you need? Do they need to be freshly made, or would dried noodles get the job done?

Until next time.
-Matt

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