Boghog

@boghogstg.bsky.social

I'm a gamedev (he/him) Working on ARMED DECOBOT | Mechanical Star Astra. Game designer for Gunvein I also have a game design blog/patreon & make vids : https://www.patreon.com/c/Boghogooo https://www.youtube.com/@boghogSTG

The "modernization" crowd & the "retro throwback" crowd are two sides of the same coin in that both tend to treat classic game design as "solved" in a sense. It's just one group likes it so they reference it, the other doesn't so they override it.

Ur playing a shmup and theres a symmetrical pattern or a long streaming section, do you tend to want to start these patterns from the left or right side? Follow up : is your vision the same in both eyes or is one of them worse than the other? Noticing a bit of correlation

There are a lot of action indie devs who also want players to care about their worlds and stories but struggle to do it in an action context. I think they ought to rethink how they approach action - most action games dont put emphasis on terrain, observation & spatial awareness

Everyone should play Lurruna's EX mode btw, it massively ramps up enemy counts, respawning enemies, enemy speeds & boss attacks making the game truly feel like a run n gun Can unlock it if you hold left + press charge bomb, then by holding charge bomb in the main menu

Anyone dabbling in games crit has to watch game design talks about games they crit to remind themselves how detached player perception is from the actual development. Devs will regularly directly admit things that players will spent hours upon hours arguing against when critics point it out

Heyo, if you bought and finished Lurruna, can you leave a review? We're 3 reviews away from the first visibility threshold on Steam (reviews from players with review codes don't count toward this number unfortunately) store.steampowered.com/app/4315900/...

LURRUNA - The Island of Towering Automatons on Steam

It's the GRAVITY-BOUND BOMBER!!! LURRUNA is an homage to CLASSICVANIA gameplay. Pelt bombs, beat baddies and cross chasms in a mysterious island adventure.

store.steampowered.com

One of the many consequences of ppl not having a proper mental timeline of arcade games is that they miss the fact that arcades had a sort of "retro revival" wave of their own in the 90s via stuff like Namco's Arrangement games, Gradius 4, etc. similar to what we got with Megaman 9

Been getting this type of stuff done, hopefully between all the character moveset demos I won't have to make much of a beat em up fundies tutorial

It's a longterm project so it'll take a while to *truly* bear fruit but I gotta say I've been really enjoying designing flatter difficulty curves a lot. It's really making me rethink everything from how varied challenges are justified to the entire game structure itself

One of the most consistently damaging thought patterns among players is treating skill level as static and games as exams rather than something more like instruments. You walk in with whatever skills you had, you get tested & graded and you walk out. It leads to *a lot* of negative trends

Gamers will be like "play the ACTUAL GAME not the main campaign" and point you to a shitty side mode that was made in an hour on lunch break or a random cheevo

Games are contracts between the player & dev. Therefore they need explicit written rules that exist somewhere in the game itself, ones that are very clear to the party signing the contract and can be definitively used to settle disputes

Something that took me way too long to internalize (even if I "knew it" technically) is that moving away from a more functional approach to game aesthetics and moving towards stuff thats more expressive/has more personality doesnt mean you need to do any storytelling/writing what so ever