Ive seen hints of a new animal crossing game on the horrizons (might be fake, but that's ok) and before the official nintendo game comes thundering down the road i need to get out what I daydreamed so I can claim to have the dodgeball of prophesy.

A lot of animal crossing games have been stuck in the space of needing to be slightly bigger than the previous game. But that means they get trapped with a lot of the trappings the past games had. Animal crossing villages tend to need a lot of waterways for all the critter catching the game entails, but this vastly limits what kinda of environments they can portay, all the ocean fish and deep sea fish that new horrizons added is yet another problem. New Horrizons caught flack on release for not having the observatorium or Cafe, stuff that was a ubiquitous part of the late game of previous games (it was replaced with the huge amount of decoration you could do to the island, ut that's not everyone's cup of tea).
I think animal crossing is going g to have to draw a line in the sand and do its version of dexit. Big chunks are going to have to go missing and may not return and be replaced with something entierly new.

If I was put in charge of the Animal Crossing series to design and lead the next game, I'd focus on what the players were already doing: business.
I'd set the next game in a cute outer suburb of Tokyo looking place and the house the player would move into would actually be a shop they can run and have the local villagers visit. They can set prices or force villagers to trade for items instead. And in the beginning they don't have much space for personal decorating, so it'd be a mishmash of space for the shop and themselves before they can afford a back room and top floor to expand into.

#Animal-Crossing #design-ideas #jankademia #if-this-sounds-fun-its-cause-I'm-good-at-game-design #if-it-doesn't-that's-on-you

Something I've been looking at for designing a lifesim has been providing bad tools to the player in the early game on purpose.
I've seen other lifesim games where if you go to the shops location…that's it, you've now found every shop the game has. There's not much expansion for the player to learn about. And anything they do want to gate behind the player spending some time playing the game first is often just really expensive or requires a quest flag to enter the shop.
Both of those feel bad to me, there's no discovery or reason to spend time in the more expensive shops, you'll either reach a point in the game where the more expensive items are literally required or you're directed to buy them, or the game doesn't direct you to it but has no disposable resource sink so eventually you buy the expensive things just cause you can.
What I want to simulate is the idea of moving to a new town and getting settled in. It makes sense that at first all you can find is the big box stores with their generic and cheap items. And as you travel more you'll discover more locations around the landmarks that are more specialized and might have better deals.
But it can't just be a thing that counts how many times you visit an area and lets you automatically find more stuff, you've got to use the wander mechanic (where rather than visiting a specific destination you go to a landmark and select wander from the options and get either a random NPC interaction (allowing us to introduce named NPCs early so that when you later find a location they frequent it feels more worthwhile) or a shop that's in your discovery range).
At least that's the plan.

#gamedev #jankademia #feel-free-to-steal-this-mechanic #it's-a-great-time-sink-for-players-to-use-in-early-game-that'll-set-them-up-for-engaging-more-with-the-game's-systems-in-the-mid-to-late-game

Being forced to watch teletubbies because of my minuscule human has revealed how authoritarian their world is if you take it as a literal world. Where the individual teletubbies don't have their own opinions or thoughts, they just experience the world as the narrator dictates they do.

Its even more stark when the BBC's lack of funding has the narrator say blatantly false things cause they wrote the script and did the vo recordings before shooting and editing, and the teletubbies just have to agree with unreality.

#The-only-thing-about-the-show-is-can-recall-from-my-youth-was-the-several-week-stint-the-teletubbies-opening-theme-was-the-top-song-on-top-of-the-pops #this-is-the-sort-of-nonsense-one-should-do-with-literary-analysis-in-school #come-up-with-the-most-unhinged-headcannon-and-use-the-text-to-justify-it #jankademia

Short term hardware projects i want to achieve this month:

• make a proxmox server at work out of a 2nd hand headless laptop
• make a local network router out of a ras pi
• Set up home server also with proxmox
• set up a vpn hosted from home
• connect the server that lives at work to the one at home via the vpn
• host websites i own on home server
• make server at work a backup replica so the websites have closer to 90% up time
• make more headless servers
• install them in friends houses
• build out mesh VPN so they all can communicate securely
• add "demploy and maintain a five 9's availability webserver from hobbiest equipment" to CV

#I-actually-only-expect-to-get-the-first-5-points-done-this-month #but-a-little-scope-creep-never-hurt-anyone #jankademia #my-job-gives-me-access-to-a-lot-of-laptops-that-have-cartwjeeled-down-some-stairs #or-at-least-that's-what-one-has-to-assume-based-on-what-they-look-like

Going from Stardew Valley and it's "Just one more turn" design to Animal Crossing with it's competing design of "If you have time, there's always something more you can do" the difference is stark.

My MMO of choice Guild Wars 2 has the same design, there's a hierarchy of regular tasks (Daily, weekly, and long term) you can work towards that will all slightly improve you're account's standing and ability to act. But As you use up the short term high reward tasks you get left with the less profitable, but still sensible uses for your time.

There comes a point in playing ACNH where the most valuable thing to do with your time in the game is to vibe. To find a beautiful part of your island and just relax. I remember doing the same in New Leaf on the 3DS (thought it was harder to find beautiful places in that game due to it running on a potato), so it does seem to be either an intentional or emergent element of the game's design. That a game that doesn't run parallel to real-time like Stardew can't emulate. And upcoming titles like Witchbrook will need to remember isn't really possible in a game where every "day" takes 10-15 minutes.

#ACNH #Animal-Crossing #jankademia #this-is-also-why-the-soundscape-of-ACNH-and-Splatoon-matters-a-lot #you-can't-chill-and-vibe-if-there's-no-way-to-immerse-yourself-in-the-imaginary-space-of-the-game-world #remember-ACNH-and-splatoon-are-developed-by-the-same-team #which-is-why-the-two-series-have-similar-design-asthetics-of-way-more-unique-3D-models-than-is-realiastic-for-their-genre-of-game #and-killer-audio-soundscapes

People are all "video game generas are pointless, there's only like five of them." Until I ask them what genera 'Fallen London' and 'Billy vs Snakeman' are.
If you ask wikipedia it's a text based adventure game.
Like yeah, they are "text" based. But not in the same way that a parser game is. They're more menu based. And they're not a life sim, like most other menu heavy games where you control a single character.
So are we just lacking words for this? Do we need more generas? Can I volunteer to name them?

#I-could-go-on #and-I-will #mankind-has-yet-to-discover-an-amount-of-money-they-would-pay-me-to-make-me-stop #mostly-from-a-lack-of-trying #but-maybe-I-have-impeccable-academic-morals #we-won't-know-unless-you-bribe-me #jankademia