There's a phenomenon that I personally find super interesting - especially since my main interest in creating games is online and web-based games - and it lies in the key difference between those online games, and offline games. With something like an MMORPG, you might expect that the fundamental difference is in the size of the playerbase - but it's actually not. The M-is-for-Massive part is just a flavor, a concern of scalability of design. No, the fundamental, key difference is: content.

In virtually any genre of offline game, you go into it with a very clear-cut expectations: the game will have a beginning, a middle, and an end. You will play the game and, if it's fun, you will finish the game. There's even the whole concept of replayable - how fun is it to start the game again, play it through, and finish it a second time? It might even be a third, fourth, dozenth time. But every time, you're essentially playing through the same game. The content that is in the game is a fixed quantity, held within the game from the moment you first open it up.

It's been a busy month, what with The Holiday Season happening and having to troubleshoot my computer issues, but nothing can stop me from working on game design stuff - even if it's just the thinky bits. And I've been doing a lot of thinky bits! Specifically, I've been thinking about what I want to do with the overall setting, theme... let's call it "vibe" for this cozy browser game.

I'm a fan of what I would call "medium-low" fantasy, for these sorts of things. I have this personal terminology rubric for fantasy genres, beyond just the subgenre (or as I like to put it, "flavor") of the fantasy. For flavors, you might have medieval fantasy, or contemporary fantasy, space fantasy, epic fantasy, that sort of thing. But then there's also the, how do I put it... the magicalness of the fantasy.

Since my last blog posts, working on this new game was going really well. Key word: WAS. For the entirety of a few days! It was great!

And then.

If there's one thing I really, passionately, way-too-strongly care about in Online Multiplayer Games, it is the ability to customize my character - or "character", as the game may be. If there's any kind of representation of The Player[^1] (and in an online multiplayer game, there pretty much HAS to be, right?) then I want customization options. But not just that: I want to be able to get more customization options. By playing the game[^2]. This is incredibly important to me, and if a relevant game fails to give me that option, it drops a giant anvil on the negative side of the scale.

And if nothing else as a game designer, I always practice what I preach.

I think probably the most upsetting part of having to permanently shelve my writing gamification project is that it completely wasted my totally sweet name and logo for it. I needed to come up with something that gave the right vibe and tone for the game. Something that conveyed a little bit of what the game was about. Something that didn't sound agonizingly stupid.

And now I get to do it all over again. Yayyyy.

I've been posting on here about Browser Games :tm: and Cozy MMORPGs, right? They have been, unsurprisingly, high on my mind when it comes to thinking about game dev, with any given day being more on one side than the other just based on, I don't know, my mood. What I was looking at most recently. And then, about a week or so ago, I was mulling over my "but if I made a browser game, what would it BE" dilemma once again, when the obvious solution struck me.

In an unsurprising but disappointing move, I'm already back to making games in Godot. Why? Well, it turns out that even though Godot is less fun, less typing, and more clicking, it's also... faster. A lot faster. Not in performance, mind, in development speed.

For me, working basically on my own in my limited free time, that is (unfortunately) a top-priority consideration. So I guess it's back to focusing on Godot with me - at least on the graphical games front.

For years now, I've held that one of the key ingredients for a successful online game design is allowing - and rewarding - players defining their own gameplay goals. Instead of laying out a single primary progression track and leading players down it, creating a more varied buffet of gameplay that are all equally valid and rewarding, and letting the players try, define, and freely swap between their own long- and short-term goals within the gameplay.

I have come to realize, this is... not wrong exactly, but, well. Wrong.

It went great, actually! Had a little bit of a rough start, but things went pretty well and I enjoyed chatting with those of you who showed up. Then the week after was extremely busy and I only just found the time to post about it... a month later... haha....

WELL. Anyway.

Recently while not feeling well, I picked up a new free incremental game on Steam. (It's nice, it doesn't try to micro-transaction you to death, like all the others these days.) And that reminded me of an interesting exchange I had on Discord, and that got me thinking... There's several different "start the game over" type of mechanics, and you'd think they'd all be pretty similar, but in practice, they feel completely different. So I asked myself one of my favorite questions: why?

Before getting into the why, the first step is of course always to pin down exactly what we're talking about.