I’ve spent some time over the last few days looking at Sega’s new Shin Megami Tensei-branded mobile game, SMT: Liberation Dx2, and I have some scattered thoughts… A MegaTen flavored take on the Puzzle & Dragons free-to-play formula was inevitable. Mashing monsters together to make new stronger monsters is the… Read more »
Here’s what I’ve been up to since the Silicon Void Kickstarter failed last August: I did some contract work for Spry Fox, who kindly employed me part-time for six months while I looked for my next long term job. I found my next long term job with Tactile Entertainment, a… Read more »
Zeboyd Games is, in my opinion, the name to beat when it comes to Western indies reinterpreting classic JRPGs. Rather than simply reskin Final Fantasy 4 over and over, Robert Boyd and Bill Stiernberg take mechanics and systems from the whole history of the genre and put a modern, streamlined spin… Read more »
The Silicon Void Kickstarter ended and… welp! We ended up raising less than 4% of the goal, and awareness of the campaign didn’t extend much farther than my immediate circle of influence. This was a disappointing outcome, but far from unexpected. There are a lot of ways to rationalize the… Read more »
Hi everybody – we just launched on Kickstarter! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorshrugs/silicon-void I’ll be posting updates on the Kickstarter page itself throughout the month with more tidbits about the design, story, art and music of the game. If you’re excited about Silicon Void, please spread this link far and wide! This is a niche… Read more »
Silicon Void v0.2.0 is now available at https://doctorshrugs.itch.io/siliconvoid! In addition to a wide variety of bug fixes and usability improvements, this expanded demo adds lots of new content: Dive into the galactic communications network Explore the City of Intersection, a failed Senescent colony Meet the hive minds who vie for… Read more »
Over the last week or two I’ve been playing through Diablo 3 again with a Necromancer, and I had the exact same experience that I did when I first played it five years ago: within an hour I had the same skill loadout that I would use for the rest… Read more »
Last time, I described how I designed Silicon Void‘s turn clock in response to what I perceive to be flaws in Chrono Cross‘ combat mechanics. In this post we finally leave Chrono Cross behind and look at a mechanic that has an entirely different inspiration. Besides the upcoming enemy turn… Read more »
Since the main selling point of Silicon Void (play the demo!) is the combat system, I wanted to spend some time digging into the rationale behind its mechanics. Two general principles guide my thinking about turn-based combat: Every action you take should have multiple consequences, allowing novel scenarios to emerge from a limited… Read more »
Hello friends – just a quick update to let you know that you can play the first public build of Silicon Void by going over to https://doctorshrugs.itch.io/siliconvoid! I’m excited to hear what you think about the game and in particular the combat system. As I note on the itch page, I… Read more »
