🍅Building Engines in TORSO TENNIS

Featured on the cover above is a nice dev session I had out on a picnic table in the woods last weekend. Amazing how much more peaceful bug fixing is when there is a literal babbling brook right next to you.

TORSO TENNIS: Sport-acular Update & More

This month, I released the Sport-acular Update for TORSO TENNIS. The update includes new passive tattoos and a new challenge system for unlocking items in game.

▶️ Wishlist TORSO TENNIS on Steam

Since this update dropped, I’ve gotten a lot of wonderful feedback from the community. The summary? The game gets too difficult, too fast. The enemy generation algorithm is smart about how it looks for item synergies, even if the opponent’s choices during gameplay are sometimes questionable.

I plan on addressing these issues by making changes to the enemy generation algorithm and creating tattoos that give the players more opportunities to build a true “Tennis Engine” with triggers and responses that synergize with each other. More on that down below.

The TORSO TENNIS Design Epiphany

I got sick over the weekend, so I played a bunch of Nubby’s Number Factory. It seemed like a pretty low stakes game to enjoy some down time with. What I thought would be a mindless evening of “Number Go Up” gameplay actually inspired me in both aesthetic design and systems design.

The player works during a Nubby run to assemble a beautiful engine of absurd items & perks. It feels awesome to identify a way that you can optimize your build, buy some new items and shuffle things around to get an infinitely-triggering system that absolutely breaks the game. This brought me back to an old article I read, an exhaustive look at the autobattle systems design of Super Auto Pets. The quick summary is: item descriptions can be broken into Triggers and Effects.

Triggers cause the Effect of the item to happen. Describing items like this and thinking about items like this both makes them easier to parse/understand and synergize with other items. In TORSO TENNIS, the Limbs all have this Trigger → Effect structure, even if it wasn’t clearly described this way.

The epiphany? I’d like to add a lot of passive boost tattoos that can potentially cause these Trigger events. This will cause Effects, which then might cause more Triggers, causing more Effects and so on... a real Tennis Engine. It’s tricky though, because if the enemies have retriggering abilities and endless engines it can feel very unfair to lose in a blink of an eye like that.

I’m really feeling strong about the direction TORSO TENNIS is headed and I’m excited to keep adding new stuff to the game as we get closer to launch.

The FORKLIFT FLOWERPOT Design Epiphany

I’ve been thinking a lot about Outer Wilds lately. Well, I’ve been thinking about Outer Wilds basically nonstop since I played it ~4 years ago. It is such a beautiful game and while it’s clear that many games have taken inspiration from its curiosity-driven exploration and puzzle solving, there has been no clear “Wilds-like” genre emerging and copying the design directly.

For those of you that are new, FORKLIFT FLOWERPOT is my longer-term exploration project that I paused to work on TORSO TENNIS. I got the demo out in 2023, and have been thinking about the game in the background a bit. The game is heavily inspired by Outer Wilds.

My epiphany: having a driving force that interrupts exploration.

In Outer Wilds, a time loop resets your progress to the starting planet every 22 minutes. While this may seem frustrating or unrelated to a investigation-exploration game, I have begun to think that a time loop or similar mechanic of forcing players back to the starting area as a central design pillar for these experiences. If you get towards the end of an area but don’t have the requisite knowledge to make it past a “knowledge gate”, the game can gently reset you.

While butting their head against a knowledge gate, the player likely came across some other hints that might make them curious to explore another area. In this way, the “resetting” of a time loop or similar mechanic also encourages players to explore other loose ends rather than getting stuck in a single area.

So, I’ve come up with a narrative structure for the resetting in FORKLIFT FLOWERPOT and I’m excited to add it into the game. It ties in with a lot of the game’s themes and existing mysteries, so I’m really excited to implement it soon. FORKLIFT FLOWERPOT will be featured in the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase in late May, so I’m hoping to squeeze in some time to update the demo.

▶️ Wishlist FORKLIFT FLOWERPOT on Steam

Thanks so much for reading, catch you next month!

Feel free to respond to this email and let me know your thoughts.

<3 Michael