Scratching an Itch

Cult of the Lamb by Massive Monster is a roguelite where you gather followers for your flock and defeat heretics. I ramble about what a break is in a game. In this one, there are two aspects of the game: the cult-building and the rogueliking. Which one is a break from which one? What is the sound of one hand clapping?

I don’t have an answer.

Rogue Crawler by Vanialviv is a first person, roguelike deckbuilder. It’s a mouthful, but with a handful of cards in combination with the positioning in the game, it’s sure to provide a good time! I talk about what this adds to regular deckbuilder, and how it’s a very satisfying loop.

UVSU by dietzribi also has a mechanic where your past self becomes an obstacle to current you, but unlike Killover’s chaos, it’s a puzzle. In this episode, I talk about Metroidvania’s and what makes them fun.

Killover by Quentin Delvallet is an action shooter and one of the winners of GMTK’s 2025 jam. It’s one of the craziest play experiences ever, with incredible amount of style and fun packed into a free game. I talk about Raph Koster’s definition of fun and how this relates to Killover.

Winterwrath by DctrElectro is a point-and-click narrative game. It got second place in the winter game jam, and it has an interesting setting—folklore horror. Apart from having gorgeous graphics, I couldn’t stop playing so I wondered why we are so driven by stories to complete them. That’s what I ramble about in this episode.

Rogue by Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman, and Ken Arnold defined the roguelike genre, so I wanted to see what it’s like—turns out it’s roguelike. Usually, I play itch games, but I decided to go rogue. Ok, that’s enough of that.

Boss key: a key dedicated to hiding the game from your superior when they walk past. I though that was funny.

With Yokai Madness, I reached the goals I had set for myself before entering the jam:

* Program a game from scratch (tutorials allowed, no AI code)

* Submit a game that can be replayed multiple times

* Rank in the top 30 (that one was close)

Click here to check it out. It’s only two taps away, and you can play it in your phone browser!

This was my first game jam where I would do the coding, so that would be my only focus (along with the game design). So as I did the Godot tutorial for the 2d game, I realized that this was a pretty good game which I could easily extend and make use of.

So out of the 100 games submitted, the godot tutorial placed 14th for gameplay and 22nd for fun, with my fine-tuning.

It’s great to know that doing this podcast is actually giving me good ideas like including the leaderboard, and having a “waiting” mechanic, which definitely made the game better.

Also, the best part about game jams is the exercise, and getting feedback and using it to improve the game is half the fun. The initial problem with the game was that it was way too hard. Instead of a one-shot mechanic, there’s now a health bar, which is depleted based on time spent in contact with the demons. Also I made the difficulty adjustable on the fly, allowing players to enter flow, hopefully.

Cookies Bakery by leafthief is a cozy Christmas game for this merry time. I hope everyone is having amazing holidays!

Although it says that it’s a Visual Novel, I think it’s what GameDiscoverCO called a find-em-up. This is the first one I played (I think), and it’s basically this loop:

* A person has a problem and they come to you

* You’re the expert and do more research to figure out their problem

* You help the person

I believe this appeals to two things: altruism and mastery. It’s a very nice feeling to help other people. There’s also something incredibly satisfying in learning arcane facts and diving deep into some niche. Cookies Bakery is heavy on the help, and light on the cooking—which works in its favor. I think the context of a bakery on Christmas where you need to figure out the correct recipe is just the right amount of friction at a cozy time such as this.

Picokaiju by spoik is very cool because it’s inspired by two other games and we get to see the evolution of a concept—its iterations! Very cool, that’s kind of what I talked about last week.

Crush, crumble, and chomp by Epyx inspired Chomp! by Picardy Third Entertainment which then inspired Picokaiju. Long story short, to me it looks like a lesson in removing stuff and fluff:

“One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.” - Bruce Lee

It’s like seeing behind the curtain to glimpse what the process is like. I wrote an article about Why Monopoly is frustrating, and one of the points is that you lose control towards the end of the game. Well, more like the early middle, and then it’s just an agonizing few hours of daily decrease that always runs to bankruptcy. But I also say that too many options is bad, and these three games are good examples. Picokaiju has the fewest options of the bunch, but it’s the most satisfying, too. Funny how that works. Now, I’m not saying that it’s a game that you can sink 20 hours into. The simplicity is great, but introducing complexities as you succeed would be awesome to create depth.

Solitomb by Jakub Wasilevski is a roguelike deck-builder based on solitaire and using poker hand mechanics. That’s a lot of concepts, and while I don’t unpack them in this episode, I just ramble about what it means to have concepts.

Why are they so important? We try to shoehorn games into specific niches and most reviews start by comparing a game to some other well-known games. The key is “well-known“ because knowledge (previous experience) is what people base their understanding of new things on. We use metaphors to quickly map new things and make them less scary and more familiar as fast as possible. This helps live life efficiently. Mark Rosewater calls this piggybacking, and he talks about the many advantages of using it, go check it out for an in-depth article.