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| photo of a random 2000s era US cybercafe |
After School
Sometimes on Fridays after school, a bunch of us would meet up to play video games.
We went to a cybercafé called CyberLab, which sounds like the generic yet clearly evil corporation in an 80s action movie. But no fancy cyber word reflected the reality of this place: a dingy room filled with surplus office furniture and overheating computers. It was probably more than a little smelly. Yet it was ours.
Down here in the other hemisphere, Australians and New Zealanders are approaching winter... which means it's time to leave the beach and attend some game developer events.
I'll be participating in a few public events this season:
(This post is adapted from my micro talk "Teaching and Rethinking Level Design" at the GDC 2025 Educators Soapbox session. That's why it mentions "students" in the slide above.)
People want to do level design. They grow up playing games like Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite — all 3D games with 3D worlds. And to create 3D worlds, supposedly you need this thing called “level design.” Then when you search YouTube, you'll be told that level design is about implanting secret lines that "guide the player" into walking down hallways. Such is the power of ARCHITECTURE!
But this is not how architecture works, nor how level design works. Imaginary invisible shapes cannot mind control players, and even if they could, no one needs to be mind controlled to walk down a hallway.
No one plays games like this, but why do we think we do? What's going on here?
In our upcoming game Tryhard, we have cutscenes and dialogue and level scripting like many other RPGs. This dev log is about how we’re implementing some of that stuff in the game.
(Note that I'm writing this post mostly for fellow Unity game devs, but even if you don't happen to be a dev, maybe you'll appreciate this technical behind-the-scenes look anyway? Just let all the game dev words and lingo wash over you like a summer rain.)
We’re using the free open-source dialogue system plugin Yarn Spinner v3.0 beta 2 as our main scripting and story plugin. I’ve written about Yarn in the past and I'm finding this fresh new version 3 to be a great upgrade with useful features, even while in beta. For more info on these features, see the Yarn Spinner docs "Coming in v3" page.
Here’s how we’re using some new YS3 features for some cutscene and scripting stuff in Tryhard:
Yep I'm attending GDC 2025. (For better or worse, I've made too many commitments to cancel.)
The best way to contact me is to @ me on BlueSky or email me ( yang.robert.w [AT] gmail ). You can also probably just find me lounging in the Yerba Buena Gardens on most non-rainy noon-afternoons.
If you're press / journalist / podcaster / creator / TikToker / YouTuber / writer etc. and you need content to feed the Machine -- contact me (see above) and I'm happy to talk about whatever to help you:
Below, my event schedule / dance card for the week:
Now that we’ve announced our upcoming game Tryhard (... WISHLIST ON STEAM?) I can talk more openly about our design and development process for it.
Today's post is about the game's setting, world, and worldbuilding.
Like many RPGs, Tryhard has an explorable 3D town hub where you can talk to NPCs, visit shops, and randomly barge into homes to steal things. These RPG towns usually exist in a magical fantasyland of make-believe, but Tryhard's town is based on an actual real-life magical fantasyland of make-believe called Auckland, New Zealand!
Specifically, you live your RPG life in a unique IRL neighborhood known as Karangahape Road (pronounced like "ka-rawng-ah-hawp-ey").
Welcome back to Radiator University! Although it's been 7 years since we last offered any courses, we wish to assure you that we're absolutely open for business and/or scholarship, thanks to a fresh funding injection from Hegemony Capital, which will never compromise our academic mission in any way.
Here's a sample of our new course offerings for the upcoming Spring 2025 semester:
AG 3532 - FOLIAGE AND TERROR
What is the reality of a forest, and how do we reconcile this with the virtual plantations infesting video games? While studying forest ecologies, we will survey various digital foliage tools such as SpeedTree and TreeIt. Students will then work in groups to "plant" virtual forests; with each week, the virtual forest must undergo 10 years of simulated growth. Then in partnership with Landwirtschaftliche Rentenbank, students will spend the second half of the semester in Austria training as industrial arborists while studying the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Even as arborist-poets, can we ever truly know the whole of the forest, across all time and space, virtual and material? As Rilke would say - every tree is terrifying. (2 credits)
($30000 USD lab fee, 50% deposit required upon enrollment. Work Study students ineligible. Prerequisites: Advanced Austrian German or equivalent.)
V Buckenham has declared that this is the year of the blog. I suppose I shall answer the call. It must be so.
I used to blog with shocking regularity -- at my peak (or my lowest point?) I was writing 2-3 posts a week. I can't imagine doing that now. But maybe I can commit to a 2-3 posts "every now and then"?
***
As long as we're strolling down memory lane: my most loyal readers may recall this blog used to have comments and a personal Twitter feed in the sidebar. I'm not bringing comments back, but I've gone ahead and added a personal Bluesky feed widget that displays a few of my most recent posts in the sidebar -- just like it's 2010. (If you're reading this on mobile, you'll have to switch to the desktop version to see the sidebar.)
Figuring out how to add a Bluesky feed widget was surprisingly complicated to figure out, but then very simple to execute. Useless google searches would have you believe that you have to sign-up for a weird widget scam service with a fake free plan, and the official Bluesky website only offers tools for embedding an individual post as a widget.
But if you can paste HTML, then you too can have a free and easy Bluesky feed widget on your website or Blogger or Wordpress or whatever. Here's my very authoritative guide:
Tryhard is an upcoming sports RPG about managing an underdog rugby club in New Zealand.
We're still quite early in development. But for now, it'd really help us if you wishlisted the game on Steam or idled in the Discord, mostly so we can show those stats to convince rich people to give us money to finish making the game.
If you're interested in why we're making this game / what's going on...
Just a brief update here -- I recently had the honor of participating in Rock Paper Shotgun's "what's on your bookshelf" interview series.
It's one of my favorite gaming journalism things happening at the moment, full of interesting book recs and observations from smart people like Alice Bell, Josh Sawyer, and Xalavier Nelson Jr. Check out the full series listing here.
The implication is that I too am also a Smart One. And indeed filling out the questionnaire made me realize I mostly read non-fiction these days. I suspect an English literature degree turned me into a snob. I'm so disconnected from modern popular book culture (e.g. BookTok) where some game devs like Holly Gramazio are making new careers as authors writing fun books that people actually read. I'm jealous! I want to read and write fun things too!
re: the unannounced rugby project, it remains unannounced. It's intended to be a more commercial game, and in business-land apparently you're supposed to be careful about when you start talking about something. All I'll say is -- I've been interested in horniness and sports for a while, and embracing sport is probably one of the next big "trends" in queer culture. Hopefully this game won't miss the peak.
As a fellow gay Australian Rules Football gamemaker, I am honor bound to write about Sudden Death by Cecile Richard and nat_pussy with help from isyourguy -- a 30-45 minute "romantic sports fiction" interactive fiction / visual novel about an underdog Aussie footy team doing crimes and gayness. Yet beyond matters of honor and gayness, there's still plenty more to recommend about it.
Sudden Death was originally released for Domino Club, an occasional month-long game jam with anonymous submissions. Eventually you're allowed to out yourself -- turns out the now-revealed Cecile Richard and nat_pussy have made lots of Bitsy and Twine-like works already, and all that experimental queer storytelling experience shines through here.
SPOILER WARNING: vague spoilers, nothing specific.
Botany Manor is a 3 hour first person puzzle game about growing plants while exploring a big beautiful fancy house that smells like British Bake-Off.
The main design inspiration here is obviously Gone Home, with a central family-based ambient narrative, household duck homages, and gradually unlocked doors. Many would also compare this to The Witness' soft visual style and sprawling sunny gardens.
But when you actually play this, it turns out neither of those are useful comparisons. Gone Home anchors its story focus with voice acting, narration, simpler puzzles, and wry realism. The Witness fully commits to hundreds of puzzles at the scope of an open world game. Neither of these really get at the player experience in Botany Manor.
Instead, I think Botany Manor is most usefully compared to The Case of the Golden Idol / Return of Obra Dinn.
SPOILER WARNING: this post spoils the game's overall design structure / puzzle patterns, and spoils the general story and ending.
Taught By Thirst is a new Mesoamerican themed single player Quake map that I made for Remix Jam, a 3 week community level design event where we all adapted multiplayer maps from other games for Quake.
The definition of "remix" was kept loose on purpose, and anyway some of the fun is in figuring out where the map came from... although that's not the case with mine: I clearly adapted de_aztec by Chris "narby" Auty from Counter-Strike.
In this post I will talk about my inspiration and intent. I also explain what happens in the level. If you want, play it before reading this post. This is your last SPOILER WARNING.
"Where's the beef is a silly little beef-finding web browser game made in zero hours for 0h game jam 2023 (http://www.0hgame.eu/) where we make games in "zero hours" when daylight savings time switches over (in Europe)""15 levels of beef finding; literally photorealistic graphics; can YOU find the beef???"
For all the zoomers / teens reading this -- "where's the beef?" was a popular catchphrase in a Wendy's ad campaign back in the 1980s...