I had this silly idea to make a video game name generator based on the upcoming clones of PUBG that we'll be seeing in 2018 (and beyond).

It's basically this:

I just added some words I though might make some funny titles, the basic structure is something like: "100 ______ are dropped in a ______ where they have to _______ until _______"

Any ideas of things that would be funny to add? This is what I currently have, but I need more variety.

Hey duders,

I've been working on this Choose Your Own Adventure game for quite some time, it's inspired by World of Darkness, Twin Peaks and H.P. Lovecraft. The story is already done, but I decided to publish the first chapter in order to get some feedback while I finish implementing the rest of the game.

The story changes a lot depending on your choices and on what itens you have. Even the order you play the chapters can change, and you may (and probably will) skip some chapters depending on your path.

You can download a build on itch.io, for windows and Mac

I'm looking for all types of feedback, for example:

- Do you think the story is interesting?

- How do you feel about the choice impact?

- Is the UI clear?

- What do you think about the attributes and the minigames?

- Anything you would improve regarding the art, font or visual assets in general?

Thank you very much =)

I continue my journey through Doom!

Man, I've seen this game countless times, but playing it is incredibly different, the music matches the matches the gameplay perfectly and makes it so fluid!

I'm getting more used to the movement and shooting, the game keeps getting better!

As @justin258 suggested, I'm trying to take my time a bit more, and look for some secrets. Still haven't found any though!

A while back I asked on the forum if I should play the original Doom, since I played the demo for the new PS4 version and liked it way more than I expected to. The response was unanimous.

It took me a while because I've been busy, but I finally managed to start. A few users suggested I should record the gameplay, so I did. I did not record any commentary though, never done that before, if you think I should let me know and I will try (and probably fail miserably).

Here's the link for the first 2 stages!

First impressions:

- Soundtrack is fuckin awesome!

- Movement feels better than I expected! I am playing the steam version of Ultimate Doom, with no mods, and using only the keyboard to control.

- Not having to look up to aim is kinda liberating!

Not sure if anyone will be interested in watching these, but I will record more soon, any tips are welcome!

Cheers!

Hello!

First of all, here's the questions I have to you, related to the theme of the post

Questions of the day:

1. Do you currently play any endless game? Which one?

2. How many hours do you play it in a week?

3. Did you ever feel guilty about it?

July was supposed to be the month that I played The Witcher 3 for hours on end, but then Rocket League happened.

I wasn’t actually going to buy the witcher 3 until later on, games have been pretty expensive around these parts (Brazil), but a friend of mine got a physical copy that did not work on his PS4 (imported from Australia), so I bought the copy from him.

Not to go on a huge tangent here, but the reason the disc did not work on his PS4 had nothing to do with the console being Aussie (PS4 is region free as you all know), but his disc reader is busted, and he only found out over a year after buying the console, The Witcher 3 was the first physical game he bought.

Back to the main story here. So I got the witcher and started it, and 2 or 3 days later Rocket League came out. I was very excited because I had played the beta, but I certainly did not expect it to grab me like it did. As days went on I found myself playing more and more, it is so easy to jump in and play a few matches when I have 30 minutes or 1 hour available, while in the witcher I can barely complete a sidequest or play a few rounds of Gwent in that time.

All this is just to justify the fact that I put Rocket League on my “Finished Games” for the month of July. Am I done with it? Nop, not at all. In fact, even in August it’s probably the game I have been playing the most. But I wanted to put it here because it was by far my most played game this month, and I also got the platinum.

July was a good month overall, I managed to beat my goal and finish more games than I bought with a good margin, in parts thanks to a lot of traveling around to visit family with the Vita and the iPad on my backpack.

So here’s the list, I’ll talk briefly about each games as well:

1. Sound Shapes (Vita)

I heard a lot about this game, and maybe that made me expect too much out of it. For some reason people really love it, I thought it was ok, the sound and all is really neat, but it wasn’t enough for me, I did not feel compelled to make any levels or even to replay any of the levels on the harder difficulty.

2. Murasaki Baby (Vita)

This is a weird little game. It’s short and the puzzles are easy, but I thought it was entertaining for the 2 hours or so it lasted. This is the type of game that I appreciate getting from PS+, because I probably would never buy to find out wether is good or not.

3. Lifeline (iOS)

This game is great! If you listen to Patrick Klepek’s new podcast, Match 3, they have been mentioning this game for a few weeks now. It’s like a text adventure where a guy crashes in a planet and you are the only one he can contact, so you help him make decisions trying to get out of there. The humor and the writing are pretty good, and the whole idea of the game and how it uses notifications is neat, I highly recommend people play this, it’s only $1 or so.

4. Rocket League (PS4)

I already said a lot about his one at the beginning of ther post. Just go play it already! For me it is GOTY 2015 for now, and the only thing I can see topping it is Persona 5.

Recently I started playing local co-op with a friend of mine, and even though it’s not ideal to use only half of the screen, it’s a great game to play local co-op.

5. Mousecraft (Vita)

I’m not really into this kind of game (one screen puzzle, collect 3 stars, etc), but I decided to give it a try anyway. Ended up playing around 30 levels (they are pretty short) to see if there was some new mechanics that would be interesting, then I got tired of it.

6. Alto’s Adventure (iOS)

An endless runner, very relaxing and beautiful, good podcast game, no IAP bullshit.

7. Entwined (PS4)

Another example of good PS+ game. Beautiful, neat mechanic and very short. I liked it =)

8. Futuridium EP Deluxe (Vita)

I got excited for this game because the art style is really cool. Ended up playing a good amount of it, but never finished it because every time you have to play it from the beginning and that’s kind of a bummer, especially when you have some level that are really hard.

So that’s it for July (I realized I posted a little late in the month), I managed to beat my goal, playing 8 games and buying only 3, so that’s good.

I also played several hours of The Witcher 3, but I’m not even close to the half of the game I think, so I’m sure it won’t appear on my list for August too.

Hello!

This is the second post on the series, if you want to read the first one and know that is going on (or just look at the puppy picture) you can do it here.

On this post I would like to explain a little bit more of my process and also talk about one of the main culprits when it comes to piling up games: the hype!

A few weeks ago we had E3, followed closely by the Steam Summer Sale, that’s a dangerous combination of excitement and low prices, it’s fairly common to get excited for the new installment on a big franchise and buy the previous game (or all of them) in an attempt to play it before the sequel comes out.

So my question for you today is:

1. Did you buy any games at the Steam Summer Sale? Which ones?

2. Were they related to E3 excitement?

3. Do you plan on playing them anytime soon?

Ok, moving on.

As I said in the previous post, the main goal of my process to fight the backlog was as simple as it can be: play more games than I buy, on a monthly basis. That means if I want to buy a new game I must have finished at least two games, or be confident that I will before the month runs out.

It’s simple enough, but I had to keep track of it, so I made a shitty lovely excel sheet with two columns where I would write the games I bought and the games I finished. Later on the sheet was improved to add platforms so I would know wether I was buying too many games on one platform and playing only on another.

This is what it looked like on the first month, August 2014.

Yes, I failed at the very beginning of my experiment, but it was the only month it happened, ever since then I was able to comply with my goal, sometimes with a good margin.

Not that there’s anything wrong with buying a game whenever you feel like it, but I think it’s interesting to write down the games you play and buy, just to get an idea of your habits, you might be surprised.

What it means to finish a game?

For some people it is 100% the game, get the platinum, badge or all achievement points. But for the most part when say we are done with a game when the story is finished, or the credits row.

I have always been stubborn with books and would force myself to finish them, no matter how bad it was. But then, one day, I decided to read Sophie’s World.

What a mistake that was, I could not go past it’s half, I could not handle that much bullshit, a philosophy book poorly disguised as a novel.

I had to put it down. And that felt great, a liberating experience.

Not so long ago the same thing happened with games, and the game that made me realize I did not have to play (or finish) every game might come as shock to most people, since it is well liked: Darksiders.

I played about two hours of it, and could not stand it anymore. From the character design to the art style, the gameplay and the overall structure of the game, everything on that game made me go “ugh”. From the very beginning everything felt like a chore.

And then I was free, my eyes were open again: there are too many games out there, there is no point in wasting time playing something you don’t like.

Just move on!

Going back to my excel table, I won’t write down as finished a game I played for 1 hour and did not like, but if I feel like I play it for a good amount of time and that I’m satisfied with the game that is fine, no need to see the credits or force myself through the end.

What about the hype?

That is a tough one.

We get really excited about games, and sometimes we channel that excitement into buying a game on impulse or maybe even something crazy like preordering a game.

I think the only game I have ever preordered was Bioshock Infinite, because I was very excited about it and it also came with a copy of X-COM: Enemy Unknown. Turned out to be a good deal for me, but I know that some people would disagree.

So I came up with an idea earlier this year that would help me clean the backlog and also appease the hype feeling.

At the end of January Dying Light was released. It was the only big game coming out in that windows and everyone was talking about it. I watched the Quick Look and it seemed pretty cool.

Suddenly I found myself excited for a game that was not on my radar at all.

White pondering wether to buy the game or not I remembered I owned Dead Island on Steam, but never played it, it was probably sitting there for a good two years.

Since the overall opinion was that the games were very similar I decided to give Dead Island a try and maybe play Dying Light later on, when the price would be lower. And it worked pretty well, I liked the game a lot (the analog melee combat system is pretty cool) and by the time I was done with it I no longer felt the need to play Dying Light, and other interesting games were already coming out.

Since then I did the same thing a number of times:

- When Mortal Kombat X came out, I played Mortal Kombat

- When the Witcher 3 was almost coming out I played The Witcher 2

- One month before Arkham Knight came out I played Arkham City

Of course you need a huge backlog to do this, but it has been working really well for me.

Post is already long so I end it here for today.

Thank you for reading =)

TL,DR: You don't have to finish every game. If you're hyped for a game, try a similar one on your backlog to cure the itch.

Also, the questions if you would like to answer:

1. Did you buy any games at the Steam Summer Sale? Which ones?

2. Were they related to E3 excitement?

3. Do you plan on playing them anytime soon?

Hello!

A few months ago I came to a sad realization: I will never play all the games that I have.

Chances are you already had that realization yourself when you saw your library on Steam, or your download list on PSN/Xbox, it’s quite a common issue for a lot of gamers, and it is often referred to as “Backlog” or “Pile of Shame”.

So what is new? Well, I decided I am fighting against my pile of shame until nothing remains, or at the very least, I’m gonna make it smaller and smaller as time goes by, and I decided to share how I’m going to do this. It’s mostly obvious and straightforward, but some things are easier said (or thought) than done, and since a lot of gamers “suffer” with this issue I thought it might be something people might be interested in.

Also, I wanted an excuse to practice my writing skills, english is not my native language, as you may have suspected by now, and this is an incentive for me to write. Critics are always welcome =)

First of all, how are backlogs born?

Easy answer for most cases: Steam Sales.

Of course it would be unfair to blame it all on Gabe Newell, the only ones to blame really are ourselves: why do we like so many different games and want to play them all? I was fine for a long time not interested at all in Metal Gear, but as years went by and I started to hear a lot of amazing stuff from passionate fans my interest grew and the next thing I know I bought the Legacy collection and my backlog became eight games longer.

But in the end it all comes down to Time. Usually what happens is that it comes a time in our lives when we have more money than time to play games, we get busy with other things such as… life.

For me college was one of the main reasons. For about five years I did not play many games, not because I was busy studying, but because I was hanging out with friends, going to classes or watching Lost. I did not play more than a handful of games every year back then (we’re talking 2006-2011, and most games were old friend’s favorites like Diablo 2, Heroes of Might and Magic IV or an MMO like Silkroad, WoW or Priston Tale). I did not care for gaming news or anything that was going on, so I missed a lot of great games.

I also did not have a console, only my PC, that I needed because I was studying Computer Science.

Then three things happened between 2011 and 2012 that changed my gaming habits a lot:

1. College was almost done, so I had more free time

2. I got a Job as a Flash Games programmer

3. I got a new PC and created a Steam account (and a PS3 soon after)

I remember exactly when my backlog started to grow, I had just created my steam account and bought a Humble Bundle with 8 games or so. And then came the Steam Sales, so many good games that I never played for cheap! Within one year I had more than 100 games on my library, and had played probably less than 20% of them.

Soon after that I also bought a PS3 and a bunch of games there, not to mention PS+.

So you can see how it piles up over a few years, specially if you like all kinds of games.

But enough about the problem, what about the solution? Well, as I said before, it’s pretty obvious, there is only one solution to the problem: Play more games than you buy. But how?

Stop buying so many games

Steam sales ( and more recently PSN sales as well) are very dangerous, you often end up buying a lot of games you’ll probably never play, just because they are cheap.

What happened after a few big sales is that I started seeing pretty good sales on games that I had already bought one year before, and still have had no time to play. More than one time I tried to buy a game only to find out I already had it from a previous sale. So I created a rule for myself: I will only buy a game if I want to play it immediately. Why? Because sales happen quite often, and it’s not like I will run out of things to play.

Last year’s Steam Summer Sale I had one goal: “to buy only the witcher 2” and no other game. So I waited until the very last day, and there it was 75% off, just waiting for me to buy it. When I clicked to buy it I saw I already had it in my library! Turns out I had bought it on the previous summer sale, one year before, and never played it.

Another thing that helped me create this mindset was PS+, more than once I bought a game that just sit on my backlog for a few months when it finally became free on PS+. Sure, I did help the developer, and I do care about that, but it really started to bug me that I was spending all this money and playing only a few games.

I’ll stop here because it’s getting long, on the next post I’ll go into the details of my method and how I’ve been keeping track of it!

Thank you for reading!

TL, DR: Only buy games if you want to play it right away, even if it’s a sale, you’ll be surprised how often they repeat if you pay enough attention. More next time!

Edit: changed the name from "Fighting the Backlog" to "Biting the Backlog", suggested by @kenori =)

Hey!

Thinking about starting a blog here. I'm a game developer, so probably some posts would factor into that.

See you soon!