The survey was hilariously biased towards AI (questions are all like “What help does your organization need in order to adopt more AI?”), and by the time I got to the free text entry questions at the end I was pretty pissed off.

But one question, in amongst a list of questions about how your organization currently uses AI, was “Does your organization have an AI policy?” I initially clicked “no” to this along with all the other questions, but later on went back and changed it to “yes”, because I do have a clear gen-AI policy, although I hadn't written it down. My policy is that I don't use it.

So for the record:

When used in creative work, gen-AI's outputs are also soulless and artistically bankrupt. Gen-AI is good at text that seems OK when you skim-read it but has no deeper meaning, and images that look OK at first glance but fall down when you look at them closely. If someone's impressed by gen-AI output then I've got to assume they've never really thought about a piece of text or looked closely at an artwork.

I've seen some people online do things like get ChatGPT to play Seedship, or having it output stories or images based on their Seedship games. And, like, I can't stop people from doing that kind of thing, but I want it on record that I would prefer they didn't.

#SpaceGoblinGames #GenAI #Seedship

Thank you to everyone who playtested my first version and sent me feedback. This month I've taken a step back from the project to take in that feedback and generally to assess how it's going.

Vorak, Narrator of the Universe!

Overall it seems like the game is achieving what I want it to achieve. Playtesters liked the campy 1950s sci-fi style, and the game being narrated by the villain mostly worked.

But it didn't work entirely. As some playtesters pointed out, the game sometimes loses Vorak's voice and switches to more generic second-person narration. I really want to commit to the gimmick of the whole game being in Vorak's voice, so I'm going to keep an eye on that when I'm rewriting what I've done so far and writing the rest of the game.

My brain-wave analyser lays bare your innermost secrets!

The other main piece of feedback was that it wasn't always clear what effect your actions had, since the game tended to end up in one of the same few places. The game does in fact do a lot of state tracking under the hood, but it could signal this more, and there are some things it could be tracking but isn't.

So what I think I'm going to do is:

• Keep track of variables representing several space hero personality traits.
• Add a “Hero Screen” you can bring up at any time, that shows these stats as well as basic information such as what weapon you have and whether you have any companions.

The “Hero Screen” will of course be in Vorak's voice, like the rest of the game. The stats you see represent the model of your personality created by Vorak's brain-wave analyser—a model that Vorak will not hesitate to use to manipulate you! Ha ha ha!

But what are “space hero personality traits”? Here's what I've got so far:

• Loner/Leader
• Reckless/Strategic
• Ruthless/Compassionate
• Honest/Deceptive

Each one starts in the middle of the scale and your decisions push it towards one end of the other. I'm seeing these not as things that limit your actions or enable you to do new things, but as how Vorak and other characters see you and therefore how they'll act towards you. (If you're careful and strategic the whole game it doesn't mean you can't go in guns blazing at the end—it just means Vorak won't expect you to.)

(name), I love you! But we only have (time_remaining) hours to save the Earth!

The other thing I think I'm going to start keeping track of with numeric variables is your relationships with other characters. I'm already tracking General Zorg's attitute towards the player character in an ad hoc way, but for the next version I'm going to make that into a visible numeric score and do the same for a few other major characters. If you get a character's relationship score to the maximum, perhaps you can get them to help you against Vorak.

Having characters with relationship scores you can build also raises the possibility of romance. The stereotypical space hero spends much of his time saving his girlfriend from peril and/or being seduced by alien princesses, so would I be fully embracing the genre if I didn't let you do this?

But enough talk! Back to work, Space Goblin!

So that's the plan. My next step is to rewrite what I've got so far based on these new design decisions, and then press on to write the rest of the game. By next month I should have an idea of whether these decisions working.

Will these bold new design decisions save the game? Can our hero write romance scenes narrated by a space villain, or would that just end up being weird? Learn more in next month's exciting developer diary!

*

In other news, Space Goblin Games now has a logo! I commissioned it from Tom Morley, who also did the cover art for Beyond the Chiron Gate. I'm very pleased with this little guy. Maybe he'll inspire me to work on my silly space games.

#FoolishEarthCreatures #DevDiary #SpaceGoblinGames

Which is of course the same thing, but what it means is that rather than using my own name, I'll be releasing Foolish Earth Creatures and my future games under the label Space Goblin Games.

Space Goblin Games has a website, www.spacegoblingames.com, and I'm in the process of updating sites with my games to use it rather than (or in addition to) my real name. Notably, this means the URL for my games on itch.io is now spacegoblingames.itch.io rather than johnayliff.itch.io. Links with the old URL should redirect to the new one.

Why use a games studio name? My hope is that it will make me look more professional and make my games look more serious (and therefore more worth paying for). It also means that I can commission artwork and music for my games without feeling like I'm taking credit for others' work by putting “by John Ayliff” on the entire game.

Why “Space Goblin Games”? I've always liked goblins in fantasy fiction—small, ugly-cute, mischievous but probably not really evil. In D&D and games of that tradition they're a very weak enemy, and I'm drawn to them in a rooting-for-the-underdogs kind of way. Meanwhile, of course, I'm a space nerd and most of my games are about space. So a space goblin felt like the perfect game dev persona.

To be clear, Space Goblin Games is still just me; I have no plans for it to ever be a company with employees besides myself.

#meta #SpaceGoblinGames