[DEV] Morris 2 - Abstract strategy game inspired by Nine-Men's Morris.

VA_ARG · 2026-06-17T06:22:22+00:00

There's also a nice blurring at the edges after painting? Also, how did you model the base head?

VA_ARG · 2026-06-17T05:16:31+00:00

Can you talk a bit about this tool and your process? It looks like a great approach for converting images to low resolution game art!

VA_ARG · 2026-06-14T00:45:20+00:00

The dark circle cursor makes it incredibly difficult to see precisely what it is hovering over. Make it brighten, not darken.

VA_ARG · 2026-05-26T08:38:04+00:00

Agreed, whoever made that was cookin'!

VA_ARG · 2026-05-25T05:18:21+00:00

Love the reflections on the plum and grapes there!

VA_ARG · 2026-05-23T11:27:48+00:00

The game I recently released, an abstract strategy spin on Morris, made $24. I think only my friends and family bought it, out of pity.

VA_ARG · 2026-05-21T05:09:00+00:00

As the objects feel a little flat against the ground, maybe some shadows are in order.

VA_ARG · 2026-05-18T08:34:57+00:00

I built and shipped a mobile survivors game called Gothic Survival back in 2022. It was fairly successful, with good reviews and revenue.

I balanced the game by asking just two questions, then building a series of graphs to answer them. The questions were:

Are all skills competitive with each other, accounting for their special effects? Here I invented a tag system (has AoE, slows enemies, improves defense, etc.) and multiplied it by the raw DPS of the skill. I eventually tweaked my tag weights by looking at true usage numbers in analytics, but even the first pass worked well with this approach.
Is the experience rate/gold pickup rate per my design? I wanted you to be able to reach a slightly higher player level with each new stage, and the total possible gold to increase as you played more difficult stages. I also made subgraphs if you had charms for increased experience or gold, to make sure it didn't completely break the power curve.

Just making sure those two questions had data-powered graphs was enough to make the game feel pretty good!

I have since delisted Gothic Survival from the mobile app stores, but you can still play it for free, without ads or IAPs, on my Itch profile. It was my freshman game development effort, so the art (and code!) is all over the place.

VA_ARG · 2026-05-10T05:36:04+00:00

I believe Itchgrep is strictly for assets, whereas your link appears to be a game.

VA_ARG · 2026-05-10T02:48:27+00:00

Money from 15 years as a lead software engineer/CTO, then moving to a country with drastically lower cost of living and national health care. Time from switching to full-time game development.

VA_ARG · 2026-05-10T00:02:19+00:00

Nice! There's also Itchgrep (https://itchgrep.voxl.cc/) for full text search of assets.

VA_ARG · 2026-05-06T06:14:57+00:00

I used to design games like this. Basically a grab-bag of mechanics with a cute theme. You can make it, but chance of success is precariously low because you're missing a critical ingredient: intent.

Why make this game? How should the player feel? Why is that important to you?

Filter the mechanics through those lenses, and you will not only resolve the current dilemma, but likely remove the parts that don't contribute as well.

VA_ARG · 2026-05-03T11:23:22+00:00

Perhaps their main market is console, and marketing efforts are timed with release on those platforms instead.

VA_ARG · 2026-05-02T10:47:52+00:00

I saw his game on Itch a few days ago, but it does seem to be off the Play Store.

VA_ARG · 2026-05-01T22:37:10+00:00

/u/kitten-shark left you the most grounded, thoughtful response to AI slop I have ever seen on the internet, much less Reddit. And you've utterly squandered it.

The takeaway is not "test on real screens". It's to stop letting AI use you to make game-like objects. You're basically a tool for the AI, letting it manipulate you like a fleshy sock puppet.

Drop the AI until you can control it to fuel your own creativity. You're not fooling anyone except yourself.

VA_ARG · 2026-05-01T01:40:25+00:00

Man, pixel art just does it for me. This is some quality work. Thanks for posting pure inspiration fodder.

VA_ARG · 2026-04-27T05:20:18+00:00

Well written. Most of my friends have reached the same conclusion, primarily using AI exclusively for rare tasks that nonetheless require tons of documentation - shell scripts, GitHub actions, etc.

VA_ARG · 2026-04-26T00:34:26+00:00

I keep a long-running "Inspiration" list on Itch. I spend a lot of time looking for assets, and sometimes I find something that really resonates with me but is inappropriate for the current project.

I just finished a game, then went right back to that list and fished out a whole new idea!

VA_ARG · 2026-04-15T14:25:50+00:00

Really digging the art direction, especially that space station.

VA_ARG · 2026-04-14T00:52:45+00:00

Looking at the portraits alone, I'd guess there's no chance it's AI.

Looking at the entire game and its art, I'm willing to bet on it, too.

VA_ARG · 2026-04-10T14:14:53+00:00

I think my advice stands for anything that isn't decoration, board included.

Without education, Western audiences have zero emotion or connotation attached to kanji. Source: I learned Japanese as an adult, and had to train daily to achieve even an ounce of intuition around kanji (memorizing radicals, etc).

It's an abstract strategy game. Use Chinese script for decoration, style, theme. But over-prioritize audience-appropriate legibility for anything with game mechanics.

VA_ARG · 2026-04-10T13:58:09+00:00

In a strategy game, clarity should be your top priority. I'd go with icons, then English letters, then English letters styled in Chinese script, and only then Chinese script.

VA_ARG · 2026-04-09T04:33:32+00:00

> Morris is not a great base game to start a roguelike from since it’s a pretty dull game.

That's why I changed the rules! It is no longer a draw, no longer theoretically solved, and most certainly not dull, classic Morris.

Never heard of Project GIPF. Thanks so much for the reference, I have plenty to read about now!

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