Wee Boats is a Short Game

2025-01-06

You can finish Wee Boats in under half an hour. You can spend longer with the world if you would like but you can get the full experience in a short amount of time.

Part of this is to make it realistic for a small team to complete a project like this. Right now, it would be almost impossible for me to create something of a larger scope even with infinite time. The drive required to bring a game project to its completion and release is all too easy lost at some point along the way.

Thankfully, this constraint goes hand in hand with the kind of games that I want to create. It allows for creating games that are concrete experiences. It allows us to focus on a small amount of ideas and explore those in a unique way. The games are therefore accessible to more people because it doesn't require a lot of commitment or complex learning from players to play the games.

Games can be 5 minutes long. If that's the amount of time for the experience to be felt then that's perfect.

Games don't have to make you feel something intensely to be valid. They can be subtle. Portray a random memory that you want to capture or something like that.

Games don't have to have an objective or a puzzle to complete. Gway with that.

Wee Boats is designed to be a short moment of exploration. A time of surprises that hopefully give you a couple of smiles, laughs and "aha thats gas!" moments while you play.

Others have written about the subject much better than I can. Some of my favourite writings on the topic are:

• Stuffed Wombat
• John Tryer (Link seems to be down :( ))

Introducing the Wee Wheel!

2024-12-26

Over the last few months, we have brought early versions of Wee Boats to two different events where it would be playable on an exhibition floor. This poses some challenges to make the game fit the environment. I personally have a tough time engaging with games or interactive pieces in exhibition situations.

I walk up to a game...

• What are the controls?
• Is the game in the middle of somebody else's previous play session?
• Do I need to go through a tutorial?
• What is the time commitment?
• Am I able take part without blocking out those around me?

With all these small mental barriers, I often will pass the games by with the aim of coming back when I am in the zone. I'm not sure if others feel the same way but if its something I definitely have noticed in myself at game festivals so maybe we can try and reduce that feeling for people walking past Wee Boats.

With this in mind, how can we make Wee Boats shine at events? We want people to be able pick it up at any point and feel like they can immediately take part. No controls to learn. No backstory or context required to understand whats going on. Just go boating and get lost in the exploration that comes!

Bring in the Wee Wheel!

The largest part of addressing this is with our handmade ship's wheel called the Wee Wheel! For exhibitions, instead of using a keyboard or a game controller, Wee Boats has been playable with this papier mache wheel.

We have found that people understand how to play from just seeing this at a distance. The goal is to signify that there are no complicated controls to learn, just grab the wheel and you are gaming! This has been extremely effective and has brought us a lot of joy seeing how people play with the game.

Laura and Brendan made the first version of the Wee Wheel that we brought to Berlin. This is us posing with our work of art.

Due to logistical issues with getting this wheel to Norway, I made another version of the wheel for the Piksel Festival. This means that now at the time of writing, there are two Wee Wheels in existence! What a time to be alive!

Handmadeness

The Wee Wheel is unashamedly toy like. It is made of cardboard, paper, masking tape and glue. It is playfully painted with acryllic paints and fat brushes. This is counter to the "gamer" style that computing is often associated with. RGB lights, hard pointed edges, neon green. Let's bring cardboard and duct tape into computing! DIY Punk computing! This scrappiness also is a signifier of a low barrier to entry and that this is something for everyone, not just "gamers".

In an upcoming piece, I will write a bit more about how we actually made the wheel. Little bit of techin' and a little bit of paperin'.

Wee Boats is not out yet but you can sign up to the newsletter (here!) to get a heads up when its coming out and you can check out the game page on Itch.io here

Do Your Own Research (Feck What Jonathan Blow Thinks)

2024-12-09

The Shite Talk

I listen to far too much programming shite talk on the internet. Twitter opinions. YouTube opinions. Hacker News opinions. The whole feckn lot. I feel like I am constantly steered by it. Most of the shite talk comes from people with far more experience than I do and some of it is probably very valid. But also, who knows? It could be a load of useless nonsense.

Even if I can pull out the most truthful and wise morsels of signal from the noise, how good of a programmer am I ever going to be if I just parrot off what I have read online? Not very good probably. I'm about 2 questions away from not knowing what I'm talking about because I haven't done my own research.

I often feel guilty or ashamed for the things that I try out and work on. Guilty because it doesn't line up with what I've read someone say online. It's probably "wrong" or I am using "the wrong tool for the job" or that my architecture is not solving the problem optimally or some shite like that.

2 Quick Examples

1. I learned about ECS a few years back and wanted to try out the concept. However, throughout the experience I am reading tweet after tweet about why ECS is a waste of my time. The thoughts are again, probably valid, but then I get more decision paralysis when my brain starts telling me that I'm wasting my time. But the point is to learn about ECS and what is good and bad about it. Ignore Jonathan Blow and do your own research.

2. Recently, I have seen some cool things with using Ruby for game development and I want to try it but DragonRuby in particular seems to have some neat things going on (fast iteration time, hot reloading, neat live console, apparently Ruby is nice to write). But by even writing that I feel like I will be forever put in the game developer bin. Who on earth would make a game in a slow yoke like Ruby? But I'm going to hold fast and follow my enthusiasm. Maybe it will lead to a new world of productivity. Or maybe I'll find some dealbreaking cons for me. Whatever happens, I'll have reached my own conclusions.

Its OK

This little piece is a reminder to myself that its OK to go do the stupid thing. I'll learn my own way, using real experiences to form opinions and build my preferences. And who knows, maybe that will lead to some other discoveries that online ranters aren't going to see because they are too busy (Jonathan) blowing hot air up each others arses.

Feck Jonathan Blow for his know it all rants condescending on us all as if we are thick eejits. I'm still going to listen to the bollix because he is class but I am also not going to feel bad for trying out what he thinks is stupid. I'll learn me own way what works best for me and if I learn from experience why something doesn't work, then that's also class and I now have another bit of tested knowledge in the bank.

Dog bless