First off the bat, since the last time I posted about my game I thought up a much better name. ‘Gentle People‘, a reference to the Scott MacKenzie lyric, was a bit opaque and it’s not like the game is particularly 60s-themed any how, despite nominally being a representation of that period. ‘Label Maker‘ is more dynamic and snappy, and crucially it’s also a pun. No-one can dislike a pun.
One of the things you don’t necessarily expect about game development is how slow it is – though you might guess from the curious emphasis on speed that all the various gamedev tools boast about. It often resembles nothing so much as attempting to build a ship in a bottle, with vast amounts of effort going into the placement of tiny bits of rigging and polish. Having sprinted all the way to having a 3D environment for the game to take place in, actually having things occur there is a long, slow process.
For example, in the last few weeks I have put multiple days work into two fairly trivial problems: one, having a band of four or five people walk to the elevator, disappear, then return, and two having a single person walk to the break room and back. The former required some way to know when a band was ‘off-stage’, so to speak, and the latter required being able to figure out where someone should go back to according to their role and the current state of the game. Neither was trivial to do!
A selection from my todo list for Label Maker.
As you can see towards the top, I’m currently implementing a feature where you manage a stable of songwriters in addition to bands, so that bands can cover each others songs and play standards – or be singer-songwriter setups who are deeply concerned with authenticity and all that. I also think there’s something inherently fun in giving the player some agency in picking the name of the song, even if it’s just from a limited list.
I’ve also been working through adding a bit of visual interest to the game: specifically, walking animations for the little people and instrument items for the relevant band members to carry. As well, I’ve made the floor of rooms where you can do something flash yellow when hovered, to nudge you into clicking into them.
All this new work has paused updates to the web build for some months. I’m almost ready to post a new release, but I need to go over to Itch at some point and replace all the assets that reference the old name. Not the first time I’ve had to do this either! The early prototypes for this were called ‘Culture Prototype‘ on Itch (to pair with ‘Swat Prototype’ for the narrative 3D game I didn’t make).
I’ve been working on my current video game project, ‘Gentle People‘, for just over two years now and back in September 2025 I hit an ostentatious milestone: the game was, for the first time, basically fun to play. This is not at all a straightforward thing to achieve in making a video game, and my list of past projects (mostly unfinished) is a testament to that. My goal in working on this new game had been to prioritise prototyping the game mechanics, the win-lose-draw aspect of the whole thing, above all else. And it had worked!
Naturally, on having this realisation I decided to go straight back to the drawing board. Here’s what I had:
My initial concepts for the game, a band management simulator, were based entirely around the idea of shuffling bands between cities to record albums and play gigs, and so the main interface had ended up being this pseudo-world map with cities represented by Monopoly-esque tower blocks and routes between them drawn with rudimentary golden lines. Along the top you’ve got some important numbers: the season and year, which amount to the turn number, a count of how close you are to winning (‘historic moments’), how many bands you currently manage, how many actions you can make in each turn, and how many number ones you’ve had (five together get you a historic moment). Down at the bottom there’s space for buttons, which are the primary way you interact with the game (you can click the city models, for example, but there are also buttons for doing the same). As you and the AI players sign bands, they appear represented as little static people moving between cities.
Put simply, this is a very boring interface. The excitement of the setting – inspired surely by my listening to Andrew Hickey’s excellent History of Rock Music in 500 Songs – is the interpersonal stuff, the drama, the who’s-in-who’s-out of it all, and while that stuff can’t really be the way you win the game, having it all visually stuffed into text-based side menus seems like a terrible waste.
_space_train taught me the power of throwing a bunch of little descriptors at made-up people.
So: the drawing board. What I want, on a base level, is to maintain the gameplay of booking gigs and releasing records, but with the player feeling like they’re there, in the background of some documentary about the Beatles, pulling the strings. Put simply: seeing some tiny little people moving about would make this way more compelling – one of the best things about _space_train (my first and most sprawling gamedev effort) was the permanent cast of personality-driven little aliens scurrying about the train around you. But that means having the game take place somewhere – there has to be a building that both the band and you, the manager, are plausible in at the same time. I went for an odd combination of the label corporate office and recording studio for the moment, with a pin in the idea of how to represent gigs for later.
swat was going to be an all-narrative game with a vaguely cyberpunk bent. I only stopped working on it because I got distracted by Gentle People – so it goes.
Cue lots of feverish coding between September and now for adding the capacity to draw a tiny little office and place a character in it to walk about; I was lucky in this regard that I was building Gentle People on top of a previous game effort I’d called ‘swat’ because the look of it was inspired by what I could remember of SWAT 2. That had a little person who walked about, but only between individual square dioramas. I had to do lots of wrangling to extend it to draw arbitrary-sized offices and then on top of that add a concept of ‘rooms’, because I was imagining that to perform different music industry tasks you’d need to walk to the relevant department at the label (still not entirely convinced this won’t be tedious in practise, we will see.) swat had an existing map editor, which was handy, and rather than adapting it to edit maps of arbitrary shape I instead put in another layer of ‘meta-map’, and an editor for gluing together lots of diorama maps into a larger whole.
The meta-map editor. Might need to revise those colours.
With all this in place I just needed to map the existing gameplay functions onto these rooms, which wasn’t too awful – though the big function that draws the entire UI is getting on for 1600 lines of code now. I’m resisting the urge to try and do something clever to break that down, thinking fondly of VVVVVV‘s 8000-case state machine.
This is where I’ve got to; lots of effort the past few weeks has gone into fixing various things that broke along the way, such as saving/loading, the rendering of some floating icons in the intro, that sort of thing. But I’m now back at the point where the game is mechanically playable, and just about fun, but with a much more engaging set of visuals. The next step will be to add the tiny little band members running about and go from there. The best thing about working on a game like this is constantly feeling like I’m about to add the feature that turns it from something functional to something absolutely amazing; the worst part is actually trying to add that feature and finding that it will take ten times as much work as expected.
My current ongoing game development project is ‘Gentle People’, a sixties-era band management sim about nudging some bands towards putting out some hit singles, albums etc. Updates are currently paused while I pick through a large UI overhaul but the bones of the game are in place and quite fun to muck about with. It’s written in Rust using Bevy and compiles to WASM for the browser.
Completed this, the first (and only) game I’ve specifically bought for my PS5. Sad to have missed the early, buggy days – long time correspondants will know that I’m convinced PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS lost a lot when all the bugs were fixed – but what’s left is an excellent open world shooty-drivey thing. I appreciated how adult it all was, not just in the shock ultraviolence but also the general, pervasive sexiness of the setting and characters. Gaming is so often stuck with arrested development in the teenage years (there’s plenty of that here as well) so when it breaks through that barrier its worth nothing. Special mention to the crucifixion quest, one of the bleakest, most cynical things I’ve seen in any fiction this year.
Hitman: World of Assassination
I finished the Hitman 1 missions! It’s only taken me fifteen months. It’s a great game, every level very considered, but I do wonder if I’m missing out because I don’t have the time for the in-depth mission repetition which the game keeps nudging me towards. I’d still be on that boat.
Hades
Celebrated the release of the Switch 2 by buying a game for my long-neglected Switch 1, which had to be gently coaxed back into retaining battery life. I almost ordered a replacement battery, glad I didn’t as it has returned to form. Hades is well scratching the itch formerly occupied by Dead Cells, and before that Nuclear Throne, for games I can very slowly get better at in short intervals. The much-vaunted writing and art is very pleasing also.
I absolutely hammered the prerelease demo of this last November but haven’t had a chance to engage much with the final release; the demo benefitted from the necessity of having all the elements of gameplay within close reach which gave it a real manic energy that I struggle to summon up in the full game. That’s probably a me-problem however.
Red Dead Redemption 2
Finally burned those crops with the moonshine. No further comment.
Fall Guys
The appeal of bailing out four rounds in because you slipped trying to murder a fellow competitor-bean remains undiminished. Baffling that queueing as a three is still so unpleasant after however many years its been though.
Stunning little gem that hits the Disco Elysium sensation of failing feeling more like a continuation of the story than a cause to reload. Don’t even know if you can reload, I’ve never tried. Considerably more cyberpunk than Cyberpunk, and eminently playable on a Macbook.
Cheating here; this is my game that I’ve been working on. I’ve been adding load/save as well as sketching out ideas for making the various game actions more visually interesting, with a little Sims-esque display of the band going about their business.
Interesting concept and fun to play, but progression requires either a bit more precision than I’m capable of giving or a bit more grind, so I eventually bounced off.
