An example of my comments in Unreal Engine 5's blueprint scripting language. Pink denotes a problem, yellow a solution, green an actual comment I'll keep. Splines are a series of nodes connected by a ribbon that can be used in all manor of ways in gamedev. In pink: we can't just delete the spline because the whole point was that we can reuse it. In pink: do we have a movement spline and a path spline? In pink: when you delete spline points, does that change the index of the rest or does the spline just start at e.g. 4? In pink: can we stop the PCG from drawing both? In yellow: yes, with a tag: TurnMovementsSpline. In green: after we delete the spline points, we need to move the last spline point to the correct spline point so the spline doesn't lose its shape. In yellow: assuming index 0 is the start where the king is. In pink: what if we always just delete the spline points -1 and move that last one! Fixes some edge cases. In pink: we should remove the part of the spline that we save for the current path from the remaining path. Sidenote: Why am I writing as if I'm addressing a team instead of just me?

I almost forgot about the final place where I design.. in the blueprints of the project itself.
It gets weird quickly when I narrate the issues I'm having with UE5 features and come up with potential solutions. Rubber duck anyone?
When I solve it, I take Great satisfaction in deleting these rants.

A selfie of me while on vacation. My face is in the bottom of the frame, largely hidden behind a helmet and skiglasses. My partner is grilling sausages on a communal grill in a little hut on the skislopes of Hafjell, Norway. Our mutual friend is lying in the snow. I'm trying to look sad to make it look as if an accident happened, but I don't pull it off.

A snippet of handwritten notes on enemy types that flow like a conversation. In white: heavy infection, having one of these pushes an edge to near death. Players need to whittle it down while managing other enemies around it. In blue: Heavy DPS, slowing down other enemies or stopping/ slowing down infection spread. In grey: It would be cool if some areas had multiple enemy types associated with them, so players don't know what to expect when entering an area. In white: an enemy that occasionally causes other enemies to move along the path. In white: AoE buffers? Healing, speed, turn duration. The "Bard". In grey: "we call them the bards. It's supposed to be a joke, because obviously the unfeeling bastards wouldn't know music if it kicked them in the teeth, but we have to get our kicks in somehow."

These are deep dives into a topic where I try to nail down the specifics and to tackle any issues before I start implementing. A lot flow like a conversation rather than a GDD.
Fun fact, I wrote most of these in any spare time while on a ski trip in January. My friends are devs, so they understood.

A Samsung Notes folder with all my Kingfection related notes. The topics are: Enemy types, camera, to-do list, run progression, upgrades, piece upgrades, enemy damage, chess set variants, enemy path finding, player turn and enemies.

Then, finally, I've recently found writing in Samsung Notes with a physical pen really works for this project since so many of my ideas work better with little drawings. I have big aspirations of porting them all with "Convert to Text", but, for now, I work alone and I have a game to make.

A very zoomed out screenshot of a Miro board; a digital whiteboard app. It's covered in post-its, where each colour denotes either a question, an answer, a known truth or a known limitation. None of the individual post-its are legible, but the overarching frames holding them cover the following topics: Art style, theme, meta game loop, enemy, player units, piece ideas, core mechanics, infection, pathing, grid and tiles, meta upgrades, theme X gameplay, upgrading, unhomed questions, wild ideas and finally... scope creep, you idiot! The only images are of non standard chess like boards with sketchy drawings on top of them of enemy pathing and player movement.

I do actually have a Miro, where I started to get an idea of what the game IS after having the initial idea.
I've dubbed this my Wall of Questions, where I have complete freedom to ask questions like "What ARE the enemies" and let myself get distracted in the answers since it's easy to organise.

A snippet of a text thread with myself filled with design notes. Text 1: A little bee that burrows underground in winter months in cute little nests. Players can find them by following their soft high pitched snoring. Make great little pets Text 2: In Dutch complaining about when inspiration for my coding problem struck. I think I need to save my turn order spline in reverse. Sidenote: this did end up being the solution to an issue blocking progress for 2 weeks! Text 3: All enemies should move at the same time and take the same amount of time to move to their destination. Text 4: Start with invalid tiles, what do they do to player?

I thought a first fun look could be at some of my design notes. Normally I'd design in programs like Miro, PowerPoint or Obsidian, but I'm often away from my desk when inspiration strikes, so I tend to text myself. As I'm usually walking 2 huskies at the same time, these texts end up cryptic haha!

It'll probably be fairly slow progress for now as I'm still implementing the core gameplay systems, learning how to do things I've never done before in Unreal, before I can even really start showing anything that resembles a game. So look forward to the most grey box monstrosities you've ever seen.

Meet Kingfection, my (@neomc.bsky.social's) personal video game project. I want to start chronicling my progress a bit more as the gameplay is finally starting to take shape.
My main account is quite politically engaged, so I'm find it difficult to talk about games between the suffering of humanity