Pre-Postmortem: Addendum. 5/10/26 || Dev Log

My hope and aim is to keep this short.

As of my last post, I am now a Master of the Arts, courtesy of Michigan State University. Therefore, I am at the ‘break’ part of my three-month plan. However, I’ve never been good at keeping still, not when it’s my own project. Something I continuously find amusing is that most of my work on game projects has been reeling in eager developers, so they do not end up as a bag of mush pooled underneath their desks. But that is besides the point. I have chosen to break from my break because the pessimism found in my pre-postmortem is beginning to fade, and I can see the road ahead again.

One thing in particular that I am excited to toy with is something one of my advisors suggested during my defense. He put forth that rather than billing Goon Game as a straight war game, I should consider making connected story modules and bill the game as something akin to DnD – wherein the outcome of each game builds into future games over the course of a larger, player-driven story. Now, a more apt comparison is Crusades in 40k, but the idea has legs.

What I am seeing as the next step for this project is to drill in on the world and how players interact with it. I left most of the story elements vague by design, as I didn’t want to be married to anything while the game was in such a modular state. However, now that there is some foundation set, I can start building.

Here’s what I’m thinking: each “campaign” is an “Episode” and each game played in an Episode is part of the internal four-to-five-act structure, starting small at first but ramping up as games progress. Players who win games gain bonuses to keep both narrative and game momentum going, while players who lose gain new objectives to help swing the next game in their favor until it reaches a fever pitch at the episode’s conclusion, where an overall winner is decided by whoever won the most games. But, play doesn’t need to end there, as players can then continue into a new episode with context, objectives, and other conditions altered based on the outcome of the last episode, which can also build and compound over a whole ‘season’ of games. 

What I am trying to get at is that I can play with variable storytelling without having to bash my head against Python for hours on end. I can just design all the systems, write all the scenes and episodes, and play-test to see if it all catches fire or not. All things I’m good at.

So that’s the plan – after the break. Anywho, back into my cave until spring.

Peace