The Game

Let’s continue the discussion we had a year ago about my next game.

I did end up making a new game. In fact, I just finished it today.

But I never made that online cruise-ship RPG.

Once I decided to make another game, I went through several rounds of scaling down the plan in a very short period of time.

Online RPG: It would require a huge amount of sprite artwork, and it would be fully online. I had never made anything like that before, and I wasn’t confident I could produce that much artwork at a quality I’d be happy with.

But at the time, I was completely immersed in my own brilliant idea. Wouldn’t it be great to build a really good, technically polished game entirely within the JavaScript ecosystem?

What happened afterward could basically be described as making dumplings just because you wanted the vinegar.

Almost ten years ago, in 2018, I made my first game. It was something similar to BBTAN, and its Chinese title was 《魔能弹球》—roughly something like Magic Pinball.

At the time, I couldn’t program, and I couldn’t draw either. If I had to describe what I could do back then, I could make some stylish graphic-design pieces in Photoshop, and that was about it.

That game was terrible.

I somehow managed to finish it. The original concept was actually pretty good: it was mainly an homage to the style of Japanese arcade games from the 1990s, and it looked pretty cool.

And somehow, a small number of people really did spend a lot of time playing it.

Honestly, though, it really wasn’t worth that much time. I have no idea why they kept playing it for so long.

This time, I decided to remake it.

The visuals, code, and game balance have all been redesigned from scratch, but I deliberately kept some of its original soul, so that the two games would still feel related.

At first, we discussed a lot of new ideas: online multiplayer, conflicts between different factions, and so on.

None of them made it into the final game.

It’s a little disappointing when I think about it.

This new game was developed on and off for about a year, and in the end, it is basically a remake of that 2018 game.

It is certainly more coherent in almost every way. But there’s also something slightly self-indulgent about it—like I’m making a tribute to my own game.

At the beginning, I was going to call it BoomBounce: Fully-Fused, representing the complete integration of the JavaScript ecosystem into game development.

But after cutting so many features, I changed the name to BoomBounce: Half-Fused.

A strange name, right?

Although, to be fair, I did make pretty extensive use of what JavaScript can do.

Vite / Phaser / Lingui i18n / Tauri / Sentry / Rapier over WASM / Cloudflare Workers

You could say I built a pretty powerful and almost ridiculously complete development environment and architecture entirely around JavaScript.

But throughout development, I often had a rather pessimistic thought in the back of my mind.

For most of the past year, apart from making this game, I basically stopped programming.

I spent a lot of time researching quantitative trading.

And honestly, I think that is much more meaningful than making indie games—especially after spending so many years making indie games without a single one of them providing me with any meaningful return.

Another very obvious change is how much more capable AI has become.

Last year, I only trusted it with backend programming tasks, because at the time it wasn’t very good at things that required even a little bit of “creativity.”

Later, I started letting it write some utility functions that weren’t particularly important to the game.

But when I recently started making games again, I realized that it had become extremely good at finding bugs that weren’t immediately obvious and fixing them effectively.

I could describe a desired effect in fairly abstract terms, and it would usually get most of the way there. I would just need to make a few adjustments afterward.

So it looks like if I keep making games in the future, I’ll be able to make them much faster.

But I feel like we may soon run into a different problem.

The barriers to programming, art, and music may all disappear.

Before, someone can play our game because we were able to make it.

But what happens when that limitation no longer exists?

The competition between creators may shift away from technical and artistic skills and toward ideas and creativity.

And I honestly have no idea what a world where the barrier to creation has been completely removed would look like.

It might mean that many works in the future won’t actually be consumed at all.

They may simply become a form of self-expression—a way for the creator to get something out of their system.

So I probably won’t be organizing another game development project anytime soon.

Unless, one day, I feel the urge to create something again—and I’m willing to accept the possibility that nobody may ever actually experience it.

Besides, quantitative trading really is much more interesting than writing code or making games.

I feel like I’ve changed somewhat compared to who I was before.