Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.

I always get stuck trying to write the intro for these newsletters, I’m not much of a casual talker.

So let’s just do this in a checklist format from now on!

• Weather: it’s good, spring is coming.

• Mood: mildly overwhelmed (too many projects!) but overall happy and all.

• Projects: I’m very happy with how Bibidi is turning out, and I’m having a lot of fun trying to work out some music for it. Here’s some unfinished shop-music, not sure if we will use it.

That was so much easier than trying to write something organic! Thank you me for thinking of that.

Creativity is about dealing with frustration

When I get a promising idea it's often all fun and excitement, even getting started might be a breeze. It’s all potential!

But there always comes a point when it feels like a tangle of frustrations. Problems without clear answers, new skills to learn, uncertainty and tasks that distract from the important parts.

Facing this tangly barrier is when real creativity begins. Up until the frustration hits all I’ve done is go through the loops, doing what is obvious and easy. Now I’ve reached the point where I need to face the facts - the roadblocks between the lofty dream and the real, finished manifestation of the idea.

Every project, idea and medium has frustrations built into them that can’t be skipped.

• Story telling: figuring out what the message is and stringing together a bunch of events in an organic escalating manner that convey that message.

• Game design: finding a hook to build a game around, figuring out a gameloop to make it fun to repeat the hook and overcoming all the technical challenges.

• Composing (music): finding repetitive patterns that aren’t annoying while finding and conveying the right emotions.

• Coming up with ideas: to think of something that you think is worth doing and that you are excited about and that overlaps with your skillset and experience.

If you see some kind of finished piece of art. A movie for instance, and it’s just not very good. Then it’s probably because for some reason the creator(s) of it didn’t deal with some of these frustrations. Let’s say the issue of this movie is the story. There could be a variety of reasons why; maybe they didn’t think of the good answers, so they relied on tropes, perhaps the message was fuzzy because they didn’t have a deep enough understanding of it, perhaps their world view was too limited for the topic. Or they simply didn’t have enough time (time helps a lot in dealing with frustration).

Soul searching and expanding your world view? We are talking frustrating stuff here! When I was a teen I met people that really challenged my beliefs and values, it’s not easy to willingly put yourself in situations like that (I stumbled into it there). That’s why I keep repeating ‘creativity is an adventure in the mind,’ real adventures should be at least a bit uncomfortable.

Story telling might sound dramatic as an example. But take any craft, drawing for instance, you don’t exactly need to search your soul to draw something decent, but you could find yourself unable to pull off an image the way you want and then face the frustration of self-doubt. Frustration hides everywhere in the process.

I’m not saying anything you don’t already know here, you have definitely felt it (and that’s a good thing). I’m just framing it in a different way or putting words to it.

My hope is next time you sit down to work on an idea and you feel frustrated, you should know that it is the most important part of the process. The way you tackle that frustrating thing is what determines how good the outcome will be or how much you will grow from it.

It’s too hard to not mention AI at all when talking about this. One of the main reasons people feel like they need AI is because they think they can remove the frustration from the creative process. But if you do, you will get robbed of the satisfaction of being an artist/creative.

The satisfaction of solving a problem is proportional to the frustration. And without frustration there is no growth.

Creating stuff is about facing frustration and doing something about it.

Mini Notes

📝 Essay - I am an AI hater

As the title says. Please don’t talk to me about how AI is good in any way. I don’t care, we don’t need it.

🎥 Short film - Bonehead 2

I love Colin Armstead’s art and shorts. Makes me want to animate a short film too.

❓ Local multiplayer games?

I’ve played and enjoyed these

• Overcooked 1+2 (always a success when we have people over)

• Nidhogg 1+2

• Towerfall

• Gang Beasts

• Human Fall Flat

• Super Smash Bros

• Mariokart

• Kingdom Two Crowns

• Lovers in a dangerous space time

• Trine

• TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge

And I recently got Ship Of Fools, but we haven’t gotten around to try it yet. Looks like a lot of fun though!

We are really itching for some kind of hack and slash that we can play together, but we don’t really feel drawn to Diablo right now. I feel I might have to make one myself some day (the frustration of when what you want does not exist)…

Do you have any recommendations?

❓ Question time

Which frustration is your biggest enemy/friend?

Thank you for reading Indie Notebook! I’d love to hear what today’s issue made you think about.

Take care and have a creative week.

Leave a comment

Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.

Shiny object syndrome?

Recently the world has been slinging opportunities at me from left and right; freelance gigs, game projects and some other stuff that is all hard to say no to. I’ve been doing my best to say ‘no’ way more than ‘yes’. Despite that I’ve still ended up with slightly too many obligations.

I think three is about the maximum amount of projects anyone should handle at any one time. Now I have around six on-going projects. They’re all different in priority and scale. But sometimes it still makes it hard to know what to prioritise and to be sure if they’re all on the right track.

Not sure where I’m going with this, I don’t think I have a wise answer.

As I said earlier, the easy answer would be to say ‘no’ to more stuff, which I think I have gotten much better at. It’s just that I’m not doing art and game dev because I want an easy life, I’m doing this because I genuinely enjoy it.

I guess I had a long streak going for a while now where I managed to focus mostly on Bibidi, now I’m shaking it up a bit again. Maybe this is just part of my rhythm?

The Afflicted Apprentice Update

In the latest Bibidi Bibidi update we added a new playable class, his name is Oppipi (named after one of my childhood friend’s World of Warcraft characters).

Aside from drawing him I also voice acted for him. I never did it before, but it was fun! It took a long time though, at the moment there are over 200 voice lines per character in the game.

You’ll have to complete some in-game challenges to unlock him and see what he does. The playtest is still open to the public over on the Steam page if you wanna check that out!

We’ve been getting some recurring feedback that the synergies and creative possibilities with the cards feel a bit limited. We’ve narrowed these problems down to a few causes, I’m just gonna copy-paste Daan here because he phrased it so nicely:

• The basic cards lack creativity. In your first few runs before you unlock anything, you’ll mostly be just trying to pump up your damage output. For a game about crafting your own spells as a wizard, it feels quite run-of-the-mill.

• There’s a lack of real AHA! moments when it comes to making strategic builds come together. They do exist, but they’re few and far between and mostly reserved for advanced players.

• You don’t have a lot of control over the reward options you’re presented with. The shop and card rewards feel very random and often not related to your build at all.

So that’s what the next update is gonna be about - we’ll be adding new cards to try to enable more variety and creativity!

Oh, and I gave the background art in the first area a new lick of paint! I’m quite happy with how it turned out.

We’ve also added a feedback form, to make it easier for people to share feedback with us. It’s anonymous, so you can be as blunt as you want! There’s a link to that in-game.

Try the Bibidi Alpha!

I’m keeping it short today!

Thank you for reading Indie Notebook! I’d love to hear what today’s issue made you think about.

Take care and have a creative week.

Leave a comment

Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.

This is my first post of the year, so happy new year everyone! For some reason there’s been quite a bunch of new people signing up, warm welcome to ya!

I started the year a little harsh. I slipped in a completely glazed staircase and twisted my leg in the fall. I’ve been limping for two weeks now. I tried to get help from Swedish healthcare, assuming it would be no issue getting help there since I have Swedish citizenship and a European healthcare card. Apparently you need the plastic version of the European health-card, I only had the digital version with me so I would’ve had to pay (sigh).

Doesn’t seem like it’s a long term injury though, I’ll probably be back to normal in a few weeks!

To have a home on the internet

When I talked about my goals for 2026 in my last post, remaking my website from scratch was one of the goals I mentioned. Somehow I’ve already scratched that one off my list!

I spent most of my holiday break on it. My brother is a great programmer and he’s made a lot of websites. So with his help and a decent tutorial I had the first version of the site done in about 2 weeks. It would have taken way longer without him.

It’s a pretty basic, but it’s the way I like it. Here’s a list of reasons why I think it’s cool.

• I own all the code and content, so I can easily migrate to a different host if I don’t like their politics or pricing.

• I can update it easily by pushing changes via Github.

• It’s lightweight, easy to use and customise.

• Now I could put a browser game on there if I want.

• I can add the features I actually want to it myself (in the public and admin area).

• No prompts trying to make me use AI tools to make the layout or write instead of me.

These things were all impossible or lacklustre when I was using SquareSpace. Sure it’s easy to use but it felt clunky, limiting and I lowkey dreaded to open the editor.

It might seem like a frivolous thing to put effort into making a website in this day and age. Who even visits websites these days? Actually, I’m not sure… surfers?

So maybe I can only talk for myself; I find it sad when I discover an artist on social media and their art is buried in their feed among dozens of reaction gifs and their best thoughts are hidden among hundreds of short spur-of-the-moment thoughts.

I think it’s disrespectful to your own work to just let the social media feed consume your art like that and never make an effort to collect the pieces in one place where they become a whole family.

I see a website as a display case for the projects and art I’ve made. And as a digital garden for the ideas and thoughts I want to cultivate. Just because it doesn’t exist on a platform with billions of members doesn’t mean it’s meaningless.

If you care about what you make, why would you not care about making a home for it?

Bibidi Bibidi: The Skymap update

In this update we tackled the most recurring feedback we’ve gotten. Up until now there’s not really been any incentive to replay the game. For two reasons basically, 1) there’s nothing to unlock, 2) most people beat the entire game in their first run.

We created a sort of skill tree to address this. Each node on the tree is a little challenge, after you clear a challenge you unlock some new cards and sigils. Which means the cards in the pool of possible cards will get progressively better and the difficulty of the game slowly adjusts its difficulty to your level.

We also added some new mechanics and monsters which make the game even more challenging.

And I’m trying something new on the marketing side.

After a healthy but confrontational conversation with a CEO of a local game company recently, I became determined to step up my marketing efforts for Bibidi even more. I’ve been kinda holding back on reaching out to content creators. I wanted to ramp it up gradually as we inch closer towards launch.

He convinced me there’s no reason to hold back on marketing. Just go all in. We can’t reach out too soon, we shouldn’t wait for all the problems with the game to be fixed. If they don’t like the game or don’t want to try it we will find that out sooner rather than later. And if they play it and don’t like it we will learn why and we can try to do something about it.

He told me I should reach out to at least 10 000 people by launch, my goal was 1000. I said that sounds impossible, it would be a full time job to find that many people and then also reach out to each and every one of them. He told me there are paid tools for either getting access to a database of content creators or for finding them. So I’ve been using a tool like this for a few days now, it has drastically increased how much reach-out I can do in a day. It’s too soon to say much about the results yet though.

And right now we are working on adding a second playable class to the game. Here’s an early concept of what it might look like.

Wishlist the game on Steam!

That’s everything Bibidi related for today!

Mini Notes

📝 Some cool websites of artists

Incase you feel inspired to make yourself a website but dunno what to do. Here are a few I enjoy visiting from time to time.

• Austin Kleon

• Cabel

• Tibo

• Ivysly

• Stuffed Wombat

• LocalThunk

• jw

• Sokpop

❓ Question time

Do you make an effort to make a home for your art, work, projects or thoughts somewhere?

Thank you for reading Indie Notebook! I’d love to hear what today’s issue made you think about.

Take care and have a creative week.

Leave a comment

Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.

Merry Holidays everyone!

I usually write up a summary and some thoughts about my work and creativity in general. It’s a nice little ritual to close up the year, I recommend doing it yourself, even if you don’t share it with anyone.

But first, My work is on sale! Maybe you can find something to enjoy during the holidays (or to gift a friend)!

Holiday Sales!

My climbing roguelike Surmount is on a huge 75% discount right now on Steam and Nintendo Switch! That’s less than 4 bucks.

Please leave review if you end up getting it!

Check out Surmount on Steam!

Everything on my itch page is 20% off. Including the Space Deer PDFs, Empty Planet and Long Puppy.

Check out the itch sale!

Playdate Season 2 is currently $31 instead of the usual $39. So many great games in there. And if you just want Long Puppy that’s also on sale on the Playdate Catalog.

Check out Season 2!

I don’t have a Patreon and I don’t have any premium tier here on Substack. Mostly because it feels like it would be a distraction from actually making my work. So even if you just like reading this newsletter, picking something up is a nice way to support me in this silly endeavour.

Yearly summary

Last year I didn’t end up writing up any end of year summary because I had too many projects going on at once. I was still publishing two Space Deer comic strips per week, I was secretly developing Long Puppy, I was doing freelance work, and I was still recovering from shipping Surmount, which I’m not sure if I took a proper break after.

I think the only compromise was when I took a 2 month break from writing this newsletter at the start of the year.

I just had too much excitement for Space Deer and partaking in Season 2 was something I couldn’t pass up on, it was such a unique opportunity.
I would have gone easier on the freelance work if the sales of Surmount had sold better. But, you know, obviously it didn’t.

Putting Space Deer on hold

I stopped publishing Space Deer in April, on the one year anniversary of the strip. It felt amazing to reach that milestone, for so many reasons. I proved to myself I could stick to it and be that persistent, I improved/proved to myself I could write, and most of all because so many people read and liked the strip.

I did say that I would get back to publishing the strip again in 2025. But it didn’t end up happening because I got burnt by going so hard on it for so long. When I get back to it in 2026 I will definitely publish it with a different cadence. Max one strip per week. The itch to write new strips has returned though.

I’ve already written a lengthy post about this.

Releasing Long Puppy on Playdate

Since I didn’t return to the comic strip I ended up spending pretty much the rest of the year doing game development.

First I wrapped up development on Long Puppy in March (started sometime in 2024). I kept doing some maintenance on it up until and a bit after its release in May. In hindsight it felt like a fun, long game jam.

The whole experience was such a blast, working with Panic was great and the whole Playdate community is really amazing to interact with and it was so much fun to see their reactions.

The revenue I made from this also allowed me to wind down freelance and do more of whatever I want for the rest of the year, and at least a good bit into 2026.

I wrote a loooong post about the making of Long Puppy.

Bibidi Bibidi!

Then we have Bibidi, my latest beast. In March, right after I had wrapped up the main bulk of development on Long Puppy, my friend Daan came over to visit for a few days so we could crack some game ideas together. We wanted to make a crafty buildy game. These were the goals we wrote down for ourselves.

1. Earn €30.000.

2. Have fun making a CraftyBuildySimulationy game.

3. Make a game in 3 months (but probably 6).

4. (Optionally) Try out systemic/reactive design.

We made a paper prototype of Bibidi Bibidi that week and it was quite a clear winner for us just based on how excited we felt about it. Still, we wanted to see how viable the other ideas might be too. That’s why we prototyped Loopy Folk. Which some of you might remember if you followed the newsletter or joined my discord server where I shared builds of it.

The reception of the concept art was good. So it passed that “likability-test”, but it was a trickier game to design and it wasn’t clear what audience we would target with it, hardcore strategy? idle gamers? wholesome gamers? That was pretty much why we ditched the idea.

Then we moved on to Bibidi Bibidi. Now we’ve worked on it since uuuh… April (wait that means I was still doing Space Deer at this time, yeez). That makes it 8 months since we started work on it. We did make a clear decision somewhere along the way to dedicate more time to it, that’s why we’re past 6 months now.
We sort of saw two paths to take the game, one was very rough and battle focused and the other one leaning more into the fantasy of being a wizard, with all the features expected from a deckbuilder. It wouldn’t have been possible for us within the original time frame to do what we are doing now. And play testing and balancing for a game like this is really important, so we didn’t wanna stress that either.

Now we’re nearly done with all the main features we need. The game can be played through completely, we’ve had a few streamers play it and stuff. Our Steam wishlists are too low, but we’re gonna go all in on promoting and improving the game next year.

It continues to be fun to work on and Daan is such a great collaborator!

Managing my popcorn brain

I had many side projects this year. You might remember the last one I talked about just two weeks ago.

Sometimes I feel ridiculous writing these newsletters because I feel like I announce a new project every other month.
However, I sincerely believe in pursuing ideas as quickly as possible in some capacity if they feel unshakeable, regardless how popcorn minded I might seem. Otherwise I just end up telling myself “once I’m done with my current main project I will try that other idea,” this is terrible for me, it makes my active projects feel like prisons that I need to get out of as quickly as possible. Which is terrible, it makes me think too much about the future instead of doing the work that is right in front of me.

Even though I haven’t formulated it until now, I guess I have a three step process to deal with those kinds of ideas. If there is enough curiosity or excitement in an idea, I continue to the next step until I feel like I can move on from it or end up finishing it.

1. Write down the overall idea.

2. Flesh out that idea through more notes, exploring possibilities, working out details, or by doing some sketches.

3. Prototype it in some way, through concept art, an outline or a literal prototype.

Eventually this might turn the idea into a side project and if that goes well enough it might eventually mature into a serious project.

It might seem like a waste to work on something I might just abandon. Listening to your guts and following your whims is such an integral part of what creativity is about though. When I don’t allow myself to do this I get restless and unfocused.

I accepted that I can’t behave like a robot that focuses 100% on the current, most important task until it is done. Instead of dropping a project for good and seeing it as a failure, I simply archive it. Leaving it in a state where I can pick it back up if I want.

Some ideas might stay in stage 1 or 2 for years before they mature into serious projects. Which is fine, it gives me plenty of time to collect inspiration and material for it, which will help tremendously if I do get serious about it.

That’s what happened with Ploppy Weather and Between Atoms. Two projects I feel very intently about, but they just don’t fit with my priorities and life right now. While Apartmented feels like it does.

Wrapping up

Aside from all that stuff I started taking guitar lessons this year. For now I’m just trying to neaten up my playing cause I make a lot of mistakes. And then I will try to learn to play some bossa nova. I wanna make an album where I sing and play guitar someday and maybe perform on a stage. That would be fun and terrifying.

I’m working with my partner on her first game. And we have even more ideas we want to explore together next year. We have planned a 3 day game jam to try one of them out.

The urge to make a super small and tight game of any kind is very strong.

Last night I sat up late to see if I could program a website cause I’m sick of SquareSpace and I hate that they are pushing AI shit into it. I’d prefer to own the code for my own site so I can move to a new hosting provider if I feel like it. Now it feels like SquareSpace is holding my content hostage.

Then as I mentioned last time I will probably end up talking more about Apartmented, maybe even asking you to test it?

I’m sure my popcorn brain won’t firing more game ideas at me. So be prepared to hear about more crap that I never finish, hehe.

While it seems like the rest of the industry is kinda unstable, with people getting laid off all over the place. I feel like I’ve finally started to find some footing as a game dev. I started the year not knowing if I would make any money with my games, to now seeing several possibilities for it next year.

That’s what I think will be topical for 2026! Thanks for reading!

Most popular Indie Notebook issue of the year

This was by far the Indie Notebook post that got the most attention this year. So many of you commented on it and sent me messages about it. Hope you all are still thinking about what you choose to spend your attention on! I still am trying to!

Panel of the year

(from Space Deer)

This panel is technically not from 2025. But I keep thinking about it.

❓ Question time

• What are you proud of this year?

• What are you looking forward to next year?

Thank you for reading Indie Notebook and sticking around for yet another year!

As usual, I’d love to hear what today’s issue made you think about.

Take care and happy holidays!

See you next year!

Leave a comment

Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.

Rant about warehouses

Today I’m writing from Sweden! I’m here for another semi-yearly holiday visit at my parents’ house.

It’s a pretty small town surrounded by hills and forest. It feels like each time I come here it grows a bit more urban. And not in a nice way, I’m talking “warehouse urban.” It’s just those purely functional, square warehouses with huge logos on the front and they’re surrounded by big parking lots. To paint an even bleaker picture of this, these warehouses had only been there for a week when I arrived at the beginning of the month, and the ground outside was already sprinkled with candy wrappers, gum and cigarette butts. Not to mention the sadness of seeing the anti-slip gravel everywhere, reminding me of the lack of snow and hazardous, slippery ice (fu greenhouse effect).

It’s great that there are new shops popping up around town. It creates some new jobs and people don’t have to travel as far to get what they need. But why does the buildings have to be so depressing and soulless?

This would be one of the problems I’d like to try to fix if I was an architect. I’m kinda pissed at all the architects who design luxurious hotels and buildings for billionaires instead. I understand it, but I don’t like it.

I wish our civilisation would give a shit about stuff. Instead creativity is getting sucked out of humanity by capitalism, social media addiction and AI. Doing stuff with creativity is rebellious. Please let there be an architect who does something about these darned warehouses someday.

I didn’t mean to write so much about that. But there it is now. The real meat of this issue is further down!

Bibidi Bibidi progress report

No new update for Bibidi this week! We postponed releasing new version because it feels like it needs some more content.

Attempting to design a more unconventional game

I’m not spending 100% of my time on Bibidi, the decision to not do so continues to be quite important for my wellbeing. In the past I worked almost exclusively on one single game for more than three years. That took a toll on my motivation, creativity and happiness.

I don’t mean to go into detail about that now. Just felt worth a mention before this next part.

I’m in the early stages on another game, where the story and art is kind of the whole point of it, as opposed to a mechanic with a good hook. Which is a very Nintendo approach and historically how my past two games and many prototypes came about.

There is still a strong gamey loop in this new one, but it’s even more in service of a message and the game’s features come from an intentional mix of genres instead of a clever little movement mechanic (which usually leads to a certain type of game, nothing wrong with that though).

I’ve been searching a project like this for a long while. My initial intentions are usually to go way further in this experimental direction.

However, unfortunately, there’s always been some reason for me to steer away from this desire to do unconventional design. It happened with both Surmount and Long Puppy, for slightly different reasons.
On Surmount we agreed to try to make it more commercial since it would be such a long project and we wanted to return the investments of our investors (we haven’t yet).
On Long Puppy I was just too lofty and didn’t have enough time to go all in (luckily at least some of those original intentions made it in).

This time the initial game idea and my message are much more clear and in line with each other. So I’m quite optimistic and believe I can stick to it and lean much further in the experimental, unconventional and emotional direction with this game.

I believe some people might call that expressionistic games? Not sure about that yet.

On top of all that it’s within my comfort zone for graphics, AND I get to try some new stuff. The characters are shaping up interestingly and the world is cool. It seems like a good fit within its genre as well and the scope seems ok.

There isn’t all that much to see in terms of gameplay. I won’t show too much either because it takes place in a small space and it’s supposed to be mysterious.

The real substantial progress I’ve made so far is more outside the game engine - on the structure, story and characters. The heart of it, one might say.

Tinkering on this makes me feel similarly to how I feel when I work on Space Deer.

Which I’ve rarely felt with game dev before. I think it’s thanks to a mix of having a more stable life situation; a nice relationship, some funds, I’m well fed, etc. And because I’ve become much more confident in my technical knowledge. It gives me space to focus more on the game design and writing, which I believe is what should lead to the game becoming something unique.

In short: it feels like a big personal win to be at this stage of making something that is as weird and messed up as I always wanted!

Mini Notes

🍎 Youtube video - How did the world get so ugly?

If you liked my rant about ugly warehouses invading my hometown from the start of this post. Then this video is probably for you too.

🌐 Browser game - Steam Review Guesser

On this website you get presented with a random game from Steam. And you have to guess how many reviews that game got (number of reviews is a good indicator of sales).

It’s an interesting challenge and definitely worth doing if you are a game dev. It will confront your judgement. Being good at this comes down to intuition and know-how about Steam players. I believe you can train and study to become better at both.

I heard on podcast recently that Hideo Kojima tries to train his judgement of what is good by going into a bookshop every week to try and pick out books that are good. Just based on their covers and descriptions.

Training this judgement/taste is important cause it’s a big factor in what you end up making.

Thank you for reading Indie Notebook! I’d love to hear what today’s issue made you think about.

Leave a comment

Take care and have a creative week.

Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.

I’ve just come back from a weeklong vacation in London with my partner!

Some highlights were the Harry Potter play, The Play That Goes Wrong, The Hunterian Museum and all the bookshops.

We also visited Bath and Oxford. Bath had a small museum dedicated to the writer of Frankenstein, Mary Shelly. She had quite a life that woman… so much loss and drama. And somehow she ended up keeping the heart of her dead husband inside her desk? Wicked cool lady.

A better way to manage notes

I had hardly any time or energy to make art or think about game design during this trip. The break was probably well needed, even though I really missed noodling around.
I was taking an unusual amount of notes though. I started reading Building A Second Brain by Tiago Forte. It inspired me to rethink how I take notes and organise my thoughts.

”Your job as a note taker is to preserve the notes you’re taking on the things you discover in such a way that they can survive the journey into the future. That way your excitement and enthusiasm for your knowledge builds over time instead of fades away.” - Tiago Forte

I’ve been a pretty arduous note taker for years. But I always found it kind of hard to make use of my notes because I’ve just been throwing them all into a long chronological list. My saving grace has been the search-ability of digital notes. But searching has its disadvantages. For one, I need to think of searching for the exact right keywords. Secondly, the further a note slips down the list, the less likely it becomes for me to ever see it again. Which is a shame. Ideally a note is something that comes to use when it matters most.

Building A Second Brain proposes a pretty simple solution to this problem.

• Put all your new notes into a folder called “inbox.”

• Create four more folders, called Projects, Areas, Resources and Archive.

• Look through all the notes in the inbox at least once a week and sort them into their proper folders.

  • Projects: This is for the most urgent stuff only. Such as creative projects (game dev, writing, knitting), but also trips or parties. Anything you can complete.

  • Areas: This is for more long term stuff. Like your health, business information and so on. Stuff that will go on indefinitely.

  • Resources: This is more like a library on useful information about different subjects. Like useful snippets of code, inspiring art or cooking recipes.

  • Archive: When you don’t know where else to put something you just throw it in the archive. Same with finished projects or areas that become irrelevant, you can move them here to get them out of view. But still searchable and never truly lost.

• Put all your old notes into the Archive and start fresh. You can always fetch what you need from there when you need it, most of it is probably not useful right now anyway and you will waste lots of energy if you try to sort through it all (I tried).

I’ve just swapped over to using this method so I can’t vouch for how effective it is yet. What I can say so far is I find myself returning to my notes a lot more than before and it lead me to put into words some stuff I had not realised until now.

This was a very quick summary of the main method in the book. There’s surprisingly much nuance and smaller techniques which help improve the quality of your actual notes.

Notes, notes, notes.

Okay, done nerding out about notes. You’ve got to excuse me though, this newsletter is called Indie Notebook for a reason.

New eventful Bibidi update!

In the last update of Bibidi Bibidi we added another classic staple of deckbuilders - EVENTS.

An event is basically a room with a mini text adventure where you get to make some kind of choice. This adds some more variety so the game isn’t all about combat.

In about 2 updates we should be completely feature complete. Then we will move on to adding content like events, cards, sigils, monsters and new classes.

On the art side of development I’ve begun updating the placeholder sprites with the final art style.

It’s gonna look way less like a child-friendly Disney movie once I’m done with this. This was always the intention. The reason it looks like it does right now is simply because it was faster. As a result everything just ended up looking kinda innocent. I always wanted Bibidi to be more dark and disturbing, with a cute/fun twist. Which some players already noticed before this change.

“It’s very whimsical but actually unnerving. […] Cause yeah these frogs with the melting eyes, Mr Handy... It’s very cartoony, but if you stop to consider it for a moment it starts to be a little scary.” - Roy Martini

It always feels great when someone picks up on my intentions.

I’ve been looking at the unfinished versions of these sprites for such a long time, so it’s incredibly satisfying and relaxing to be at this stage.

I’ve been wanting to explore darker themes and vibes with my art for a while now. It’s a nice change from my usual cute and wholesome stuff.

And lastly, the public alpha is still up on Steam! Now is a good time to give it a go and share your feedback!

Join the playtest on Steam!

Black Friday Creator Sale on itch

I’m participating in the site-wide sale over on itch dot io again! All the Space Deer PDF’s and Long Puppy are included at 30% off.

Check out the sale!

If you get something from the sale today (28th of November only), all the proceeds will go to me instead of the usual split with itch. The sale ends on the 4th of December.

Thank you for reading Indie Notebook! I’d love to hear what today’s issue made you think about.

Leave a comment

Take care and have a creative week.

Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.

It’s been more than a month since the last Indie Notebook post already!?

I’ve been mostly focused on my main project Bibidi and helping my partner Héloïse prototype a game she’s working on. Two weeks ago we took the train to Paris because she signed up for an advanced Blender course.

We stayed in town for a week, I hung out a lot with Daan (whom I’m making Bibidi with), we blabbered about the game and did some bouldering. It was really fun and energising!

I’ve also been tinkering with some of my other projects. One of them being Ploppy Weather (for the first time in months). It works quite well for my sanity to have one serious main project which I’m committed to but not working on 100% of my time (Bibidi) and then I can just do whatever I want with other side projects. Makes it feel like I’m going somewhere concrete but I also get the rush of pure creative freedom. I struggled with that during the making of Surmount because we decided to work on it so intently.

Ok, that’s the end of the personal update!

The latest Bibidi Bibidi update

In the latest update of our wizardcore roguelike deckbuilder we added path selection. We’ve done it slightly differently compared to how most deckbuilders do it.

This is how it looks in the most well known deckbuilder ever, Slay The Spire. And in most other deckbuilders too.

It’s a map of locations and paths. The player gets to pick which connecting destination to move to next after completing the objectives at their current location. There’s nothing wrong with this take on path selection.

But we decided to do it a bit differently. The main reason being the first-person perspective in our game, as opposed to the third person perspective in Slay The Spire.

It would clash a bit if you would suddenly see Tom Foolery move as a 3rd-person pawn on a map. So instead we present the player with a view of up to three doors. Each door hints at what the room is about and you get an indication of the rewards and risks.

I like this approach because it feels much more like you’re actually in the dungeon, exploring it. Because you only see what is directly in front of you. Why would you know everything ahead of you anyway if you delve into a mysterious dungeon? Kinda ruins the mood if you ask me.

Only seeing what is right in front of you also helps take some pressure off you in terms of strategising. The combat in our game is rather thinky, so hopefully this will let the player’s brain cool down somewhat before the next combat.

That’s the most exciting new thing we’ve added in this last update!

The game is still in public alpha over on Steam (and it’s free atm). Oh and some streamers and youtubers played it recently! Some of them said quite nice stuff about it. Like this…

“Omg! [chef’s kiss] I love this game. This game is so good. This game is really fucking good man.” - Roy Martini

We also have a dedicated discord server where we talk about the game and wizard stuff. Feel free to warp in!

Itch Halloween Sale 2025

I’m participating in the site-wide sale over on itch.io! Which means all my itch comics and games are 40% off for a week.

There are all the Space Deer PDF’s, Empty Planet and my Playdate game, Long Puppy.

Check out the sale!

Mini Notes

🕹️ Games - Horror recommendations

Spooky season is here and I have some suggestions for games you could play if you wanna get in the mood.

• Yuppie Psycho: Honestly the art style of this would not have grabbed me on its own. But I read something about it somewhere and that made me curious to give it a shot anyway. I’ve played about 6 hours of it and I’m kinda loving it. The writing and world/characters are quite something. This has already inspired me a lot for my own horror game.

• Crow Country: This is one of the few games I would give a 5/5. I love everything about it.

• Darkwood: This one I kinda dropped even though I liked it because it was so scary. Even though it has been years I keep thinking of it, I will give it another try.

• INSIDE: This is a clear 5/5. A must play. The same studio made Limbo. But even if you didn’t like Limbo you should give this a shot. It’s often very heavily discounted on the Switch.

• Return Of The Obra Dinn: This might be the least scary one out of all of these. You are never in danger, it’s just a very intricate detective mystery with a mysterious story.

• Grunn: Odda and charming. Big rec!

• Project Zomboid: It looks like an old Sims game but is probably the most believable zombie survival simulator ever. This has somehow managed to make it into my top list. It completely grabs me and swallows me when I sit down with it. It has a learning curve and it’s a very time consuming game. But it perfectly fulfils my morbid dreams of surviving in a zombie apocalypse. Every time I play it I come out of it with some kind of story to tell my girlfriend, she seems to enjoy hearing about it (hehe).

🎵 Music instrument - The Minichord

I fell in love with this thing the second I saw it. It’s sort of a mix of a harp/guitar and a tiny keyboard. You can strum or pluck on it. As a guitar player this seems more approachable as a midi instrument to me than learning to play piano. Definitely wanna get one someday.

📝 Random thought - How many games have I played in my life?

I wondered about this for years and this weekend I decided to investigate. First I wrote down anything I could think of from memory, from the earliest games of my childhood, to the AAA games of my teens and all the indie games I’ve sprinkled in. Right now the list is 357 entries long, and I know there is a lot left to add, it’s just harder to think of them.

Then I started to give them different statuses, like; playing, completed, inactive, or abandoned. I won’t go into it too much here but so far I’ve apparently completed 114 games. That’s about a 32% completion rate. I thought that number would be way lower.

I just find it fun to know this kinda stuff and as a game designer/writer it’s quite useful to have a place to remind myself of what I have played. It already helped me when I looked for horror games to recommend. And since it’s a notion page I can also keep notes about them. Nerdy stuff!

❓ Question time

Do you have any horror movie recommendations?

Thank you for reading Indie Notebook! I’d love to hear what today’s issue made you think about.

Leave a comment

Take care and have a creative week.

P.s - I made a lightsaber with my girlfriend and we took sick pictures with it.

Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.

It’s been a while! Indie Notebook is getting way more sporadic. It’s because I’m so into what I’m working on at the moment. So I just forget. Is that a bad thing? I dunno! And I don’t see it as a problem!

But today I am here because I have some stuff to share. So let’s go!

The Wonder of Wizardry Update

The next update to the public alpha of Bibidi Bibidi is out today! We’re releasing it at the same time as we join our first Steam event. Which is also called Wonders Of Wizardry, it’s an event for wizard themed games.

In this new update we’ve added a lot of new stuff.

• New cards with a handy effect, and others yet that might conjure up your imagination.

• New encounters with monsters that don't mess around.

• Spells now have visual effects, for a more satisfying casting experience!

• Refreshed art to make everything more cohesive.

• Quality of life features requested by our playtesters.

• A reporting feature to make it easier to submit feedback, requests and bugs.

There’s more, but those are the main improvements!

Try the WOW-Update!

Just as before, we are still doing a public alpha on Steam. Just click opt-in to add it to your Steam library!

The strategy behind this marketing beat

I guess I could talk a bit about our thinking/strategy for this Steam event…

Events and festivals are one of the most effective ways to collect wishlists on Steam. Usually they beat social media by a long shot.

That’s why we’ve been keeping this event on the horizon for months as a milestone for this slightly bigger update. Tbh we have no idea whether this event will get a lot of visibility. Mostly we just picked it because the theme goes so well with our game and the timing feels good. It’s sort of a way for us to dip our toes into promotion.

To increase our odds of visibility during this event I’m also gonna do some manual labour to reach new players.

I’ve been crawling the depths of Youtube and Twitch to find people who play similar deckbuilders. In this first round I’ll be contacting about 50 people who are in the range of 0 to 10k followers. We just want the right kinds of players to discover the game at this point, almost regardless of the size of their following.
We want to find enthusiasts who are willing to get involved and give lots of feedback. So that we can make the game as great as we can for them.
As we continue to update and improve the game we will ramp up and contact people with bigger and bigger followings.

This strategy basically boils down to: make the game so good people can’t help talking about it.

Getting feedback is the way to get there.

The making of Long Puppy

As I promised in the last issue of Indie Notebook, I’ve written a post mortem about my Playdate Season 2 game ‘Long Puppy.’

It’s a loooong post about a rather short game.

I learnt a lot making this game and grew a lot as a game designer so it felt important to write down these thoughts while they are still fresh.

I wish everyone would write these kinds of blog posts when they release a game.

Mini Notes

🔴 Video - Silksong is a wake up call

A non-spoilery video about Hollow Knight Silksong.

Players love this game, but press and developers have been a little bit frustrated by it for several reasons.
Press feel entitled to get access to games before launch so they can prepare their reviews. But Team Cherry didn’t give them any special treatment. So now press is frustrated.
Some devs have been frustrated because the game is so cheap. It’s only 20 dollars. That’s very cheap considering the quality and length of the game. It could set a standard that hardly anyone else can live up to.

Team Cherry’s reasoning is that the people who backed the game on Kickstarter deserves access to the game before press. Because it’s thanks to them the game exists. And as for the price, it’s very pro-consumer, it makes it way more accessible. And the game is making tons of money anyway, so it’s not like they are suffering from the fair pricing.

Personally I just find it fun and refreshing. I hope this will impact the rest of the industry (looking at you Nintendo).

👀 Artist - P1PE

Love this artist’s work! It’s dreamy, minimalist and cartoony.

📝 Blog post - I am an AI hater

I’m pretty sick of explaining why I hate AI. That’s why the start of this article grabbed me immediately.

I am an AI hater. This is considered rude, but I do not care, because I am a hater.

Despite what I just said I can’t help giving you some reasons why I hate it. It steals, it encourages suicide, it accelerates global warming, it’s soulless, it makes people lazy and complacent. I feel like I just described a cartoon villain.

❓ Question time

Do you know any streamers, youtubers, social media users or just friends, with a following from zero to a million followers who are into deckbuilders?

Would appreciate any leads or recommendations!

Normally this is where I would ask you to leave a comment. But today it would mean even more if you went to wishlist Bibidi on Steam and/or gave some feedback after trying our alpha.

Try the WOW Update!

Thank you as always for reading Indie Notebook!

Take care and have a creative week.

Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.

Damn, I feel like I’ve been kind of in neglect of this newsletter lately. But in a good way, hopefully? I’ve just been so knee deep in other projects. Making lots of progress on Bibidi Bibidi, wrapped my last freelance gig of the year (probably) and tinkering with other prototypes.

I’m working on a looonger post mortem blog post about the making of Long Puppy, but that’s taking longer than expected because I’ve kinda gotten out of the habit of writing. I’m all about game dev at the moment and it’s so much fun. I promise to have that blog post done for the next issue of Indie Notebook though!

The Bibidi Bibidi Shop Update

Me and Daan are chipping away at our roguelike deckbuilder. In the latest update we added a shop. It makes the game a little easier cause now you have a consistent way to heal between battles and the deck-building aspect also becomes more present since you have more possibilities to get more cards.

We also did a pass on the overall UI; tidying up the layout and settled into a more coherent style for it.

Daan even made a little trailer, where you can hear Tom Foolery shout the names of the spells you create!

I felt it was due time to update the key art for the game since the previous one didn’t give any hint whatsoever of the genre. I made a few sketches featuring Tom Foolery more prominently with some cards. Then I shared these around, let people vote, and the last idea turned out to be the winner.

And this is how it turned out! The logo is still a work in progress though. I always take ages making logos for my projects… (it was probably hundreds of hours for the Surmount logo).

If you want to try this new update; the public playtest for Bibidi is still open (and free) on Steam. Just press the opt-in button on the Steam page to join in!

Check out the Steam page!

❓ Question time

Since I spend more time focusing on my projects, I don’t take as much time to prepare Indie Notebook posts the way I used to. The type of posts I make right now are more status updates. But I could definitely spend some time to write about certain topics if there’s something anyone would like to hear about.

So let me know if you have any questions you’d like me to answer or if there’s some topic you’d like to hear about!

Mini Notes

🕹️ Game - UFO 50

The port of this finally came to Switch so I picked it up and having a good time with it. It’s a collection of 50 games. There’s lore behind justifying the existence of these 50 games, inside the game… That sounds confusing. The idea is that they are made by a fictional game company for a console that was unearthed in a storage unit. It makes the whole experience feel like you’re exploring the past of an alternative-universe’s video game history.

The game I spent the most time with so far is Magic Garden, a cute and addicting arcade game with witches. It plays a lot like Snake but I find it much more engaging.

📝 Blog post - 64 Reasons To Celebrate Paul McCartney

Fun read if you are a fan of The Beatles!

💭 Thoughts - Quitting Spotify

Recently I found out that the CEO of Spotify uses his money to fund the development of AI powered war drones. I don’t wanna support that in any way more than I have already done (unbeknownst). So I cancelled my subscription. I never thought I would give up on Spotify completely. I have invested so much time into making my playlists, and I use it almost constantly every day. But that’s a small price to pay for some slight moral relief.

In the past I found the recommendations of Spotify very useful. But these last few months I’ve started to get more and more annoyed by them. Nothing really sticks with me. I think part of the problem is the recommendations are so easy to just keep going and skip-skip-skip. I think that kind of listening devalues music a bit?

Since I just want to listen to the same few artists and albums on repeat anyway, it wasn’t hard to decide I would begin buying music instead of finding another subscription service. I did some math and realised my Spotify budget would get me my go-to music collection in about two years. And I would actually own the tracks for life (and more of the money goes to the artists).

Currently I’m listening to the albums Blue Rev, Morning Phase, Brothers & Sisters of The Eternal Son, Maraqopa and Green. I never get tired of them.

In the end I’m happy about this change. It makes me feel closer to the music I listen to.

Thank you for reading Indie Notebook! I’d love to hear what today’s issue made you think about.

Leave a comment

Take care and have a creative week.

Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.

Some big news today! Our roguelike deckbuilder about silly wizards Bibidi Bibidi now has a Steam page!

We will continue refining it as we go along with better descriptions and screenshots and eventually a trailer. But it gives a good idea of what the current version of the game is like. More about this below.

But first check out this magical guy I drew with a magical pen.

Bibidi Bibidi’s Steam page is up!!!

So our current plan for Bibidi is to premiere it at a Steam event called Wonders Of Wizardry. The theme is just too fitting, we just had to be part of it. It will happen in September so everything we’re doing now is in preparation for that.

That means we’re getting a nice demo ready with all the core features and some decent art, and probably most importantly we need the game to be FUN as heck, or even ADDICTING. That’s why we’re really trying to ramp up playtests to the maximum now with a public playtest.

See Bibidi Bibidi on Steam

To join you just need to click the “request access” button on our new Steam page! You should be granted it immediately, and it’s free! Then you can share your feedback by replying to this email, in the comments or over on the Bibidi discord server (which you can find a link to in the game itself).

We’ve added a lot of new stuff since anyone last tried the prototype. So even if you tried it before it’s worth another shot if you liked it!

Consider tossing us a wishlist too while you’re there poking around?

Development update

As for development itself, I mostly end up focusing on art while Daan does all the programming and the heaviest lifting with the game design. There is so much stuff to draw, I think it took me about 3 or 4 weeks to get all the rough-draft backgrounds into the game.

There’s a couple reasons why it took so long. Part of it is because I’m not used to drawing fantasy stuff in general, and even less so drawing interiors and dungeons.

I also went down an old familiar rabbit hole. I wanted the backgrounds to always look different, so I thought of ways to draw assets which I could shuffle around to procedurally cobble variations of scenes together. I did this exact thing for Surmount as well, and it was one of the worst things about working on that game because I had to do so much of it. As a side effect I feel it lead to variety being a higher priority than appeal.

Another reason it took a while is because I’ve been transitioning from Affinity Photo 2 to Clip Studio Paint. At first I was skeptical about CSP (I even used to hate it) but I was so fed up with the workflow and lacking features in Affinity I pushed myself through it and now I’m almost completely on board with it. After lots of tinkering I can use almost all the same shortcuts as I used in Photoshop, the brush management is way better and in general it’s just way more built for art than Affinity is. There are still some gripes with this, but so far they are easier to overlook.

Ultimately I decide to just draw one static background per area, because when I looked at other deckbuilders I saw pretty much all of them just do that. Which makes sense cause when I play any of these games it just sort of blurs away, I just look at the UI and the cards.

Speaking of cards, that’s the next thing I need to look into. So far they all look the same aside from the text that goes on them. But that obviously won’t float for the demo or the Steam page.

And overall it feels like everything is going quite smooth! No mayor technical problems, the collaboration between me and Daan are very to the point, fun and we have quite complimentary values and preferences. It just feels a bit intimidating to get everything to where we want it by this Wonders Of Wizardry event. We’ll see how it goes!

And again, consider joining the playtest!

Mini Notes

🕹️ Game - Curiosmos

Help build a solar system in this cute god sim where you collect asteroid rubble to create planets and then create life on them by throwing ice and seeds at them. The physics interactions are so much fun to play with and the vibe is completely immaculate.

They just put out a demo!

📝 Random thoughts - There are no more good shows to watch???

I know this probably isn’t true, but I feel like there is nothing left that I really want to watch. At least nothing new, I’m enjoying rewatching Dexter with my partner, and we’re getting into Dark. But we are watching those together so when I’m alone I have nothing to go to. I got a Netflix subscription and finished Squid Game, which I think is a great show. But now I can’t find anything that hooks me. I miss X-files and have a lot of that left to watch but I don’t want to get a Disney+ subscription for it cause the show is so long. All these subscriptions are maddening.

📝 Random thoughts - Steam’s developer interface sucks

When you use Steam as a consumer it works quite well. It all sort of makes sense.

But when you’re a developer and have to set up your store page and upload builds of your game it’s quite maddening how illogical and convoluted the experience is. It could definitely be a lot worse, but it could also be so much simpler. The thing is no-one at Valve cares to do anything about it and likely won’t. There is a whole documentary about what it is like to work there. And basically they have a popularity system which can determine whether you get fired or not. In short, working on Steam’s developer interface is not really gonna help increase revenue for Valve so nobody is incentivised to do anything about it.

Basically they are too busy making lots of money. It is expensive to swim in cash so I understand they are strapped for these important things.

Thank you for reading Indie Notebook! I’d love to hear what today’s issue made you think about.

Leave a comment

Take care and have a creative week.

Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.

I’ve been in the thick of drawing backgrounds for Bibidi Bibidi these last two weeks. It’s slow going, possibly because there are so many details, and I probably put a bit too much effort into the sketches.

I can cram out like 8-10 usable monster sketches in a day. So I was quite shocked by how much longer it took to draw these backgrounds. I’m gonna have to sort of redo the whole image at some point with proper line art and a lot of the coloring with it. It would have been smarter to go rougher at this stage but we’re putting the Steam page live soon and it kinda needs to look cool right away, so I’m categorizing that step as ‘polish’ instead.

Let’s talk about something completely different for the rest of this newsletter now!

Making the key art for TOEM 2

One of my main streams of income is through doing cover illustrations for video games (I call this ‘key art,’ a lot of people call it ‘capsule art,’ but I find that limiting, I’m saving this rant for another post). One of the first key arts I got commissioned to do was for TOEM. In it you go on a photo adventure in a quirky Scandinavian world.

It has already been 4 years since this game came out. It was very well received by the public and critics. Well enough so they’re making a sequel!

They’re really pushing the quality to a whole other level this time. To be honest I didn’t think they would come to me again for another illustration cause they had made such leaps, I didn’t know if I could keep up. But luckily they asked me, and I got the opportunity to see whether I had improved since 4 years ago.

So they shared some references and let me try their current demo. I think they wanted to make it more clear this time that this is about photography. And the tone of the sequel is a bit brighter.

The first step when I make an illustration like this is to spend some time considering all the possibilities with some rough sketches.

They shared a few references of what they liked, this key art from Super Mario Wonder really stood out to me.

This is the first thing which came to mind. I draw these very loosely because it is really just about the idea at this point.

In the first game the movement was nice, but kinda simple. But in the sequel you can climb around on nearly everything, it feels like parkour. So I wanted to explore that too.

The composition of this one is quite reminiscent of that one picture of Link scaling a cliff in Breath of The Wild.

I’m also a fan of the fish-eye lens effect (who isn’t), I haven’t gotten to do an illustration using it yet so I gave that a shot too.

Then I felt the urge to try another variation of the first sketch. Because why not?

I shared all these ideas with them in one go. They said they liked all of them, but they ultimately landed on idea #1. I think that was a good pick. What I like about it aside from the composition is how it allows us to show many things from the game very efficiently.

So I refined the sketch and took the time to fill in all the polaroids. That took a while.

I also always separate key arts into separate layers for each element in the picture. For this one I split the background with the photos into one layer, the butterflies into one, and the foreground with the characters into another. This is to make it easy to configure all the different graphics Steam ask for (there are a lot of them). For this reason we also decided it would be a good idea to expand the borders of the image so I could draw the polaroids completely. To make it easier to move them around without them being cut off.

Then I did the line art. This is often the scariest stage for me because it often looks so messy and unflattering. And it’s at this point where it becomes clear to me just how much work there will be with coloring. The lines here are very noisy in my opinion, which means I will have to work quite a lot to make the image easy to read.

Normally I would call this step “coloring,” but I don’t know if that’s the right word for it when there are no colors. Once I’ve filled in all the flat colors, I start rendering the image with shadows, highlights and fog. I also color the lines themselves. My rule for that is; each separate object has a fully black outline and interior lines are brighter. This is maybe my favorite step, it’s just plain meditative and easy. I think it’s always worth the extra time because it becomes a lot easier for the eye to look at the image.

This is what the final key art looks like! It might be hard to tell but I added some noise texture on top of it (I always do), to me any art feels kinda unfinished without it. I find cartoony pictures with mostly flat colors just look a bit too perfect without it.

I feel quite proud by the progress I’ve made since that first TOEM illustration I made. It looks so much more tight, polished and confident.

I’ve already mentioned it but the same goes for Something We Made, they’ve made incredible leaps between these two games. The love and care this little team is pouring into this game is mind blowing! I hope they are at least as proud of TOEM 2 as I am of this illustration.

Go have a look at TOEM 2 on Steam and wishlist it!

Mini Notes

📚 Book - The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

This is a collection of thoughts by an entrepreneur about wealth and happiness. I never really considered wealth to be anything else than money.

This book has sold more than one million copies but they give it away for free in all digital formats on their official website. Which I find quite amazing.

I’ve only read about 25% of it so far but it’s been quite inspiring and interesting. If you’re looking for something to read I’d say at least pick it up and skim through it to see if anything picks your interest.

📚 Book - The Postmortal

One of the best books I’ve read in a long time.

The premise of this book is that humanity invents a vaccine for aging and so everyone can live basically forever. They can still die of natural causes like disease and wounds, it’s just that their bodies don’t age. The story is told through journal entries by the main character, so it feels very believable and relatable. Each journal entry is quite short, so it’s very easy to read.

I read his other book The Hike before this one, which is also great.

📝 Blog post - Making video games in 2025 (without an engine)

After making a game for the Playdate (Long Puppy) I find it somewhat overwhelming to work in editors like Unity and Godot. Especially the Godot interface feels so clunky. Now I'm tempted to transition to something like Love2D so I can mostly deal with scripts and files.

This blog post makes a great case for trying a framework instead of an engine.

Thank you for reading Indie Notebook! I’d love to hear what today’s issue made you think about.

Leave a comment

Take care and have a creative week.

Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.

I started writing today’s Indie Notebook from the train station at the airport in France on my way back home from Sweden.

It was two very eventful weeks: I got engaged to the sweetest person in the world (at the location in the picture above), we stayed at my bestie’s place in Göteborg, saw a Håkan Hellström concert and then we took a train ride across half of Sweden to visit my family for a week.

And in the midst of all that I launched my latest game!

The launch of Long Puppy!

One week ago my game Long Puppy came out as part of Playdate’s Season 2! It’s a bundle of 12 games, delivered directly to the Playdate console, 2 games per week.

My game launched in week 3 along with Otto’s Galactic Groove!!

The games of the previous two weeks are amazing so I was unsure whether people would think my game holds up. I didn’t feel particularly nervous or stressed. But I did feel some imposter syndrome building up as the launch day approached.

When it dropped I kept an eye on the Playdate subreddit and another eye on the Playdate Squad discord channel. It took over an hour for people to get my game because Otto’s Galactic Groove dropped at the same time, since it’s a rhythm game with a lot of music files the download time became long.

“a loooooong download for a Looooooong puppy.” - discord user

I refreshed every web page and checked every discord channel constantly, eager to hear people’s reactions. It was silent for quite a while, then posts and messages started to bubble up.

“i was really hyped about this game from the title alone but when i played the tutorial it was better than i ever thought”

“This has me cracking up lol. I can't believe someone's brain created this”

“it's such a simple concept and I love the (gameplay spoiler) wario race to the finish at the end too”

“There's a lot to love on this one but I wanna say the sound design is incredible, the puppy stretching sfx really makes it. Also I adore the art direction”

“God I love this puppy”

And someone posted this picture. Not sure what it means but I like the vagueness of it.

Along with these comments some players reported glitching through walls in a few specific spots. I thought I had already fixed this bug completely before launch, but apparently there were still some ways left to trigger it. It seemed like quite a rare occurrence but I couldn’t leave it in there. So I put on my Customer Support Hat and started telling people I would fix it. I worried that it would be REALLY hard to fix because we had a similar persistent problem in my previous game Surmount. So I thought, ”ok let’s be super methodical about this.” I then put a Detective Hat on top of my Customer Support Hat and patiently reread my player-code. I wrote down any theories about the cause and ideas of what might fix it. I managed to fix it in 1 hour and 30 minutes.

Another recurring bug report took me a bit by surprise. One of the collectables on the second last level was just out of reach. I didn’t expect much to anyone going for 100% completion. So I was actually quite happy in a way to hear about this bug from so many people - because it meant a lot people made it this far!

I’ve fixed and improved some other stuff too but those were the most dramatic things so far.

I worried a bit that people wouldn’t get the controls (because the way you move Long Puppy is unusual). Whenever I showed the game to people in person it was a bit of a pain to watch them struggle in the beginning. There is still a little struggle right when someone picks it up. But I think that’s part of what makes this game fun. It’s a bit like the game throws you into a world where you are a baby (or puppy) again and you have to crawl before you learn to walk. That’s something I love about games in general and especially when they have weird movement controls.

There was a time during development where I felt like I had done a mistake by going with a weird movement mechanic again (after doing that with Surmount too). It felt like the game was overly complicated and difficult. And I didn’t know if I would really be able to do anything to better that. So it feels amazing that I managed to get it to where it is today. There are lots of big and small decisions about the player behavior I could talk about, but I will save that for another day. The progress I made in this regard only really occurred to me now as I sat down and reflected on it. I never seize to be amazed by how quickly I can start to take aspects of the things I’ve made for granted, even though it took a lot of effort to get there.

So in general it seems like people are having a good time with Long Puppy. They enjoy both the gameplay and the presentation of it.

Engadget is writing reviews for each of the Season 2 games as they come out. I was really happy to read the one for Long Puppy.

“I'm convinced that Playdate developers are a different breed. This console has led me to some of the oddest games I've played in a while, and Long Puppy is yet another ridiculous but charming entry to the canon.”

I even appeared on the Playdate Podcast to talk about the game! The production quality of this show is so high. I’ve been a fan for a long time so it feels nuts to be on it.

I think that’s all about Long Puppy for today. I’ve got some more stuff to write down but I will save that for the post mortem.

Get Playdate Season 2!

This project has been such a wonderful and fun experience from start to finish. I’m so glad I got to do this. I hope you enjoyed the game if you had the chance to play it!

Mini Notes

🎤 Talk - How To Win The Lottery (as a creative person)

Hilarious talk that has been circling around in game dev circles a bit recently. It captures perfectly how inspiring talks from creative people in any creative industry talks about their success.

⬜️ Software - Anytype

I’m a huge Notion user, I use it for nearly everything. But I am a bit afraid that it will become unusable to me some day if Notion decides to change what is possible to do on their free plan. Or if they became completely unreasonable with their AI implementation. For now it is possible to disable it. But I might give this open source alternative a go to see how it compares.

Would love to know your thoughts on it if you’ve tried it!

Thank you for reading Indie Notebook! I’d love to hear what today’s issue made you think about.

Leave a comment

Take care and have a creative week.

Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.

I don’t have much to say about my personal projects today, mostly because most of my time recently has been consumed by freelance work. Which is great! I’ll talk a bit about that soon.

I did manage to sneak in a little bit of a quick personal creative fix though. The wall behind my computer screen is very white and somewhat empty. I realized there was no sign of Space Deer anywhere on it. So I made this drawing to make the wall a little bit less plain.

It’s a super simple drawing but it still took a couple hours to complete. When you draw a big black surface with ink or marker, you will usually see the direction of the pen strokes. I hate that. So I filled in the background one dot at a time. It makes the blackness look way more solid and consistent. The stars are just spots I didn’t put any dots in.
It was relaxing and quite addictive to do it this way.

Now I would like to always have a drawing on a loose sheet of paper in progress on my desk. It replaced my usual distraction of checking social media (I still haven’t managed to reclaim my attention completely).

We’re going on a vacation to Gothenburg in Sweden next week to see my best friend and to go to a Håkan Hellström concert. My girlfriend isn’t fluent enough in Swedish to understand his songs, so I’ve been translating some of the best ones, so she will have the option to follow along like that if she wants.

I’m obsessed with this song at the moment. Here’s my translation.

If you don’t know Swedish, this is one of the best things you’re missing out on. Although, even a lot of Swedes miss out on this because a bunch of people don’t believe he can sing. I think I have a soft spot for artists who sing imperfectly. Maybe there’s something going on there. I think the best artists find a way to sing even if they don’t have the voice and training of a traditional pop star. Or maybe I’m a bit tone deaf.

The Sweden-trip will last for two weeks so Indie Notebook will be on break until laterrrr (unless I get the urge to write about something).

Bibidi Bibidi progress update

I didn’t have time to work as much as I wanted on Bibidi these past weeks. As I mentioned before, freelance work ended up taking most of my time. Which is great for me! Less good for Bibidi.

Some small updates though.

• We are getting the Steam page ready.

• We set up a dedicated Bibidi Bibidi discord server.

• The gameplay is steadily improving thanks to Daan.

My next game will be available soon!

Playdate Season 2 starts on the 29th of May! My next game is part of it!

What the game is is supposed to be a surprise until it pops up on your Playdate console, so I won’t give away any details about it yet. If you are one of those rare subscribers who has a Playdate, consider pre-ordering it!

Mini Notes

🕹️ Games - Good games

I’m just gonna list some hidden gems that came out recently.

• Sulfur

• Rift Riff

• Sol Cesto

• Guncho (maybe my GOTY)

🤖 Article - AI Is Eating Data Center Power Demand—and It’s Only Getting Worse

Sure, AI sucks because it steals from artists and sucks the soul out of art.

But what sucks even more than copyright infringement is the planet burning up.
Sacrificing the environment for futile sh*t like generating soulless art, summarizing emails or brain storming ideas is insane.
Lots of people even use it in place of what they would have accomplished with a simple google search before.

“…worldwide AI energy demand is now set to surpass demand from bitcoin mining by the end of this year.”

Some researchers even say, “a generative AI training cluster might consume seven or eight times more energy than a typical computing workload.”

It’s almost as if AI does more bad then good?

Thank you for reading Indie Notebook! I’d love to hear what today’s issue made you think about.

Leave a comment

Take care and have a creative week.

Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.

After gathering feedback on the last game prototype I made with Daan, we’ve got some cool news to share.

⚡️✨*BRAKOWWWW!!!* ✨⚡️

We are making a game called BIBIDI BIBIDI!!!

Bipibidi Bopidi Doo the game we will do…

The pitch: Bibidi Bibidi! is a wizardcore roguelike deckbuilder where you combine cards in your spellbook to cast unique and powerful spells. Crawl through twisting tunnels and fight maddening monsters to find the perfect build for your wizard. Every turn is a puzzle!

So yep! Expect some silly wizard puns going forward. Also, expect some wizard memes. They are the best and only memes I need in my life.

Some deckbuilder research

I did a bunch of research on deckbuilders, reading a looot of Steam reviews of existing games to get a feel for what people like and dislike. I also tried a few because I actually don’t have a lot of experience with this genre. The only ones I had played before this project was Dicey Dungeons and Balatro. LOTS of Steam reviews kept mentioning Slay The Spire and Daan kept referencing it too so that was the first game I picked up.

Initial impressions: Slay The Spire starts very slow, each run becomes a little more interesting as more cards unlock. A tad too slow in my taste. I haven’t found myself itching to get back to it like with some other ones. Personally I find Balatro is a much better experience from the start than STS is.

While I was doing this investigation I stumbled on a GDC talk about playtesting from the developers of Slay The Spire which cast some light on how they managed to make the game so well balanced.

Early on they did the standard type of testing, meaning; you watch people play and listen to their feedback. But they found this inefficient and time consuming, especially since they were just two guys doing everything by themselves and they were aiming to make the game in a year.
So they did some kinda hokus pokus to collect player data onto a server. Which gave them an overview of how people were playing and what was happening. They combined this with feedback from hardcore players and from their subreddit. They made daily and weekly updates to the game. Constantly tweaking it. In turn this also got the community excited because they really liked to see what would change and learn the new meta/exploits.

This method worked really well for them paid. You can see the proof by comparing the playable characters. The last character they added is the least popular, or considered the most broken/unbalanced. And that’s because they didn’t have time to run through this process for as long with her.

A big aspect of what makes or breaks a deckbuilder is its replayability. Which is directly connected to game balance and variety of gameplay. It’s extremely hard for anyone to make a game that measures up to the quality of STS. For several reasons.

• There’s the technology barrier of setting up a system that track player decisions and stats and all that. Most teams, especially indie, probably don’t do this.

• You need a sizeable pool of playtesters for the collected stats to be usable.

• You need some dedicated players who keep coming back for more so you can tell if your changes are going in the right direction.

• Lots of streamers played the game live, which was a great way for them to directly see how dedicated players who are in touch with the community sees stuff.

Not sure if we will do what they did. Either way it’s good to know what we’re up against and that it might be an option.

Another deckbuilder I picked up was Die In The Dungeon. Instead of cards it’s about dice. It’s still in early access but I really enjoyed it so far (honestly I’ve had more fun with this than I did with STS).

Progress on Bibidi Bibidi!

Back to Bibidi Bibidi!

Right now we are addressing the most important points we gathered from the feedback, thank you so much to everyone who played! Your thoughts have been so helpful!

And I’m replacing all of Daan’s placeholder art with my placeholder art. While he is adding more juice and tweaking some UX.

This is the first time I make a 2D game with actual drawn sprites. Even though all my games so far play like 2D games I’ve always opted for 3D graphics because I find it so quick and easy to whip something up in Blender.

I never quite figured out the workflow for 2D art in games. Mainly because I find a lot of friction drawing digitally and exporting and such. I no longer use Photoshop because I think Adobe are bastards and they ruined it. So I’ve been using Affinity Photo 2 for the last years, it works for drawing but they haven’t done any QOL updates that affect drawing (it takes self-restraint to not go on a rant about this).

I miss Photoshop.

I just added “look for another desktop software for drawing” to my to-do list. Lmk if you have any recommendations aside from Clip Studio, I already tried it and it’s so darn unpleasant.

Drawing on the iPad is great and all but it also slows things down a lot with graphics implementation. I love how exporting I’ve got exporting setup in Blender, where I can just do a button click and it updates the file in-game, AND I have all my assets in one scene so it’s easy to see all the sprites in relation to each other. When I work in Procreate and wanna put a sketch in the game I have to transfer the file to my computer and then move it to the right folder from the computer. I need to figure out a better workflow.

I sketched a bunch of the monsters we have in the game already and came up with some new ones. Sentient Wall is one of our favorites from this bunch, it will probably block you from attacking any other enemies.

We’ve made a rough plan for the entire project. It feels really solid right now. Our original plan was to make this in 3 to 6 months but we admitted for this to turn out as good as we want we would have to put a few more months into it. So the game probably won’t come out until sometime early next year.
That means we failed already at one of our goals, “build and ship quickly.” I think we both got so attached and started to believe in this so much, we don’t really mind right now. We can always adapt as things unfold.

Making a game doesn’t take so long. But making it great takes a while.

❓ Question time

Do you have any recommendations for 2D software for drawing? Excluding Photoshop or Affinity Photo. Especially if it’s something tailored to making game art.

I really miss good brush management, smart objects, and shortcuts for alpha locking layers/brushes.

Thank you for reading Indie Notebook! I’d love to hear what today’s issue made you think about.

Leave a comment

Take care and have a creative week.

Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.

My parents are coming over tomorrow, they’ll be staying for a week. So I thought I’d write this week’s issue in advance so I wouldn’t have to do anything tomorrow. But now I’m too excited to keep this scheduled for Wednesday! When I could just send it right away!

Today I’ve got a sneak peek to share of my next upcoming game, which is coming out on Playdate soon. I’ve got a new playable prototype, featuring wizards(!). And some small Space Deer stuff made its way in here, even though I’m on a break from that.

I’m pretty hyped to send out this one!

Partial reveal of my Secret Game

The first piece of news is a first glimpse of a secret game project I’ve been working on (which I hinted at here a few months ago). It’s called Long Puppy. It’s coming to Playdate as part of the hottly anticipated Season 2.

“Playdate” and “Season 2” might not make much sense to some of you. So I’ll give you a quick explanation of what that means.

The Playdate is a gameboy-like console with a crank (the crank is not used to charge it, it uses a cable for that). The crank is used for input, it can be used for simple things like scrolling through lists or crazy stuff like simulating a fishing rod!

The console has a few other quirks as well. The screen lacks a backlight, and it’s black and white. So it feels retro. But at the same time it feels modern because it has wifi and something called Catalog, which is basically an AppStore. It hosts about 200 games right now. And there are over 800 on itch.io.

And what does “Season 2” mean?

With every Playdate a first season of games is included for free. Season 1 contained 24 games in total, they were delivered to you two games per week. A little light on the console will tell you when a new game has been downloaded and is ready to be played. You don’t know ahead what the game will be, so it’s a neat surprise where you get to unwrap the game on the console (there’s a satisfying animation for that) and discover what the game is about.

And now they’re doing this again with Season 2!

You can watch a Nintendo Direct style video presentation about 4 of the games that will be part of it right here.

Season 2 has a total of 12 games and can be pre-ordered for $39 right now. I will be playing the games along with everyone else on May 29 when it starts.

I wish I could but I won’t be saying anything else about Long Puppy until people have actually gotten the chance to play it. I don’t wanna spoil the surprise!

Its been such a pleasure to work on this game. It’s so fun and simple to develop for this little console, and to have the support of Panic throughout it made it even better. Knowing people would get to experience it through S2, along with so many other great games was also a huge honor and motivation.

Check out Season 2!

Consider preordering Season 2 if you own a Playdate!

Bibbidi - a roguelike deckbuilder prototype!

Me and Daan have continued to develop another game idea, and we’ve got another prototype for you to try today.

Last time it was sweet and wholesome forest spirits cleaning up trash. This time we delve into a dark and moody dungeon full of nasty monsters.

Game description: Bibidi Bibidi is a wizardcore roguelike deckbuilder where you combine cards in your spellbook to cast unique and powerful spells. Crawl through twisting tunnels and fight maddening monsters to find the perfect build for your wizard!

Play the prototype!

This time it’s playable in your web browser, so you won’t even have to download anything to try it!

Hint: Don't underestimate drawing cards!

We would love to hear any and all your thoughts on it. But if you need some inspiration, this is the main feedback we’re looking for.

• Do you usually enjoy roguelike deckbuilders? (E.g. Slay the Spire, Monster Train or even something like Slice & Dice)

• If you do, do you feel like this game's mechanics (the spellbook) set it apart from other games in the genre?

• Did you figure out how the spellbook and card attributes (Boon, School, Force) work?

• Did you want to try again as soon as you finished a session?

You can share your feedback in the comments or reply to this email!

I’ve also got a discord server where I share updates about prototypes more frequently.

Maybe this will sound a little obvious but the success of deckbuilders like this depend heavily on their game balance and replayability. The only way we can get that right is through lots of playtesting, feedback and iteration. What I’m getting at here is, if you’re not into this type of game, maybe you know someone else who likes deckbuilders? 🙏🏻

That’s my gentle plead for help lol. I’m just asking like this cause I feel like this one has lots of potential and we wanna make this something great.

Mini Notes

🍋 Games - Some of my favorite Playdate games

To go with todays theme of Playdate stuff, I’ve got some recs.

• Under The Castle

• Mars After Midnight

• Core Fault

• Snak

• Dig Dig Dino (coming up in S2)

• Loopsy

Would love to hear if you have any recommendations too!

🎵 Music - Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying

Just throwing in a random song I love here.

Panel of the week

(from Space Deer)

No panel this week, and there won’t be for a good while since Space Deer is on hold!

But I did write a long summary about what it’s been like to publish this webcomic for an entire year.

Oh, and there’s still a sale of Space Deer PDFs going on! 11 days left to pick it up, this is your last reminder. Thank you to everyone who picked it up! ❤️

There are now over 300 subscribers to this silly lil newsletter about my popcorn brain trying to say interesting stuff about making weird stuff. That kinda blows me away!

Thank you all for reading Indie Notebook!

Leave a comment

Take care and have a creative week.

Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.

Now that the newsletter is biweekly it kinda makes sense that they become a little bit longer instead. That’s why I’ve got three (3) pieces of news today.

Space Deer 1 Year Anniversary!

Today it has been an entire year since I started publishing Space Deer. Which means there are now 104 comic strips for you to read at www.spacedeer.net!

For the occasion I’ve put together a PDF collecting all the comics neatly in high quality.

I also created a bundle which contains…

• Space Deer: Suit Up - The 104 comics of the first year.

• Space Deer: Then & Now - An in depth behind-the-scenes look at how I shaped the comic.

• Empty Planet - A short graphic novel I made when I was 15, it’s sort of the prototype version of Space Deer.

Get the Space Dear bundle!

When I started this project I set myself the initial goal of publishing it for an entire year, to see how I like it and if there is any point in doing it. Now I’ve reached that point. And it feels very worthwhile.

With this milestone I’m going on a break from drawing Space Deer. My buffer of strips ran dry months ago, so I’ve been drawing a lot of the strips the day before they come online. Which isn’t exactly the conditions I wanna work under. I’ll take a few months off, refreshing myself and preparing a new buffer. But I’ll mainly be working on game projects and freelance stuff.

I’ll write more of a summary about this whole thing later when I’ve gathered my thoughts. In short I guess I would say - It was hard to start, but once I got going it felt like I couldn’t stop. I’m very happy I took this step.

Thank you if you’ve been reading it in any capacity so far. And if you haven’t checked it out yet, I hope you do. ❤️

The Loopy Folk prototype is ready!

Me and Daan have been working on a prototype and concept for a game called Loopy Folk. It’s a wholesome idle game where you help little forest spirits clean up nature by tossing stuff in a hole.

The prototype is lacking a lot of content and features, it’s a little buggy and all that kinda stuff. But it does have the core gameplay loop and it has a certain charm to it.

Builds: Windows | Mac

If you do give the game a shot, there are a few questions we would love for you to answer.

• Do you usually enjoy playing idle games?

• Do you usually enjoy playing wholesome games?

• Would a more beautiful and fleshed out version of this game compel you?

• If not, what would have to change for you to want to play it?

• If you managed to finish a session: did you want to continue playing on the same map or start over on a new one?

You can send your feedback to indianajonas42@gmail.com or share it in the Loopy Folk channel over on my Discord.

Plock is playable in web browser

Two years ago I challenged myself to make a really small game and finish it. The result was this little falling-block-puzzler.

This weekend I looked over my itch page and realized I should have made a web build for this game. So I did.

Play Plock!

Now I think I might even go play it every now and then myself. It’s nice how making something playable in the browser makes it much easier to pick up. Makes me want to make more tiny browser-games.

Mini Notes

💬 Comic - The Walking Dead

I’ve been on a huge zombie spree lately. There’s something awkwardly comforting in watching humanity crumble under such unrealistic(?) circumstances. I think it’s sort of primal to get into zombie stuff, but I’ve just been going with it.
First I watched the end of the tv-show and was extremely disappointed in how it developed. I heard that the comic was much better. I ended up chugging through the entire series in like a month. It was a blast. So much better than the tv-show. And the ending of the comic was actually satisfying.

There was a while where I was reading the comic and feeling like it would end up sort of like the show, just no point, not going anywhere. I thought it would just meander and try to shock me to keep me hooked for as long as possible. But it was actually going somewhere all along. I’m happily surprised by it.

🕹️ Game - Guncho

I discovered this little browser game over on itch. It’s made by Tiny Touch Tales with art by Terri Vellman, the creator of Sludge Life. I played the browser version for hours and then caved in and bought the Steam version of the game as well.

It’s a short strategy gem. Cleverly designed and charming. It manages to do so many things I want to accomplish with my game design too (fun chain reactions and sick vibes).

Panel of the year (according to me)

(from Space Deer)

Thank you for reading Indie Notebook! I’d love to hear what today’s issue made you think about.

Leave a comment

Take care and have a creative week.

Ps. Remember to check out that Space Deer bundle. 👀

And thanks if you already bought it!

Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.

The response to last weeks devlog of Ploppy Weather was super nice! I’m really hyped to work on it and simultaneously a little overwhelmed whenever I open the project. It’s gonna be quite a beast to get it made all by myself. I do like the challenge though.

But this week it’s time to announce my new project! Something a bit more sane.

Making games smartly on a small scale

Now it might seem strange to start talking about ANOTHER game I’m working on. But that’s exactly what I’m going to do. And I have my reasons!

To start it seems highly unlikely that I’ll be able to ship Ploppy Weather any time this year. It might not even be ready next year. So while I will keep working on it and posting about it, I will not commit 100% of my time to it.

I wanna be a bit more strategic with my time and try to get something good out as soon as possible.

Chris Zukowski wrote a great blog post about what he calls “crafty buildy strategic simulation games.” It’s a mouth full so he shortens it to “crafty buildy games.”

He did a lot of research on the types of games that work best on Steam and found this common denominator across a lot of different genres. What defines these games is that they’re built with reusable content in mind first.

The way I, and many other starting indie devs make games is by filling a game with unique content (as is the case with Ploppy Weather). Just think of a huge open world map with lots of handmade quests, characters and things you might only encounter once.

Balatro is an excellent example of a crafty buildy game, full of reusable content.

Balatro is a roguelite deckbuilder where you play poker hands to score enough to pass to the next round. The rounds get progressively harder, in order to keep up you’ll have to pick between different joker cards and benefit from their attributes.

In one of my best runs I got a card that gave me a multiplier based on the sell value of all my jokers, then I found another card that increased the sell value of each of my jokers after every round. Which meant my hand leveled up a little by itself every round.

That sort of “synergy” (is what the cool kids call it) comes out of designing with reusable content in mind first.

Every single card in Balatro adds to the possibility space of the game, there are uncountable ways this game can play out because every piece of content (card) is designed with this in mind.

If you design with reusability in mind you get a lot more BANG out of your effort as a developer.
I could spend 16 hours making a quest for an open world game and that quest will be played once. Or I can design a couple of cards for a deckbuilder, if done right all these cards will add to the depth and variety of the entire game.
The goal is for variety and depth to spring out of varied configurations of the game’s content.

I’m not saying quests are not worth making. It’s just not as cost efficient as making a systemic game (that’s also what the cool kids call it).

I do have ideas for systemic stuff that will go into Ploppy Weather. But it still has a lot of handmade content that is not reusable.

Crafty Buildy Prototype #1

SO! I’m making a systemic game. And I’m not doing this alone. My friend Daan is in a similar situation as me and we both liked the idea of making a game this way. So we decided to try out this strategy together.

Last week we got together at my place and came up with as many game ideas as we could. We made some paper prototypes, we strolled around, we mostly talked (and I introduced him to Balatro).

We are prototyping the first one of our ideas this week.

I drafted up this description to try and answer some of the most important marketing decisions we will make.

Tend to the Loopy Folk in this chill idle game. Strategically place buildings and plants along the path, collect resources and sacrifice them to the HOLE. Behold as the barren wasteland blossom into a lush forest.

The questions I tried to answer here was: Who’s it for? What’s the genre? What’s the player fantasy?

It’s for wholesome players, it’s an idle game, the player fantasy is to restore/care for nature. We might end up tweaking it a little or rephrase that sentence along the way. But it feels promising.

Three months was the timeframe we initially aimed for with this entire collab. I never stop being surprised by how long it actually takes to make a game. After estimating the dev time for two of our ideas one ended up 7 months and the other 12 months. We tweaked their scopes a bit and managed to reduce each to 6 months. It’s crazy how long it takes to make even simple games like these.

We will be sharing builds of these prototypes over on the Indie(Jon)Games discord channel in the coming weeks. Feel free to join if you wanna test or just shoot me a message somewhere!

It’s the first time I try to be this rational about a game project. We will see where it goes and whether it pays off!

Also, Daan wrote about this in his own newsletter, I read it after writing this and I gotta say he said it much better than me. Haha

Panel of the week

I reached quite a milestone with Space Deer last week! The 100th strip! It’s a special one in full color, a bit longer and it’s about the robotic fella Roblo.

(from Space Deer)

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Take care and have a creative week.

Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.

Through a spurt of sudden inspiration on Monday I ended up spending over 3 hours putting together a first development log entry for my game Ploppy Weather.

It’s too long to fit in this newsletter. So you’ll have to click yourself over there if you wanna read it.

→ Ploppy Weather: Getting started (dev log #1)

It sums up the first 7 months of thinking and progress on it. Among other things, there are couple of video clips there which I haven’t shared anywhere else.

It is quite a lengthy post. I will keep future logs shorter than this. I don’t intend to make this a regular thing like I do with this newsletter. I will just write one whenever I feel like enough has happened and there’s something worth saying.

One reason I felt so inspired to write this dev log was because I started reading dev logs of other developers that I look up to. Such as Lucas Pope, and Stuffed Wombat.

📣 Call for testers!

In a few weeks or months from now I would like to hear what other people think about Ploppy Weather. And I will continue to need this kinda help in the future as well, on this game and upcoming ones. So I made a discord server!

Join discord server!

It will be a place to get quicker updates about my solo game projects, be that about releases or new builds to test. Of course there’s no obligation to test my games if you join. It’s fine if you just wanna lurk around. I might end up using it as a place to post random silly stuff too. And maybe stream some development??

I made a channel where you can show your own work too and maybe we can just have a good time there. I just made the server 10 minutes ago so it’s a bit barebones for now.

If you wanna test but don’t care about discord, send me an email and I’ll make sure to get you setup when the time comes!

Panel of the week

(from Space Deer)

Thank you for reading Indie Notebook! I’d love to hear what today’s issue made you think about.

Leave a comment

Take care and have a creative week.

Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.

I just wrapped up a game project I’ve been working on for the past 6 months. I’ll save my words about that game until later. But what I can say is it has freed up some time for me to enjoy getting (back) into other game projects.

I’m taking it chill and having fun working on Ploppy Weather. At the moment I’m mostly coming up with silly ideas and trying to visualize the world of it. I’ve been sketching and thinking of what the main character might look like and some NPC’s.

And soon I’m gonna get into a collab with a friend. We don’t know what game we will make. We have a strategy. I’m really looking forward to try to come up with something with him!

Do you have A Room Of Your Own?

In the previous post I talked about reclaiming my own attention, by changing my relationship to SM (social media/slot machine). You left some very thoughtful comments on there. I’m gonna share some of them with you here today.

“About boredom, I notice only when I let my kids be bored for a few minutes (screens off) do they start to engage in imaginative play, almost as if creativity can't happen without boredom. I wonder for myself if the reason why I feel uninspired or unmotivated to create sometimes is due to the fact that I don't often let myself get bored.” - Nicki Newell

And then long time reader Ash said this…

A computer with internet does not feel [like] a room of my own. Casey Muratori's work computers don't even have internet. If he needs documentation, he'll download it when he's not working. That is his room of his own.

Do you have a room of your own? Or a *work device* of your own?

I don’t know who Casey is, but sounds like a smart guy.

I heard a similar story about a group of programmers working for the military. They had no internet access or even documentation on their work computers. If they needed to look something up they had to walk to the other side of the facility where there was access. Then they would memorize what they had just read, walk back across the facility while trying to keep it in their mind, and then put it into use immediately when they got back to their workstation. This made them famously efficient as programmers because they basically had the whole documentation in their heads.

I don’t remember where I heard that and I’m too lazy to look it up, but I think it’s a cool story. In their case it’s almost as if they were forced to have A Room Of Their Own.

As for me, I guess I do have a room of my own, but I’m not sure what the quality of it is?

Growing up I definitely did. I distinctly remember sitting at the desk in my childhood bedroom, running my hand on the wooden surface of that desk and really loving it, feeling very at peace there.
Oh and summer break was the best! Late Swedish summer evenings where the sun never completely set, and nobody else was awake. That was the best time and place I’ve ever found for creativity. It’s impractical and hard to recreate as an adult. But in theory I could, so maybe I will try it this summer?

The way I try to make my workspace A Room Of My Own now is quite different compared to then. This comes back to social media once again, I think I’ve been so influenced by it that my picture of what is nice now is almost impossible to recreate. Or at least quite expensive. Or it would require me to do some handy-work that I’m not quite ready to tackle. But these are very surface level things that might not be as important as I make them out to be in my head.
A Room Of My Own should be more about how I get myself into a mindset where I am where I want to be mentally. Ofc aesthetics plays a part in that. But it also has to be about something else, like choosing my relationship to the internet and how I block out my time.

But in my case I don’t feel like internet access is the problem. I had that back then too. For me adulthood is the problem. I’m much more serious when I do creative work now compared to then, because I have this pressure of making money. Part of this is my mindset with my own projects, which is what it is and I feel like I’m getting to a place where this won’t be a problem anymore (I hope). Freelance work feels more invasive into my room in this regard.

Austin Kleon answered a question about serious vs fun for the creative mind recently. It spoke to me so much I’ve had this picture as a backdrop on my phone since then.

Finding this balance between getting serious and having fun is something I hope to think more about going forward.

This wasn’t what I meant for this week’s post to be about, but your comments inspired me and I like where Ash’s question led me.

Thank you everyone for your messages!

❓ Question time

I’ve been wanting to read more devlogs recently. One I like and try to keep up with is Stuffed Wombat’s, because it feels very personal and he’s a very interesting designer.

Do you know any similar devlogs? Or just devlogs in general that you like?

Panel of the week

(from Space Deer)

Thank you for reading Indie Notebook! I’d love to hear what today’s issue made you think about.

Leave a comment

Take care and have a creative week.

Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.

I’m back! That break ended up a bit longer than I had intended! It was very much needed though. I feel recharged to keep this going now. Buuut I will step down the cadence slightly, instead of posting every week I will settle for posting every second week. Mostly for my sanity. I do way too many things. :- )))

Somehow over 100 new subscribers joined the newsletter during this 2-month break??? I think it’s because my friend Wren made some great posts recently and they are recommending my newsletter. Either way, welcome everyone!

Incase you are new here and don’t know what I do, I do a couple things.

I make a weekly comic strip called Space Deer.

And I make indie games, my first big game was Surmount. It’s a roguelike climbing game. It’s out on Steam and Nintendo Switch (it’s actually 50% off right now)!

And I’ve just reached 99% completion on another game project that will be shipping soonish. That’s actually the main reason I extended my break from Indie Notebook. In upcoming issues of this newsletter I will probably talk more about the making of that game and on my progress with other game projects.

I’ll talk more about that another day!

Reclaiming my own attention

My whole adult life I’ve been checking several social media sites per day, mainly twitter (recently bluesky) and instagram. I rarely took the effort to click myself over to the tab of people I follow, I would just hang around in the “for you” tab and let the algorithm wash over me. I never checked the hours per day I waste on there, but it’s probably been a lot more than I like to admit. The feeling of this being a waste of time was enough to make me consider, “maybe I should care more?”

And then I found the book Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport was included in my Spotify subscription. I’m not done with it, but it has already made my feelings about this much more clear.

I’ll try to break down the basics of what I got from the book so far.

To begin with we get phones and social media accounts for good reasons. We want to stay informed about stuff we care about (friends, family, interests, work). But social media apps are not designed with this in mind. They are designed to hook us. They will pull lots of tricks to accomplish this. For instance, the facebook feed is filled with garbage celebrity gossip and shit posts. To get to the feed of posts from only friends we have to do a series of unintuitive clicks. Which doesn’t align at all with the reasons we get facebook in the first place.

This is a common point for all social media platforms. The way we end up using them is not in tune with why we join them in the first place.

And the price we pay for this is our attention. Anytime boredom starts to loom, the first reflex is to reach for the phone, to check notifications and jump between social media apps. Social Media is abbreviated SM, same as Slot Machine. Coincidence???

Cal used a line from Virginia Woolf in his book. It stuck with me.

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

My understanding is that Virginia (1882-1941) was talking about this from the perspective of women’s rights. She meant that women need a break from serving men, to get seclusion. Which is required to do deep thinking.

Now our phones are always with us and rob us of this deep/free thinking. So now it’s not just women who struggle to reach this state of seclusion. We all do.1

In this way the big tech companies are suppressing freedom of thought across the whole world. But the way they do it is just sneaky enough and just pleasant enough for us to not notice or complain.

Realizing all this made me sort of lose my taste for social media. Being on there makes me feel uneasy. When I do log on I usually just check some messages and leave.
Now I try to reach for a book or a sketchbook when I get the SM-itch. When I don’t feel like doing either of those, I just let myself sit around and be bored for a few minutes. It’s not as bad as it seems.

It’s too soon to say how this will impact my creativity, or if I’ll just fall back into old habits. But I do feel more peaceful right now and that’s worth something in itself.

Mini Notes

🎥 Movie - Perfect Days

This is a rare movie about a man without great ambitions. The main character lives in Tokyo, he cleans public toilets for a living and has a very nice, simple, repetitive life. And he’s perfectly happy with it. He doesn’t dream of anything big, he’s just satisfied.

It made me question my fixation on ambitions. Maybe I don’t need them? Or maybe I can be satisfied and ambitious?

Panel of the week

(from Space Deer)

Thank you for reading Indie Notebook! I’d love to hear what today’s issue made you think about.

Leave a comment

Also let me know if there’s anything specific you’d like me to talk about in a future issue of the newsletter!

Take care and have a creative week.