plastic coquina devlog

Plastic coquina came out on 1/11, and with that my friends and I have started the broken rotten games circle! Lots of talk about!

Edit, 1/19: Zeno typed up a wonderful devlog going over the programming. If you're curious to hear about the tech side of things, please check it out here!

broken rotten

First off, broken rotten. The idea of it is just us as a group of friends making small, narratively-focused games. The members at the moment are myself, Amet, Zeno, and Jemi, but it's quite flexible by design. Amet and I had the idea right around kicking off work on plastic coquina, and shortly afterwards we hit up the ever cool boocanan for the logo. The idea was to sort of formalize the group so that we could make games under one name, versus someone listing out every group member for a project or (even worse, in my opinion) falling into the trap of the single auteur… I refuse it at every turn…

For now, there will be no itch page, website, or socials for broken rotten, as it’ll just exist as a collective name relevant to the individual games and less so outside of that. But! If we have the time we will probably put together a site, just ‘cause it’s fun. Will be sure to share about it if we do! (And a small technical note, Hana’s Light and along an extremity are not broken rotten games.)

plastic coquina

Second off, plastic coquina! We were so beyond thrilled when pilot announced the DOLL & KIGU jam (Amet especially) that we knew we had to participate, and we’re really proud of our submission. It’s also been so wonderful to check out everyone else’s submissions! Maybe I’ll try to type up short shout-outs on Bluesky like I did for Shortbox… really great work, and eternally grateful to pilot for organizing.

It's worth saying I had sort of a limited POV—I did the writing and the UI and as such will be mostly talking about that. If the others do devlogs I'll be sure to share!

Now for the devlog part of the devlog! For initial planning, Amet is a huge ball-jointed doll enthusiast (check out her super cute collection here) and was very firm about wanting to do something BJD related, which I was super thrilled about. She’s also a dress-up game specialist, so it sort of naturally begun with those two things on the board: BJD + dress-up. We invited on our good friend Zeno for this project to tackle the programming, which would free Amet up to work her character design and dress-up magic.

I really felt like I had my work cut out for me, as the rest of the structure would basically need to be determined by the narrative needs. (Not to mention—this was my first time writing prose! It was so much fun but I was very aware that I had no clue what I was doing haha.) Amet shared her wealth of knowledge doll hobby quirks, as well as additional mechanics that she was interested in working with. I also threw SO much spaghetti at the walls trying to sift through potential narrative hooks. I kept circling around ideas of body genres and how dolls can be very interesting and powerful locations of displaced emotions. How could an idea like body genres interact with something separate from the immediate, literal body? (If you think this sounds interesting, please check out ATTACHMENTDOLL from the jam, which is a masterclass in these themes and more!) But ultimately what stuck was this ritualistic practice of breaking something down and being reborn newly assembled—a new person but more “yourself” with every progressive cycle. Something like that would have a really powerful ritualistic and meditative feeling for whoever was partaking in the dismembering and reconstitution.

After lots of talking amongst us three, the general structure shook out! Ultimately, the goal was a game that forced the player to be thoughtful and reflect on their decisions. A winding, less-complicated maze would be perfect for that as it would be easy enough to navigate without being immediately obvious where the path through was, but still give the player plenty of time to reflect on the different objects. Sort of a Many Nights a Whisper format—performing an action balanced out by delineated time to think about the weight of what you’ve done, and consider what you might do next. The player cannot replay individual stage and must think carefully about their choice, but can forfeit the less crucial items (wig, eyes, clothes) if they’d prefer, and ultimately can repeat the entire cycle at the end again if they want. Ritual!

Fun draft of the maze from when I was trying to pull all of our ideas together into actual mock-ups.

The rest followed from there. Amet drafted up tons of gorgeous doll parts and I’d give a little thematic feedback, but most of the meaning was derived after she’d settled up most of the doll parts. From there we worked to rearrange them and thematize them for combos, and then I had the very fun task of coming up with what on earth could someone pick up in the game that could be broken down and yield this doll part. Amet then drew up all the items, and I wrote the descriptions. Sort of creative table tennis, it was really fun.

Probably my only wish would’ve been more time to hone everything narratively. No jam is ever conveniently timed and this was no exception... It would’ve been so incredibly satisfying to send the doll parts and workshop items through a few more rounds of narrative development. For example, what does it mean to refuse to take any item with you in the doll-making ritual, and what sort of self would that yield? How could that be reflected in those parts? Honestly had this been a project independent of jam timelines, I think item/doll part development could've easily taken up the majority of the dev time.

I totally forgot I meant to keep the window art from the background of the narrative section as the background for the workshop item selection as well... but maybe it would've turned out too busy?

Really I am so very proud of the game, and it was a great way to start the year. I’m really looking forward to making games with these two again, as well as my amazing friend Jemi who’s graced all of our games so far with beautiful music. And amazing shout out to Zeno, who took every idea Amet and I had for game mechanics in stride and did really amazing work with the programming in general.

What’s up next

First up—a HUGE thank you to everyone who's played and enjoyed the game. It was really overwhelming in the best way possible. We were all so thrilled going over everyone's dolls, and a few of you made at least me cry with your kind words. So thank you!

I think all of us really need a bit of a break… ! The jam actually went nearly flawlessly and we had so much polish time, but it was still a big project for 7 straight weeks. But this was also the longest project I’ve ever done, and I remain really interested in having longer runways for future projects. This isn’t to say that we won’t go back to doing 9.5 day jams (which now seem completely insane… how’d we do that…), but I’m definitely going be turning over some longer term things in my brain to pitch the team on.

But otherwise, Amet is working on a really cool cat dress-up game and occasionally sharing little updates on her Bluesky (you can check one out here), and also just put out a very cute dress-up game called Tiger Tea Party. Zeno will be taking cool bird photos on hikes. Jemi continues to make very cool music and experience miracles.

I’ll be working on a redraw of my comic Maintenance (I must give the boys their due) while also cooking up a very fun erohorror project with a friend (more on this soon, hopefully). For website stuff, I'll get plastic coquina up on my site, and with it some very fun little buttons for anyone who wants to link to it on their site. I'm also planning on tabling at my first fair this April... !! Lots to look forward to, while also figuring out how to still take it easy...

But that’s all for now—talk soon!

bluzo