Groovelet is now Cabinloop: deckbuilding RPG

So, I was reading a book on game design and it mentioned how important naming is for accurately setting player expectations vis-a-vis what your game actually IS.

And then I thought about the name “Groovelet”. What does that even mean? It sounds like… a little application... for making music.

Groovelet started out as a generative-music-retro-RPG, and since then it has changed, and changed, and changed, and now it still contains generative music and is still a retro RPG, but also there’s a lot of “cutting wood in a forest” and “deckbuilding”. So I thought about trying to capture the new vibe in a better way with the name.

Picking one, I tried it out on a handful of people, and aside from my wife (who refuses to play the game because it is too boring) “Cabinloop: deckbuilding RPG” seemed to communicate the game’s vibe much more effectively.

So with that, I went to cook up a new logo and register a new domain, cabinloop.ca. The whole rebrand took a couple of hours. Rebranding is real easy, this early in a project’s life.

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Since our last major update, I’ve introduced:

• A new NPC, “Blit”, who has almost no lines, so far

• Card foley

• Dynamic favicons!

• Vastly improved card stack management!

Also:

• The dialogue system now has a progressive art loading system that allows for specific NPC+emotion combinations to fall back on the default emotion or just “nothing” rather than a broken image link.

• A lot more of the cards’ flavor and dialogues have been moved into the View window, where it’s passively consumable rather than depending on the game’s very slow “turn” system to trigger.

I’m also slowly working on the game’s next two major locations, “shop” and… I think “mines”?

Anyways, after struggling and crunching to get this game into an Alpha-ready state where it’s minimally playable, it’s very obviously still very far from being a complete game - so my plan is to spend the summer actually chilling out a bit. Reading some books. Playing with my Steam Deck. Adding features real slow-like. For the sake of my sanity.