After playing Animal Crossing, I did a lot of thinking about the nature of rpgs. RPGs are incredibly addicting, to a certain kind of person. Everyone else seems immune, but I wondered if it was because RPGs were simply too complicated and too Japanese for most people. Could an RPG be made with virtually no narrative story and no complicated time-consuming combat mechanics? If it did, all that would remain would be the grinding, collecting and gear upgrading.

I built New World Explorer to try making a game out of Flash and, along the way, test my RPG experiment. The premise is a favorite of mine; you are an explorer, a hunter and a naturalist -it's just you and an expanse of uncharted wilderness. Behind the premise, this game is set-collecting, pure and simple. In fact, there may be too much set collecting; at least with the gamers that I was able to test it on; they felt like the progress was too slow compared with the amount of repetition involved. Never mind that real rpgs require much more grinding, explorer needs a more engaging grind; it's actually too easy to rapidly click through the grind.

My next step was to experiment with reducing the number of species groups (particularly the plants) but evidently I lost the flash file and all I have left now is the .swf. This also means I can't fix at least one minor bug that I've discovered.

The small size of the screen reflects the fact that I intended the game for a mobile audience. The gameplay also reflects this -you can slip in and out as often as you like.