Started an experiment about adding beads and letters to the bracelet. The game is checking if the placement is symmetrical, which could be one constraint. The word doesn’t have to be a palindrome, so I have one “structure”–string, and one “word”–string. I’m doing this one in Construct2, which I also used to create my wedding game 12 years ago, and it still works perfectly. The placement on the string is just a cursor counting up the widths as more are added.
While I strongly prefer grayscale syntax-highlighting for code, I always prefer colorful Icon-Sets for toolbars.
I checked out some of the old Flash-based girlie jewelery-makers for inspiration. Also some commercial ones that build-to-order. But I’m seeing something more like a puzzle-game in my head. Something more Zach-like with a Balatro twist. A Zach-Lite-Balatro-Ghost-Bracelet-Maker. The player has to prepare something like 20 bracelets for the Ghost concert. (This is autobiographic, since I make about 40 ones a year ago for the Skeletour in Munich) The first bracelet is clearly readable as a certain song-title like “MARY ON A CROSS” The player has additional beads, charms, etc.
Braceletter, a bracelet making game! No idea if there is substance to it, but the making bracelets for concerts thing may be a nice little game. The Ghost version would be basically a word guessing game, where the player has to build a bracelet with a “relevant” word from a Ghost-Song, or a Song-Title or name from the Lore. The one in the mock would be “Searchlights” (from the song “Watcher in the Sky”).
Some progress on People-Please. The prototype is the movie-crowd. They are watching a triple feature. The player can toggle the blame-mode, and then click a person and a rule. Then “commit” the blame and then gets feedback. Currently only using a cellphone during the running move is a “violation”.
What do Pico-8, Flash, GameMaker and Construct have in common? They all integrate code AND graphics-editing into their feature-suites. I believe they were as successful as they were, to a large part because of that. With other engines and frameworks, you always need to get your media-assets from outside. Having all in one allows you to start quicker and not having to think about where your placeholder graphics will come from.
Whenever I need to draw something with mouse or touchpad, I use Flash. Nowadays it’s called “Animate”, but the good old Flash MX still works great, also on a VMWare ARM Windows. The reason is that it still has the best line smoothing procedure for vector based painting. There is nothing comparable. Most painting apps do have smoothing brushes, but they are usually speed-based (Flash doesn’t care for drawing speed) and/or pixel-based.
Prototype WIP for the “People, Please” Idea (QtQuick)
Here’s the illustration of the idea from the last post. I’ll probably do a quick-ish prototype in Qt if my energy levels allow.
Random Game Idea on a Saturday Night: Papers Please x Crowd Control. You’re a security guard in front of a crowd during an event. You have a list of rules that the crowd has to stick to. “No signs”, “no standing up”, “no sitting down”, “no phone usage”, “only one photo per person” and so on. You have to make sure the rules are followed. You have to report/fix offenders, but false reports will make some people leave, which is also negative.
Playing Dragonsweeper is triggering so many thoughts on other possible Minesweeper-Variants. Like Minesweeper+Crossword-Puzzle or Scrabble. Defuse mines by constructing words from the surroundings. But IDK how that could look like. A field in a grid has 8 neighbors. Maybe the “mines” would be visible from the start, and you have to construct words from the adjacent letters to defuse them. Would the letters be hidden or visible? There might be 4-5 Mines in a 8x8 field and you have a limited amount of letter-tiles.
Random Idea/Thought: A Lyrics Website. Not a platform with texts to all songs, one page custom made for one song. The layout and typography supports the songs' topic. Audio optional, it’s more about the styling, animations, storytelling. I’m not sure that I have seen this anywhere yet.
Game-Idea: Infinite Minesweeper. Like the ol' Windows Minesweeper but on an infinite field. Clicking bombs will punish the player in another way, the game is going on. At some point it gets too hard to recover, and a new game will be started. But what is the winning condition? If you click a bomb, instead of losing, you’ll dive into the bomb to de-fuse it. You do that, you guessed correctly, by solving another minesweeper puzzle.
Game Idea: A Balatro-Tetris. Pimp your tetraminos with additional skills, like “bombs away all pieces below” or “double points”. I’m sure this has been done thousands of times, but I haven’t looked yet.
A little avatar-illustration for a friend, who wanted one in the same style as my profile-image on most platforms. Vector-Based, made with Affinity.
I added two pieces, and they both need to land to make the move. The problem is, how do I resolve placing the pieces if both should overlap after landing. One way for now is to just merge them.
I also thought about a game loop. The game could be about filling up as much as possible of the “blob”.
May I present: The 4-Way Rotating Tetris Idea Prototype (Godot) So far I can only accumulate tiles, no winning state or even a game loop yet.
game idea: tetris, but you control the “blob” and the pieces are coming from all sides. the blob can be rotated and moved, but the pieces need to land somewhere, you can’t just let them pass. or maybe you can?
game idea: you start at the lowest level of a cyberpunk coruscant style city-planet, and have to work yourself up. everything is one huge vertical level, where you have to come up with interesting tricks to get higher. like Downwell, only upwards. Contains longer phases of just climbing upwards. Not endless like Desert Golf. Not really a hardcore-platformer like Celeste, but a point&click/limbo/KR0-Mix.
how about a digital figdet toy. an app that just consists of extra juicy, bouncy, satisfying ploppy buttons, sliders, and other UI-elements, that do nothing else.