the red dove chick

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 10:33:19 +0100

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.

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 10:43:47 +0100

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.

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 10:36:19 +0100

A little update on the BB-Tan-Clone game on Pico-8. Bouncy corners are working, with actual circle-to-rect-collisions.

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 09:35:23 +0100

RE last post: I underestimated the ways this collision can go wrong. I used a small rect as a ball-collider, not a circle, so it gets weirdly stuck. I think I’ll rewrite it from Rect->Rect collisions to Circle->Rect.

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 11:49:49 +0100

On the BB-Tan-Clone I failed to imagine how a simple corner-collision would work. After hitting a corner, the circle should bounce differently. A comment on SO lead me to a good approach: The corner is an infinitely small circle, so this case can be handled the same as two circles colliding.

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 11:42:59 +0100

Added some more goods to the Pico-8 BB-Tan-Clone. The aim has acceleration to allow finer movement. The level is going down after each round and the shooting-position is changing depending on the first lost ball. Also I got items now, giving the player one more ball per collection.

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 10:56:49 +0100

I did a quick BB-Tan clone with pico-8. Currently it has pretty simple collisions and a faux-level-editor via sprites. The level is also moving down after a round.

Vending machine game thoughts/ideas

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 21:56:21 +0100

A concept of a game-idea… Vending Machine Simulator. But not as in: drive around and manage your vending-machines. More like: the vending-machine is the game. I feel like there could be more to it. (Every bullet-point is an unrelated thought)

A card game, where a card is one product in one of the vending-tracks. You draw and place the cards randomly in a grid, like 4x4.
You have to use a vending-machine “from hell” where you have to buy strategically for the product to not get stuck. It can’t fall down too far. Or your product gets stuck and you need to buy the one above to unlock it, when it falls down and frees the other one.
There could be ridiculous products inside, like a broom or animals, monsters.
The numbers could play a role, where you don’t see the numbers and have to find out what you number is.
The challenge could be that your task is to buy a specific product, but ultimately it takes half an hour.
- You don’t have enough money, so you first buy something cheaper, then try to sell it yourself etc. a bit like a point&click-game.
- There could be a phone and some tools available to the player.
- The player has to buy Y. Y costs 5$. The player has only 4$. But: The product Z costs 50ct, and has bonus points. The player searches for Product Z on their phone and finds the app. The player buys 5 times Z and can now afford Y thanks to the bonus points.
- The machine could offer lottery tickets for machine-credits.
“The Venting Machine” with a T, however that might look
In each “round” you can ultimately choose to just punch the machine, you will get everything, but it would be the last round. Light kicking would trigger a warning, but you can go on.
Use a combination of shaking, kicking, paying, grabbing from bottom to get the goods.
A vending machine where you can add additional slots, and it can get ridiculously large. The higher it gets, the more fall-damage the products suffer. Or the longer it takes the robot arm to retrieve the thing.
A vending-machine-track can have different products, maybe the order in which the products are being inserted could be a mechanic
A vending machine kinda looks like a smartphone home-screen
The machine could have a “debug” mode or be hackable in some way
A vending machine cookie clicker style game. that would bring it back to the machine-manager-style game that I didn’t want.
- 1 click is 1 fill of a product in one (of multiple) machine
- you can upgrade to 1 click -> multiple fills
- there are emerging trends and products can get stuck due to a hype ebbing
A cozy game where you load the vending-machine, and then let the day happen, people walking by. some are buying something. you can listen to their talking or thoughts, to fill it up with something they need. “I hope I don’t forget my cable tomorrow”. Next day: add a cable to one of the tracks. Person forgets their cable and is happy they can buy one at the players machine.
- could include “love letters”, or other messages-in-bottles from people to people
- could move through times like starting at middle ages and continuing to the far future, supporting the surrounding people
Could have a search where you have to actively find names for items, like Scribblenauts. try to find what objects the people need and store them.

Unnamed JS-Word-Game

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 09:41:28 +0100

I wanted to test Codex and generated a little game-idea I have had for a while. A word-game where the player has to construct words out of the word-tiles they are given, combined with the letters of the words from the round before.

Each round is restricted to 30 seconds and the player has to build a word that they haven’t used before. After a correct word has been submitted, the player gets dealt new letters. It’s always possible to construct at least a valid 2-letter-word out of the new letters that are given.

I got word-lists from different sources for EN and DE.

The experience with Codex was OK, it was all included in the normal paid tier, no messing around with API keys. I have never reached any limits. The resulting vanilla JS-file is currently around 2k lines.

The front-end styling was bad as always with LLMs, but the resulting CSS was ok to fix.

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 08:02:26 +0100

This is interesting! I made the modifiers rearrangeable and the challenge was to solve my test-level that I didn’t think would work with the given elements. It worked! I just had to figure out how to double the damage of both bullets after splitting. Let’s see which modifiers are next.

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 10:47:39 +0100

A little game prototype idea: Tower-Defense, but it’s literally a tower where the defense happens. Like a building where stuff is dropped from the windows on the enemies that are passing. I’m doing a quick prototype in GameMaker, which is probably the best free way to try something quickly.

Inspiration?

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 11:35:55 +0100

It has been almost 10 years since my last kinda-finished game Dubiduh. I did some smaller things since then, like the Pico-8-Solitaire Kuso, but Dubiduh was not a clone of something existing.

Usually there is a repeating pattern with the stuff I start. I’m inspired by a game/game-idea/new tech/engine, and I start a thing. Sometimes the motivation goes on for some weeks, sometimes it’s gone after a few days, sometimes I close the editor within the first hour, and wonder “why am I doing this?”.

At this point I doubt that I’ll manage to finish anything ever again. The only projects that have a chance of seeing a polished version are so small in scope, that I can finish them before the novelty wears off.

I don’t see the point of polishing clones of games, like the Qt-project I did. The MacOS-upgrade broke the compilation of the project, and I can’t be bothered to fix that. I got a good impression of Qt, and that’s it.

I also feel that it’s getting harder for me to even start things. I’m catching myself wondering if the thing is even worth it, when I’ll be cancelling it in a few days anyways.

We went to a games-festival last weekend, and there were some great folks showing their hobby-projects. One of them has been working on her game for THREE YEARS. I think I would love to have the motivation to keep working on a thing for that long. I don’t know if I just haven’t found the right project, or I’m just not built for sticking with something for such a long time.

Or maybe those long-haul-projects just require more free mental space than I currently have.

My Space-Hangar Game-Idea

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 15:34:33 +0100

A game-idea that I’ve thought about and prototyped a lot is a space-hangar-game. You’re managing a hangar with ships inbound and outbound.

One version that I created with Elixir/Phoenix some years ago is round-based. You have 3-5 landing-platforms, and each round there is an incoming ship. Your goal is to assign the ships to the platforms. The catch is that the ships belong to different fractions (Cartel, Police, Corporate), and placing them next to each other will improve/decrease your reputation with that faction, depending on their relationship (rock-paper-scissors-style). It was playable but I didn’t manage to make it fun in the time it had my attention.

Another version I did in JS was like a placement puzzle. You have ships and resources (ship X needs 2 repair and 1 energy resource), and you need to place everything on the board so that all needs are matched. It’s playable here. Ultimately it did’t spark enough joy to continue working on it.

Currently I’m thinking about a version that is realtime. You’re walking around your hangar and ships are incoming. Or it’s more an RTS-type thing where you have to click manually, and then slowly start to automate. Like a cookie-clicker-game. You have to take care of repairs, loading/unloading, transporting people and so on. I may do a prototype in 2D with a basic game loop soon-ish.

I tried vibe-creating with phoenix.new

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 14:37:33 +0100

Just tried to take Fly.io’s phoenix.new for a spin. I love Elixir, even though I never really used it heavily. I learned about this service some months ago on Hackernews.

It’s a coding environment with something like Copilot enabled, that lets you create complete Elixir/Phoenix apps.

Or so I thought. Turns out it burned through my 20€ in an hour and I don’t even have a working CRUD app that I wanted. There was nothing special in my requests, just some entries that I can edit. Most of the time it was fixing its own errors.

It felt like a slot machine. “Please add another 20$”. What a scam.

I recently started going to a gym and wanted something simple to save my settings on all the training-tools. An app that lets me save a photo of a thing in the gym and lets me track the weights, angles, seat-height etc. and add notes. I naively thought it’s a good simple thing to try “Vibing”. I didn’t expect much, and still was disappointed.

I considered making a Qt app, but there’s no way to permanently install apps on the iPhone unfortunately.

I downloaded my generated repo and instantly cancelled the subscription.

Quorridors, what's next?

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 15:37:59 +0100

I’m back from the three weeks of family-vacation. Always good and important to get off the keyboard for a while.

Not sure if I’m going to continue on the Quorridors-Game. I think I’ll leave the side-projects for a while and focus a bit more on health and reading for a bit.

I have gotten a good grasp on the basics of Qt, and it’ll definitely be my first choice for anything native. Also I was surprised at how quickly I reached performance limits with displaying images and calculating game-state via JS. Which is fine since it’s not targeted at games, and performance-critical projects will likely use C++ over JS.

As much as I love native apps, for my simple stupid games, nothing beats vanilla JS and canvas/Phaser, or a simple C++/Raylib combo with WASM-export.

On vacation I have played UFO-50, and got inspired by the simple graphics combined with modern gameplay tropes.

If my motivation allows, I’ll wrap up Quorridors at some point, so it’s semi-finished, as in playable with 100-ish levels and a good intro/tutorial.

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 22:06:52 +0100

We have Web! I just managed to test the Qt-game’s WASM-build. It was quick and easy, I just had to downgrade my installed WASM from 4 to 3, and install it from Git instead of Homebrew. I also got a new ground-texture from OpenGameArt, and it looks 10x better already.

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 23:09:44 +0100

I have underestimated the performance implications of evaluating everything as lazy as possible in QtQuick/QML. The col/row-numbers get their color from calculating if there are too many walls in them or not. This routine got executed on each mouse-drag, maybe even on every hover. I added two arrays that hold the count-states, and changed the update-invocations to only happen on adding/removing of a wall.

It may sound like premature optimization, but all levels bigger than 6x6 were really tedious to play on iOS, simulator and iPhone.

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 19:36:53 +0100

The game is running nicely on iOS! That means I can take it with me and make new levels on the go. I had to mess around a bit to combine MultiPointTouchArea and the normal mouse-handling, but it works surprisingly well!

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 18:56:14 +0100

In QtQuick, it seems to be better to use a readonly TextEdit for showing rich text, than just adding HTML or Markdown to a normal Text-Object. Since I’m inside a flickable drawer, I’ll have to somehow disable selection, which seems to be enabled by default.

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 22:18:02 +0100

Quorridors update: A “next level” button and a winning-state for the screen.

More on level-editing

Sat, 26 Jul 2025 17:04:15 +0100

The level editor is now usable for me to create more levels. Not really for shipping or for players, but let’s see. There are indicators if the level is valid, and even which of the conditions for completion are fulfilled. I can copy the generated level-string into the levels-object. I could add a paste-new-level-from-clipboard feature, where you copy the level from somewhere else and paste it in the editor. Will I add sound next? Perhaps.

Level-Editor!

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 21:47:20 +0100

A small update: We have a level editor! I can switch it on/off on every level and it will just edit it in place for now. The goal is to save the edited level in its own category.

I got the methods from the JS-version, like adding/removing Drones and recounting the lines. So happy that I made the game-logic pretty functional and pure. Everything that is doing something will receive a board, with data, and return a new board.

function addDrone(board, fieldCoordinates) {
    board = removeItem(board, fieldCoordinates);
    board.drones.push(fieldCoordinates);
    board = recalculateLineCounts(board);
    return board;
}

Drawers and Walls

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 08:07:59 +0100

Using the QtQuick Drawer to show and hide the games menu. It’s a pretty useful component!

I’m still struggling a bit with my habits from years of web. I started as a front-end-dev full-time in 2012. Having a responsive layout was the #1 golden rule, so I get nervous when an interface isn’t liquid and only works for one size. There are more important features at this stage, but fixed layouts are an itch, I can’t help it.

Also added game-progress, persisting the clicked walls in memory. So returning to a level won’t reset the board. It’s not yet persisted to the file-system though. I’m storing the walls in an object where the key is “level-category_index”, and if a newly opened level already has stored progress, I apply it to the board.

Storing the progress into a file would be the next step. I’m thinking of being able to store the progress-file wherever, so a player might save it to Nextcloud, iCloud etc, and be able to continue their game on Web/iOS/Android, without me having to deal with a saving-service.

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 20:00:22 +0100

Moved from 2 windows to a single window, it was an experiment, but ultimately it should be easier to handle, especially once I try to export this to mobile or web.

I might add mousewheel-zoom-in/out that resizes the tiles, just for fun.

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 12:24:01 +0100

Lots of issues are only visible after some time away. Yesterday the ship looked harmonic and readable to me. This morning I saw that it’s much too dark. Here’s the improved version.