the red dove chick

Ghost Braceletter

Wed, 06 May 2026 20:18:46 +0200

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. The reset will restart the current scene. I’m thinking about having multiple rules, not only symmetry, but also color-constrains, size-constrains (can’t be longer than X, has to be X wide, etc.)

Another idea for a rule is to check for loopability, like not symmetry “XXADAXX”, but more for a loopy pattern like “XXADXXAD”, since a bracelet is being looped while worn, it would make more sense to check for that.

Tue, 05 May 2026 14:11:39 +0200

While I strongly prefer grayscale syntax-highlighting for code, I always prefer colorful Icon-Sets for toolbars.

Thinking out loud: Ghost Braceletter Game Idea

Mon, 04 May 2026 22:35:41 +0200

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. available.
Clicking a bead will move it onto the string. Clicking a thing on the string will remove all things next to it.
(This could even work as a CLI-game, now that I think about it, or HTML/CSS-based)
The bracelets could have rules like, at least two beads have to lay between words; one bead can be between letters; the bracelet has to have the same number of fillers on each side; not the same color next to each other.
The player starts assembling it… but: One letter is missing. The letter “Y” for example
It gets clear that the Mary-Bracelet can’t be finished. The player has to UNLOCK the “Y” to finalize it.
The player starts the second one, this one is simpler and can be finished, which unlocks some more “tasks” or “words”.
Some can be solved, some can’t, but with time the player unlocks everything, so the collection is complete.

Braceletter

Mon, 04 May 2026 21:19:22 +0200

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”). This could be a small web/flash-based fan-game.

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 14:07:50 +0200

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”.

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 08:50:24 +0200

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.

Flash is still unmatched

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 11:49:59 +0200

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.

This GIF shows the smoothing in steps of 20, 0 to 100. (I usually stick to 40-60)

I’m seriously considering to just do all my game prototyping and experimentation in old Flash. No annoying updates all the time, ActionScript is well documented with lots of learning material, and it’s no problem to run it in modern browsers via Ruffle.rs.

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 11:18:19 +0200

Prototype WIP for the “People, Please” Idea (QtQuick)

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 11:03:08 +0200

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.

Game Idea: Papers Please X Crowd Control

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 22:45:08 +0200

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.

Random thoughts on a Scabble-Sweeper Game

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 15:25:40 +0200

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. Each mine has HP, each letter has points. Lay the words in a way that the “touching” letters or adjacent words has to fulfill the mine’s points.

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 22:32:01 +0200

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.

Infinisweeper

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 22:05:24 +0200

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. Probably not an infinite one though. So the MW is not only infinite to the sides, but also in depth. The data-model will probably be a nightmare to design.

The depth could be a difficulty-slider. The deeper, the simpler the puzzles get. The “top” is super-hard, and it gets smaller and easier when you go deeper. IDK what the motivation would be to play this.

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:38:07 +0200

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.

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 13:02:38 +0200

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.

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 11:31:53 +0200

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”.

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 22:29:08 +0200

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.

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 09:34:12 +0200

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?

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 11:33:19 +0200

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 11:43:47 +0200

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 11:36:19 +0200

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 10:35:23 +0200

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 12:49:49 +0200

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 12:42:59 +0200

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 11:56:49 +0200

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.