the red dove chick

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 13:38:07 +0100

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 12:02:38 +0100

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 10:31:53 +0100

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 21:29:08 +0100

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 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.