Finished Listening: The Sandman Vol. 7: Brief Lives by Neil Gaiman 📚
“The Zummoning” (which only occurred to me when I realized I had to name the thing) has been submitted to Ludum Dare 55. It needs a TON of work, but… you can play it. It’s a game. That’s something. If you’re going to try it, please read the caveats on the LD page or itch.io.
I think I’m onto something promising, but I’m not feeling confident that this will actually be a fun game and not look like ass by the jam deadline (tomorrow, 9pm). I’ll sleep on it, but this might just end up being a Godot Wild Jam submission (which is fair game, since they overlap) in six days, instead of a Ludum Dare entry tomorrow.
19 or so hours into this 72-hour game jam, and I’m only just starting to code. So far, I’ve spent time researching demons, sketching out a magic system, and entering cards into a spreadsheet. I think I read somewhere that game designers mostly live in spreadsheets. Maybe I’m progressing?
Working on a Godot recreation of Pong Wars. I might write this up as a tutorial?
I struggle to resist:
- Monte Cristo on a restaurant menu
- bread pudding on a restaurant menu
- audio humblebundles
Currently reading: Make Your Own Pixel Art by Jennifer Dawe 📚
I’ve started a few video tutorials on pixel art, but didn’t manage to stick with it. Maybe a book will work better for me.
Currently listening: The Sandman Vol. 7: Brief Lives by Neil Gaiman 📚
I love that electoral-vote.com basically looks the same as it did in 2000.
It seems like my schedule is clear enough that I’ll be able to participate in Ludum Dare 55, April 12-15. It was fun last time. My goal on this one is just to improve my scores from LD54:
At the kiddo’s taekwondo class, where it’s “blocking week”. Somehow, it’s never “ducking week” or “running away week”.
Achievement unlocked: pirating the Webelos Handbook.
(I swear, we have a copy in the house, I just can’t find it)
We rejoined Netflix this week, and I’m a little surprised by how big the included library of Android games has gotten. Any recommendations? I’ve played Terra Nil before but didn’t get too far, so I might revisit that. 🎮
Spoons, Brakes
This feels a bit like cheating: but immediately after my last post on the topic, I built a paper prototype of the Spoon Theory game using index cards. I’m going to count that as hitting my goal to have a prototype by the end of the month.
For April and May, I want to return to Brakes Escape– adding polish, more variability in scenery and obstacles, and perhaps some power ups. By the end of June, I want to have it in the Google Play Store.
Finished Listening: The Sandman Vol. 5: A Game of You by Neil Gaiman 📚
He’s not “taking a bath”, he’s in the bath tub.
The hardest part is starting
I still like my spoon-theory game concept (as amended), though there’s a lingering skepticism over whether the thing I’ve described will be fun and actually a challenge to solve– but that’s what testing and iteration are for.
I’ve slept on it for a week. I now have 7 more days until my arbitrary, self-imposed deadline to build the prototype. Let’s go. Start. Now.
(Is blogging this itself procrastination? Maybe.)
I assumed that replacing our aged wireless router (whatever Verizon gave us, 12 or more years ago?) would improve performance, but kind of surprised that (according to speed tests) our internet is now twice as fast.
A Solution
Is it possible to take what I’ve described and actually make it fun and challenging? Or, will the right path (or a right path) always be obvious at a glance?
Now that I’ve thought about it some more, I think part of the answer here is: the player shouldn’t be the only entity moving across the board. There should be NPC’s representing social interactions that the player may want to encounter (that add spoons) and others that the player will want to avoid (that take away spoons). They should move in predictable patterns, and the player’s challenge becomes:
- observe and understand the NPC’s movement patterns
- figure that into their plan for traversing the board, along with destinations to reach, routes to take, and turns available.
That sounds more like a puzzle.
Idea File
Found this list of ideas I had posted to Twitter over some number of years. It’s not all gold, but I still like a few of them:
- a first-in, first out laundry hamper
- Shazam for the noises a malfunctioning appliance or car might make.
- URL shortner that implies value judgement. Think like.ly, hate.ly, whatev.er
- a site for stolen recipes, called TastyLeaks
I vaguely recall trying to build this:
- site that lets you take any book, and turn it into a chapter-a-week lesson plan. discussion and vote-based rev. q’s and homework
This is basically haveibeenpwned.com:
- site where you can sign up, submit your email address(s), get notified when it shows up in a dump from @LulzSec & friends