Online Experiments (July 11 2025)

I added another level to the puzzle platforming game. This one is noticeably more difficult than the previous levels. The hardest part is that the level is basically on a timer. There is a box on a conveyor belt that you cannot influence, and you have to make sure that box gets to the very end of the conveyor belt or else you cannot beat the level. This means you must rush to disable all the barriers along the conveyor belt. Another hard part is that there’s a fairly tricky and precise box throw that you must perform near the end. I can beat the level consistently, but I’m not sure if that’ll be true for most people.

Along the way I prototyped a new mechanic: bullets. The bullets instantly kill you, but you can block them by holding a box. I’m sure there’s a level I can make with this, where you’re safe from the bullets while holding the box, but there are a bunch of things that will make it hard to do that. I haven’t planned it out though.

I also took the time to try out some new features for online games. I have the game able to respond to players connecting, leaving, reconnecting, and spectating. Reconnecting was difficult, as I had to make sure the game remembers everything that has happened right before you disconnected, and recreate everything when you reconnect. One thing that helped make this experimentation go faster is that I downloaded Unity and github on my desktop. Now I can easily test things using my laptop and desktop at the same time. More experiments will be needed to do things like handling a card game, with undos and such. And again this will all only be seen whenever I make another card game in the future.

Now what will this future card game be? I have 2 ideas for it, and in a way it’s a different take on Battery RAM. The first I have for it is an idea I mentioned in the past for Randomly Generated RPG: building up speed to get a turn. Except instead of characters building up speed, it’ll be cards in your play area building up energy. Each turn, the cards you’ve played will gain 1 energy, and when they reach a certain number, they can spend that energy for a bonus. It’s kind of like the opposite of Battery RAM; in that game, the cards do things for the next X turns and eventually run out, but you can add more batteries to delay the inevitable. In this game, the cards have to wait X turns to do anything, but you can add more energy to speed that up.

The second idea is a twist on the events. While I enjoy the Battery RAM event system where you have a secret hand of events that you can use to plan for the future, there are 2 issues that I’d like to address: some events are either useless at the start of the game, or too annoying; and I’m sure some people would only ever choose 1 of their events and never the others. My fix for this is: there are 3 decks of events, and during setup you draw 1 event from each of those decks. During the game you start by revealing the 1st event, then later the 1st and 2nd, then later all 3 at once. This means now events that want to be used later in the game can be delayed to the 3rd deck, and now you have to use all your events.

Current and Future Games (July 04 2025)

The platforming game now has another 2 levels. So far a lot of my level designing is throwing things together, testing it out and reaching a specific game state, and then figuring out how I wanted the level to progress afterwards. However for the first new level I actually sketched out on paper first to figure out exactly what I wanted the level to be like beforehand. Another thing I do while working on the level is figuring out speedrun tricks, as I want to enable them (as long as they aren’t super obvious). You can see that in the tutorial level, you can totally just jump over some of the walls. I think for a full game, this wants at least 3 more levels, which should hopefully be done by the end of this month.

Another thing I realized I wanted in this game is a new kind of barrier. Currently there’s a purple barrier that blocks boxes from going through them. Now there’s an orange barrier that blocks you from going through them (boxes can go through it no issue). I like it, except that I highly doubt anyone will be able to remember that purple blocks boxes, and orange blocks players. I’ll have to figure out some other way to differentiate them than just be color.

I guess I can talk a little bit about this mysterious online card game. 90% of the base game was really easy, it’s not the reason why it’s still taking my time. What’s taking more time is improving on the systems I’ve made for online card games. One thing is that my undo system was not good enough. I ended up rewriting it to work more like a tree of decisions, and the game tries to find the newest decision that isn’t complete. There are some other miscellaneous features like being able to right click card names in the log, or showing an easier way to connect to another player’s room in the online lobby. Since this game will be kept secret you’ll get to see them for yourself whenever I make another online card game, which could be months from now. I doubt I’m going to go back and update the previous games I’ve made, some of the new systems would require replacing most of the code in the original game.

Now for the memory game I was talking about last week. I started prototyping that game and the base game was pretty easy to do. The more time-consuming part is now the minigames you play. Since I don’t want to work on 3 games at the same time (it almost always means one of the games makes no progress), I’m going to finish this game later (it’ll probably come out in August). The minigames I imagine for this will have to follow these constraints: quick to play and program, your performance in the minigame will have to be measured with different grades, and they want to not be things where you could say “expand this into a full game”.

I recently had a terrible idea for a challenge: play Celeste, except mix up the controls. Instead of pressing right to move right, I had to press down to move right. To move up I instead had to press left, and so on. This was much more difficult that I thought it would be. It took over 10 minutes to get past the first area of the first level, and I gave up. Going against years of muscle memory is extremely tough on the brain. Then I thought, I could force other people to go through this experience by making my own platforming game, where the controls are messed up. But to be the most effective rage game, you’d need a reason to move in all 4 directions and to do more complex movements like dashing. The puzzle platformer I’m making isn’t going to be a good fit, and I’m not sure I want to immediately make another platformer after I just finished one, which means this game idea will have to be something for much later.

Platforming Visuals (June 27 2025)

After some more experimenting I decided to change how switches work in the platforming game. Previously you just hit them once with a box, and then both the box and switch would disappear. But I realized that I could have them do different things. I could have them work as buttons, where you can press it with a box multiple times and have them toggle off and on, or they could work as pressure plates, where you have to keep the box on it (or else it’ll turn off). I went ahead and made this change, and I think this should help me do more kinds of stuff in the levels. There aren’t new levels right now; turns out that card game I’m keeping secret is still taking up work. 

If you try the game on itch.io you’ll also notice I added in more visuals to tell you what the buttons will do. There’s a line drawn between the button and the thing it’ll interact with, and anything that is disabled until the button is pressed will be see-through instead of completely invisible. The last part was somewhat tricky to do. I didn’t want to do anything like go through the object’s components and turn all of them off and on. Instead I decided to clone the object, remove most of its components, and reduce its opacity. I’m not sure it’s the best way to do it but I didn’t see a better option.

I mentioned wanting to do this a long time ago, but I finally made a webgl version of Chromatacombs. I thought the main struggle would be framerate, but no it wasn't a problem. The biggest issue was updating it to the new unity version. This broke a lot of things (since I had a bunch of packages in it), but the biggest issue was the physics. The game is built on objects of one color not interacting with objects of the same color. For some reason updating the version broke the physics, and I wasn’t able to fix it. Eventually I gave up and uploaded the game with the old version, which means there’s the Unity splash screen at the start. 

I also just got inspiration for a quick minigame I could do sometime later. The inspiration is a side game from Wii Party U, where you have to memorize a bunch of tiles on the screen before they go face down. As you play the memory game, you get prompted for minigames. If you do well in the minigames, you get another chance to look at the tiles. If you fail, you get nothing. The minigames sound fun to do, it’s a chance to make some really quick challenges that don’t take long.