Trying New Games (Sep 05 2025)

This week only got in 2 minigames. The first one was inspired by a minigame in Mario Party 4 actually. It's a game where there are bob-ombs walking on conveyor belts, and you have to change the conveyor belts to make the bob-ombs walk towards the enemy team. That was a 2v2 game, but this is a single player game. Right now there are 4 conveyor belts that get faster over time. It's possible it needs to be more complicated, like there are barriers in the middle of the conveyor belt, that randomly turn on or off, and if the bomb hits the barrier you also lose.

The other minigame is very simple. There are tiles on the floor, and you must move around avoiding tiles that turn red. What was sort of fun to do is that tiles that can be different sizes (e.g. one takes up an entire row). I think my initial plan was instead of avoiding tiles, you avoid different objects flying at you, but this was easier to do. I also first tried it at 45 seconds to get the best rank, but it was way too long and difficult, and I reduced it to 30 seconds.

But also, this week I played some more games irl with other people. The first was that card game with mom, Christie, and some others. I still don't know what this game is called, but it's the one with traditional playing cards. Again the flaws I have with the game are still a thing here. The rules for levelling up are confusing (and the fact that the adults kept arguing with each other about the rules only confirms this for me) and add nothing. If there was no leveling up, no "check what the best card is every round", it would be better. Also I had forgotten how slow turn-based games are. Games where you don't have to constantly wait for everyone in the table to do their turns are much faster.

Christie also bought a game called Stone Age for me and we played it. It's a resource management game with no text on any of the cards. While it was fun, there were parts that I didn't like. Again the game is turn based and not simultaneous, which I don't like as much. This also ties into another issue, which is that the game takes way too long; I think I can only sit through an irl board game that's 1 hour at most, and this was approaching 2 hours. While not having text on the cards was mostly fine, there were definitely some cards that should've just printed the instructions on the actual card instead of in the rulebook. Looking through the rulebook to figure out how one specific card works is not a good use of time.

Earlier this week, I also ordered a new board game. It's Pacific by Donald X.. It was supposed to come out in July, but due to a minor misprint it got delayed to September (which also means if you want it, you can get it soon). The order I got was the one with the minor misprint but I can live with that. I haven't really played it but I think it's a cool game. I didn't playtest this one; when I became a playtester in 2023 this game was already done (and yes it took 2 years for it to come out).

Making Minigames (August 29 2025)

Over the course of the past week I got 3 minigames done, which is about what I expected. After all of them are done I'll have to playtest all of them to make sure that it's even possible to get the best possible score, as some of them may be too hard. To summarize the 3 I made:

1) a level where you have to move around collecting coins and dodge the skulls that will send you back to the start.

2) a combination of memory and cursor movement. you have to touch the orbs in the correct order, while avoiding any other orbs with your mouse.

3) you have to protected your rockets from bullets until they're ready to launch, but while a rocket is protected it's launch timer will no longer tick down.

Each minigame didn't take long to make, and since each game doesn't need that much code that also means I can get away with some slightly sloppy coding. My biggest worry is that I may run out of ideas too quickly, as I've only got 4 out of many games done so far.

Another thing is this blog. Will it end one day? I'm approaching the 2 year mark, and I think it's more and more likely that after Dec 31 this year, things will come to a close. I've gradually had less and less to talk about, even when posts are a week apart from each other.

Change of Plans (August 22 2025)

I've recovered from my sickness. No more vomiting or anything, and the headache basically subsided in a couple days. It took some more days for my appetite to return though, one day it took me several hours to eat all my breakfast. Fortunately I'm all good now.

After spending a bunch of time not making any progress on the platforming game, I think I just need to take a break from it. Not making progress on a game for over a month just killed my creativity and any motivation to resume working on it. Instead I'm going back to that other puzzle game, the one where you have to remember tiles and play minigames in between. Work on that game will go much faster, since all that's left to do are minigames, and the minigames shouldn't take much time.

But while working on some minigames, I realized my weakness. I don't enjoy handcrafting individual levels. I started a minigame where you must shoot your character across the screen and pick up moving coins, but I got so bored placing the coins that I didn't want to work on it. I straight up wasted 3 days not being able to finish even this really simple game.

This must also be why I lost interest in the platforming game, I've gotten bad at making levels. I think it's because it's a lot of work for low payoff. Each level must be carefully made by the designer, and then the player will blitz through it in a couple minutes or even seconds. This may also be why I enjoy Randomly Generated RPG and Relentless Waves. I don't have to make levels, just the things that can be randomly chosen each time you play.

I don't know how many minigames I'll make, but probably a lot. Definitely more than 10. My plan is to only spend 2 days on each minigame, which means this will be what I'm doing for the next few weeks or so.