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.

Sickness (August 15 2025)

The family visiting is gone, which is a relief since they are really loud (especially at night). But on wednesday I got really sick. I feel like I get sick pretty rarely (since I've been doing these blog posts I know this is the first time I got sick in 2025), but when I do I tend to get hit pretty hard.

This time I didn't experience any sore throat or anything, but I did have a pretty bad headache. It's gotten better after some medication, but on wednesday and thursday it was hard to walk around, and I slept for a large portion of the day. And I was so low energy that I barely had the energy to chew food, and spent most of the day hungry.

This sickness was especially bad. I haven't vomited in years, and yet at one point it got so bad I vomited 3 times in 24 hours (and one of those times was at 4-5am). It's stopped now, but vomiting is very unpleasant for me.

With this, plus the family thing, basically no progress has been made. I think I've mostly recovered from this sickness, but I'm still not at full strength yet.