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.