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.