Finishing Up (Sep 19 2025)

I finished 2 more minigames, and possibly the last 2. For these ones, I decided to try and look back at some previous games I liked and see if I could remake them. The first one is based off one of my games, Sky Attack. This time it's single player and you have to avoid skulls flying across the screen, while bouncing on the clouds. It wasn't really my plan to remake old small games for this, but since the original was 2-player and this isn't, I let it slide. I don't think I want to do that for other games though (like Chaos Pong).

The last minigame was inspired by a minigame in Epic Battle Fantasy 3, a JRPG I played many years ago. Epic Battle Fantasy 5 would later go on to inspire Randomly Generated RPG. But the important part is the 2nd minigame where you play as a narwhal to collect coins. The most interesting part were the jump physics, the more momentum you gain when swimming upwards, the higher you jump. I had to experiment a little to get that in my game. I decided that, whenever you weren't holding the up arrow, the game keeps track of your Y position, and when you leave the water the game uses that number to determine your jump height.

Since this game is close to done (except for some extra testing), what's next? I have a couple ideas for online card games, but still need to think about them more. One idea is, another game like Fortress Siege where you play cards to attack the other player. This time I have a solution to make it simultaneous. Which is: your turn has 2 phases. On the first phase, you can only play cards / activate abilities that affect you and your troops. On the second phase, you can only play cards / activate abilities that affect the other player and their troops. Now there's no more: what happens if a troop gains health and loses health at once, or what if a troop tries to get moved into 2 different columns. But I don't know if I want the new version to keep the column part, maybe that can be different to feel more like a new game.

But before I hop into that, I want to improve on my system for handling online games. The current version is working fine, but it'd be great if it could handle disconnecting / reconnecting. I've been experimenting with that a little bit, but there's still more work to be done to make it compatible with other systems, like undos (and AI opponents). This also means that the next online card game may want to be simpler if possible, because immediately incorporating all of this experimental technology into a larger game could be very difficult and time-consuming, and I want to make sure everything is stable first.

I also finished my digital version of Pacific. It only took 3 days of work, which is pretty fast. I don't know if I want to make it public though, chances are Donald X. wouldn't be interested in that.