Game design
I had an idea around Christmas for a new game design. it was basically to be a single or multi-player game where you would tie knots in a piece of ‘string’. The single-player game would focus on discovering new patterns while the multi-player one would be a time-based challenge where each would tie a knot, pass it over to their opponent and the first to untie it would win.
I built a basic prototype and had some fun inventing a few interesting knots (my favourite being ‘Yoda’) but didn't get round to doing anything with it. As I'm tidying up all my projects before immigrating to Germany, I figured I should just go ahead and put this out into the world.
Slightly technical bit
The system is built using an invisible 3x3 grid and 4 quadratic curves. The curves' start, control and end points are the centre of a tile. When you move a tile, it basically swaps position with the tile nearest where you drop it. This can also be done with multiple tiles simultaneously if you're on a multi-touch device. You can see the tiles if you enable debug mode. You can also switch between the two colour schemes it has at the moment.
The only addition I've made to it since Christmas was to add on a system to allow players to save knots back into the system. I've only built in 22 patterns so if you make a nice, interesting or funny one, give it a recognisable name (nothing too rude, please) and save it, it will then be available to everybody who plays with it. You can also set whether the pattern is to count as ‘matched’ when rotated 90°, 180°, flipped vertically or flipped horizontally. Calculating the isomorphisms (when two knots look the same to the viewer but aren't necessarily the same to the computer) was probably the trickiest bit of the system.
Go, make.
If you're interested in taking the idea further, grab the code from GitHub and make something from it. The usual rules apply, if you make something from it that makes you a huge tonne of neverending cash, a credit would be nice and, if you felt generous, you could always buy me a larger TV.
