Concept

Another proof-of-concept game design prototype. This is kind of a puzzle game. Ish. It's mostly a simple maze game but one in which you can't see the walls. You can see the goal all the time but you are limited to only being able to see the immediate area and any items lit up by your torch. You control by touching or clicking near the torch. The character will walk towards as long as you hold down. You can move around and it'll follow.

Torch v0.1

The first 10 levels are very easy and take practically no time at all. After that, they get progressively harder for a while before reaching a limit (somewhere around level 50, I think). The levels are procedurally generated from a pre-determined seed so it would be possible to share high scores on progression or time taken without having to code hundreds of individual levels.

Items that could be found around the maze (but aren't included in this prototype) include:

• Spare torches which can be dropped in an area and left to cast a light
• Entrance/exit swap so that you can retrace your steps to complete the level
• Lightning which displays the entire maze for a few seconds (but removes any dropped torches)
• Maze flips which flip the maze horizontally or vertically to disorient you.

I worked on this for a few months (off and on) and found it to be particularly entertaining with background sound effects of dripping water, shuffling feet with every step, distant thunder rumbling. It can be very atmospheric and archaeological at times.

Slightly technical bit

The game loop and draw controls are lifted almost line-for-line from this Opera Dev article on building a simple ray-casting engine. I discarded the main focus of the article - building a 3D first-person view - and used the top-down mini map bit on its own. The rays of light emanating from the torch are actually the rays cast by the engine to determine visible surfaces. It's the same trick as used in Wolfenstein 3D but with fewer uniforms. It's all rendered on a canvas using basic drawing functionality.

The audio is an interesting, complicated and confusing thing. If I were starting again, I'd look at integrating an existing sound manager. In fact, I'd probably use an entire game engine (something like impact.js, most likely) but it was handy to remember how I used to do stuff back in the days when I actually made games for a living. Most of all, I'd recommend not looking too closely at the code and instead focusing on the concept.

Go, make.

As with Knot from my previous blog post, I'm not going to do anything with this concept as I'm about to start a big, new job in a big, new country and I wanted to empty out my ‘To do’ folder. The code's so scrappy, I'm not going to put it up on GitHub along with my other stuff, I seriously do recommend taking the concept on its own. If you are really keen on seeing the original code, it's all unminified on the site so you can just grab it from there.

The usual rules apply, if you make something from it that makes you a huge heap of neverending cash, a credit would be nice and, if you felt generous, you could always buy me a larger TV.

Torch v0.1

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.

Knot v0.1

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.

Knot v0.1

Here are some mockups I did for a game design last year.

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The general premise is a 2d physics game with multiple single-screen levels. When the level starts, you have a few seconds to rearrange whatever items/furniture/planks of wood you find lying around and place your hero somewhere on the screen. After the initial timer has run out, the pipe opens and hundreds or thousands of tiny zombies or robots (or robot zombies) pour into the level. You have to avoid being touched by them for 30 seconds, after which the level is cleared and you're on to the next level. The difficulty is in being able to quickly rearrange the furniture and choose your safe spot to prolong the time before they get you. As they are able to eat through most things, they would eventually get through.

There is the possibility for tweaks to the difficulty setting by changing the amount of available furniture, whether the protagonist can move mid-level, how many zombies there are, how small they are and so on.

At the time, I was too busy building The SMWS Spirit Cellars and when i had time again, I started building The Elementals so I never came back to it. Looks like it could be a fun game, though.

After seeing this collection of the 892 different ways you can partition a 3 x 4 grid1, I was struck by a thought. If these were generated as HTML templates, they could be combined with a couple of other useful websites and become a nice, API-driven site builder2.

The process

• On the site-building webpage, you'd enter a few keywords describing the site you want and drag a slider along between 1 and 12 to specify how many content areas you want. The value from the slider would be used to pick a template randomly from the number available for that combination of panels.
• This template would be dropped into the middle of an HTML 5 boilerplate (possibly generated via Initializr)
• The keywords would be passed to ColorAPI to generate an asthetically pleasing colour-scheme
• The keywords would then be passed to FlickHoldr along with the dimensions of some of the areas from the template to get relevant imagery
• Grab some lorem ipsum of the right length from LoremIpscream to fill out the content areas of the site
• Done. Your asthetically pleasing, nicely designed site is ready to download within a few seconds.

Once this service has been created, I'm fairly sure me and the rest of the industry will be out of a job.