Monthly Archives: August 2007

Yes, but can you play it drunk?

Processing, Prototypes, Video Games

Finished up the second gameplay prototype for Primaries. Play it here:

http://code.compartmental.net/primaries/proto2/

I like it. It hurts my head a little to play it, but I enjoy that in a puzzle game. However, I don’t think it’d be very fun to play while drunk. I also don’t think it’d be very fun to watch someone play it, either while they were drunk and you were sober, or they were sober and you were drunk, or you were both drunk. It’s also not very conducive to a five minute gameplay session, even if you already know how to play. Admittedly, the keyboard controls complicate things a bit and it would be a little easier with a 360 controller, but even still.

The verdict?

KISS!

I think I’m going to reduce it to a single grid and do Puzzle Quest style swapping. Color mixing will still be involved, since you could swap two tiles and match two colors with that swap, and I think that will be a nice twist. But it probably also means I will have to come up with a clever way to initialize the board so that you don’t get a bajillion matches right off the bat.

But now, Bioshock calls!

Primaries: First Pass

Java, Processing, Prototypes, Video Games

I’ve started working on a game for Gamma 256. It’s an idea that literally came to me at about 2am in the morning. I sent a brief design doc to Fish and Heather and incorporated some of their feedback into the design. I’ve just finished the first gameplay prototype. The basic idea is to match three or more colored tiles in a row. The catch is that there are three grids, each corresponding to a primary color (RGB), and the tile and grid have to be the same color for a match to work. In other words, red tiles are matched in the red grid and so forth. To move tiles around you position selection boxes in each of the three grids and the swap tiles between them either clockwise or counter-clockwise. If a swap results in a match in two grids, then a tile that is the mixture of the two, like red and blue making magenta, drops in the top of one of the two grids. Since magenta is red and blue mixed, magenta tiles can be matched in the red and blue grids. Anyway, describing this with words is silly, just go try out the prototype:

http://code.compartmental.net/primaries/proto1