Quicker Than Hanging

For my next game idea I have a simple derivative of the famous paper and ink word guessing game 'Hang Man'.

My version is a little easier because more information is given but harder because it has less room for mistakes. More information in the sense that the bounding boxes of the letters are shown so one can distinguish the tall letters and those that go below the base line from most ordinary letters. Less room for error in that you only get to make three mistakes whereas traditional hangman allows 6/7/8 depending on how you play.

I am thinking of using handwritten look - probably like chalk on a black board. The bit of the board where the traditional hangman would go I want to fill with the same idea with cartoons of sudden ways to die (in square four frames - starting, 2 errors, death) - I was hoping to somehow source these by smiling hopefully at talented friends - otherwise I try some art myself.

The programming is undemanding for this project which is appropriate because I'm short on time this month.

Game 4: Release

Here at last a completed version of my text adventure. It's more an artwork than a game, and more a writing project than a technical one but I'm satisfied with it.

A play through only takes a few minutes so have a look at it: Finding Yourself

Game 4: A Sample

I've made the web version of the software work and have put it up on elementalsystems.

Here is a demo of the system showing off the new on-line system and the layout and fonts that I intend to use for Finding Yourself. The text in this sample is drawn from a friend's micro fiction from a few years ago.

I'm happy with the simple look and think it will work well for my purposes in the longer project.

Game 4: Finding Yourself

For March I'm going to write a 'choose your own adventure' game inspired by the books of my youth. The game will be text only and fairly short with the minimum of interface - the idea I have in mind is more an interactive narrative work than a game, it is supposed to be interesting and perhaps amusing to wander through the story various ways as opposed to being winnable in any sense.

From  a technical perspective I have already have most of the pieces in place with a long term project called Narranet that I have been working on for some months: Narranet is a java-based generic tool for storing and handling narrative-like interactions expressed as a graph of nodes - in English this means it does things a lot like a 'choose your own adventure' with some added benefits. I have a narrative editor for this system and a desktop player that are quite functional. I mostly have a web-server based version of the player that can efficiently maintain a large number of simultaneous games back-ended by a database - but it doesn't do a few major things it needs to.

You can see an example of Narranet in action on my business site where it is used to simulate an interview with a client.

Game 3 - Deadly Dungeon Dash

A few weeks after the game jam and our team has continued to put some work into our board game. Additional play testing; a new pretty set of the game (thanks to JL) and also a play test with strangers went really well.

I wanted to share some photos from our design time during the jam, we had some large bits  of paper and coloured pens, just like real designers:

By the end of the weekend we had progressed to basic designs for cards and tiles tiles, the first semi-digital versions looked something like this:

Here is a photo of us testing our earliest sticky based versions:

A couple of weeks later we played on our first carefully constructed set with pretty coloured cards and plastic covered tiles:

Game 2 - Phaseball - Release

After a double length sprint on this game I've finally completed it.

My final release of the game can be played here: PhaseBall

I am very pleased with the final product, it is much as I imagined it would be in my head and I think the puzzle space turned out quite interesting. The design worked really well on the small and tablet screens in both landscape and portrait mode; the square playing surface was convenient to work with and made it possible to make a smoothly responsive environment without any css media query special cases.

I have some real regrets, maybe I'll get back to them when my schedule permits:
* Audio: The game would be a lot cooler with sound effects and ambient whot-not; I never seem to have time for this on these fast game projects - maybe I need an audio collaborator.
* More Levels: I think the game could have 9 more levels without being boring. I  had planned four stages including a challenge stage between 'Exploration' and 'Hardship' - that would have been good.

The full source code here if you want to copy it, mod it, use it or whatever.

Game 2 - More Pretty

A new release of the game with a lot more levels and a whole lot of intra-level interface and prettyness: http://elementalsystems.github.io/PhaseBall/v6/

Now I mostly have to concentrate on level design to complete this one.