My spouse has been very ill, so most of my weekend was spent taking care of her. She was sick enough to go to the ER last night, just in case it was anything serious. I'm glad she went, because it could've turned into something serious, but they sent her home with medicine and she's doing a bit better, well enough that I could come to work today. 😌
Not that I wanted to come to work, but I'm still not permanent enough to get benefits like sick time or vacation time.
My puzzle game playing has got me brainstorming a sequel to Slime and Goo. I've thought of a setup that would enable to make more sokoban-style puzzles with the S&G mechanics. It would be called Slime and Goo 2: Quest for the Cure in Phantasia Phorest. The story is: the Radiant Cake was a phony! Dr. Fondant must have already gotten to it, and replaced it with a cursed facsimile. All the critters of the Black Forest who partook have succumbed to a debilitation sleeping sickness. Luckily, Slime and Goo were full, so they avoided the effects. Now they must venture into Phantasia Phorest and collect 100 Insomnient Shrooms so the witch can make enough waking potion for everyone.
Mechanically, it would be similar to the previous game except that instead of just needing to reach the cake (exit) on each level, you have to collect all the mushrooms to move on. Instead of showing you what level you're on, the counter would show total numbers of mushrooms collected. That way you can get an idea of how far into the game you are, percentage-wise.
The sokoban element comes from magic logs that you must push into patches of moonlight peeking through the forest canopy to grow mushrooms. The win condition for each level would be: no logs or mushrooms remaining on screen.
That's my only idea for new mechanics so far, but it would open me up to making more traditional sokoban puzzles with the S&G twists. I may also copy over the one-way passage mechanic from The Quest For One, that could be a pretty simple way to add some puzzle variety. I'd probably eschew the bonus coin idea this time around; I liked it, but it was a difficult constraint to work around, and S&G wasn't as fleshed out as it could've been. My goal for the sequel will mostly be more puzzles, so it's more of a level pack than something that'll redefine the game.
I'm debating whether I want to include more story. Puzzlescript does allow you to display short messages, and having some charming writing could make the game more interesting to more people. Having two protagonists automatically gives me plenty of opportunities for little bits of funny dialogue, and a Phantasma Phorest is a good setting for interactions with other fantasy character archetypes, like The Owl of Wisdom and Orestes the misunderstood rat.
I do kind of enjoy that the first S&G is a textless experience, so it can be enjoyed by anyone regardless of language. I think it's more elegant as a game, but it does limit me creatively. Maybe I can expand on the zine idea, instead of just 2 pages from the Indiepocalypse zine, I could make a full booklet with some expanded lore. Of course no one would read it if it requires an additional download, and the whole idea was to have interesting stuff in the game to make it more compelling. I dunno. Maybe I'm being unnecessarily purist about it. People seem to like bitsy games, so if I include some bitsy-like exploration and storytelling, maybe that'll make it interesting for a greater number of people. And since it'll have essentially the same mechanics as the previous game, some storytelling would help set it apart. Okay, it's settled: Slime & Goo 2 will have in-game lore. Thanks for letting me brainstorm at you.
Of course this is all academic, because puzzlescript is not a development environment I can make use of on a phone, and it's still unclear when I'll have the time and brainpower to work on personal projects when I'm at home. I can make a page in my notes app to jot down story and dialogue ideas to be transferred to the game later, but I can't work on actual level designs. Maybe I can get some graph paper and pencils and start sketching them out like it's the 80s. Just kidding, that would probably draw more unwelcome attention than using my phone, and I can't work like that anyway. I need the live playtesting ability. I downloaded a tiled graphics editor on my phone just to see, and yeah, I can't do anything with it.
I'm trying to think of more creative outlets I can tap into while I'm at work. I wish I had more ideas for downpour games. Truth is, I've never been all that interested in straight-up choose-your-own-adventure games. The few actual CYOA books I interacted with as a kid bored me, I didn't see the appeal. There's not enough to do in them and your choices don't really matter. It takes 10 minutes to go through the book and see every possible branch. There's no way to predict which choices will lead to good outcomes, there's no way to feel like you "solved" the adventure. The only real strategy for getting the best ending on your first go is picking the most counter-intuitive action at every branch, because they probably punish the obvious good choices to make it more interesting. I heard tale of solo gamebooks that were more like RPGs where you have a character, you're moving around an actual map, and there are systems with die rolls, but I never saw any outside of the tiny solo example dungeon in one of the original red box D&D manuals. I would've loved to play more games like that, but I never encountered any.
Twine is cool because it has systems for tracking variables and generating random numbers, and that's all you really need to turn a CYOA into a proper adventure game or RPG. I haven't finished any of the games I started making along these lines, but I'd like to. But twine also isn't workable on a phone.
Downpour has one game mechanic that isn't possible in a physical CYOA book: the ability to make a choice lead to a random passage. You can use this to implement a crude "die roll": if you want a choice to have a ¼ chance of leading to outcome A and a ¾ chance of outcome B, you can make a link to a random pool of 4 passages consisting of ABBB. But there are no variables, so there's no way to make it have a long-term effect on the narrative unless you create two completely separate paths that branch out from from that point.
For example, if the player clicks a treasure chest and there's a ¼ chance of finding a magical shield that will protect them should they try to confront the dragon, there's no way to check to see if the player has the shield when they get there. You'd have to create two completely divergent story paths from that point, and obviously if you have more than one or two of these kinds of choices, your narrative will quickly unspool into unmanageable fractal spaghetti. So nifty as it is, downpour is really only useful for little joke games, and that's mostly not the kind of game I want to make. Not that I think it would be easy to make a tool that allows people to make these types of games on their phone, and it's very good for what it is, that's just why I lost interest after a couple small projects.
I realize I'm asking a lot from a bad computer with the world's worst input device, obviously I'd be using a real computer if I could, but if I want to reclaim a little sliver of agency in this hell society, it's phone or nothing. Might as well make the most of it
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