I got a Vive set up in my living room this week, which you might imagine would lead to a lot of VR ideas, and it did! But possibly because I was also rather busy, most of my entries ended up short and scant on details. I had a couple of ideas that I then later found close close corollaries on Steam. The project also took a backburner several days this week, and occasionally became (sometimes literally) a last minute scramble.

4/15 – This was my longest entry this week, and I flushed out some of the details around an idle game where the key factor that increases over time (rather than some currency) is distance. So the game is (in a way) an endless (auto) runner, but in the beginning you tap for every step. But of course by the end you have purchased planes trains and automobiles to make that distance go by faster and faster.

4/16 – I laid out some (very high-level) ideas for a game that uses 3D models from Google Maps to allow you to virtually travel to a city. Then I got the Vive setup, and (later that week) spent some time in the Realities application. It’s not exactly what I was describing, (I can’t see that it uses Google city data), but it’s pretty darn close.

4/17 – A virtual model train set in VR, where you can mold the hills and add trains and setup towns and tracks wherever you want. But you have to have resources to make tracks and add trains and you get resources by having trains go between cities. I think this could be HUGE.

4/18 – I had a lunch with my friend Lloyd, where he mentioned wanting to stomp around in a VR city and destroying it (a’la 3D rampage). This was straight up cheating, (since it wasn’t my idea), but I outlined some details in my journal. Then later in the week I found this video of Maximum Override in VR. (Which is also available already on Steam.)

4/19 – This started by thinking more about action puzzle games in VR, and led to taking a beat from Tetris Giant, and thinking it would be cool to have a game with giant in-game controls that would be impractical in real life. No game really, just thinking about controls.

4/20 – Three entries for some reason on 4/20. The first was just some thoughts about Puzzle Prison as imagined without VR, (and themed to be Donutron specific). The second was someone else’s idea. The third was a two-player board game based loosely on Battleship, but you can only choose a space (fire at a space) that is within one space of one of your own pieces. So you give them a hint every time you fire. Additionally, you can take a turn to move one of your ships instead of firing with it.

4/21 – Prince died yesterday. It saturated social media, and at some point I saw an article headline that said it was “The end of Prince’s Purple Reign”. As sometimes happens, I couldn’t stop thinking about the phrase (especially the homonym, Purple Reign). Eventually I sketched out a game where you are like Harold from the children’s book “Harold and the Purple Crayon”. In my idea, you draw the world (in VR, sorta like TiltBrush), and the game will recognize if you are drawing the ground line and change your height in the environment, turning jagged lines into steps, and automatically “stepping” up them as you draw. It would also recognize lots of other shapes and allow you to interact with them. Rectangles at appropriate heights would turn into windows, for example.

This week was mostly about board game ideas for me. I’ve still been thinking about that two-player abstract from last week pretty much every day, and I’m working on a prototype. I also missed my second day, again as I was traveling.

I was definitely influenced by some of the great Kickstarter projects that are happening right now. Looney Labs has finally launched Pyramid Arcade, the next iteration of their awesome pyramid game system. I’ve been intrigued by the pyramids since I first played Zendo over 10 years ago, and I’ve designed a few games for them over the years, including a few using a custom deck of pyramid themed cards that I conceived.

Also notable is the two (or 3) player abstract strategy game Santorini. Abstract Strategy doesn’t usually fare all that well on Kickstarter, but that project has a lot of things going for it. First thing is that the game has been around for a LONG time, like 30 years, I guess. Secondly, it’s sporting some fabulous new artwork and custom components. It’s already on the “wildly successful” end of the spectrum, I think.

Here are the game ideas from this week:

4/8 – I was at an indoor playground when I started thinking about games you could play in a ball pit. I sketched out a few ideas, but probably the most notable involves laying a blanket or a jacket on top of the balls, and everyone throwing balls onto that surface, with the aim of having the most of their color on the fabric at the end of some specified time period.

4/9 – Missed a day. :(

4/10 – Thinking about the name “RememberBall”, (and maybe also about the ball pit ideas), I sketched out some rules for a memory game you would play with plastic easter eggs.

4/11 – I had the idea somewhere after (or during) the writing of this post to make all the rest of the week’s games Pyramid games. So this one was a 2-player pyramid game with very specific movement rules dictated by the color the piece. It’s sort of a chess variant, I guess, since it takes place on a chess board, and red pieces move like rooks, green pieces move like bishops, and blue pieces jump like knights. The different size pieces dictate how far they can move, and that’s where the blue piece movement gets a little weird. You may stack your pieces to make a piece that moves like both pieces. Win condition right now is just capturing a set number of your opponent’s pieces. (From this description, you may wonder how you can tell your pieces from your opponent’s, and my idea for that was to have some custom bases that indicate which player’s pieces sit on each base.)

4/12 – I’ve done some thinking previously (over a year ago) about a pyramid simulator application. Something 3D, where you could play all the pyramid games in a sandbox, a bit like Tabletop Simulator. This brainstorm expanded on those ideas to make it a VR experience. I imagine being able to shrink myself to the size of an ant and walking around in a surreal landscape made of pyramids. It really would be fun to work on such a thing.

4/13 – Another abstract strategy pyramid game I’m calling Pyramid Piggyback. This actually went through a couple of iterations, and deserves some playtesting. In this one, the gameboard is made of different colored LARGE pyrmaids, and each player has two different colors (not used for the gameboard), but they only use the medium ones. You play your pieces with caps (SMALL pyramids) made of all the different colors. You can move in a direction only if there is a gameboard (LARGE) piece matching the piece’s cap color in that direction. You can spend a turn to add one of your medium pieces to the board, or a cap to any of your pieces, or swap around two large pieces. Capture an opponent’s piece to take their caps as victory points. The pool of caps is shared, and when it’s gone whoever has the most victory points wins.

4/14 – This entry is borderline abandoning the pyramid game constraint, and it was already the second video game in only 4 entries. So I’ve decided to abandon that constraint for future entries. Essentially it’s a lemmings and/or pikmin inspired swarming game… where all the little characters are looney pyramids. The anthropomorphized pyramids run around where you tell them to, stacking when you tell them to, and operating doors and switches based on their sizes and colors. In general, I would love to see some video games with the pyramids in them, I’m not sure if we ever will, given potential legal issues, sadly.

Just going to jump into the recaps this week. (Apparently I had area-enclosure on the brain, but I frequently — and erroneously according to BGG — call it area control below.)

4/1 – I wanted to think up a game that had a bluffing mechanic (for April fools day), and ended up with an area control game where everyone can lie about what area they control. I think it needs more thinking to be interesting. (It’s actually a little too simple right now.) But the idea shows promise.

4/2 – I spent some time thinking about Flatland inspired mechanics, specifically how objects in 4-dimensional space would appear to our dimensional senses, and how to make a VR game featuring them. (One of my favorite authors, Rudy Rucker, features this sort of “extrusion” in his novels pretty frequently. One of his earlier works, “The Sex Sphere” is basically all about it, but it features prominently in several others as well.) Two ideas came rapidly to mind:

First concept is to allow you to rotate an object (somehow in all 4 dimensions, the controls might be… interesting). Of course you would only see the intersection with your 3D space, and then somehow you would have to guess the “real” shape. I’m betting this would probably be extremely hard to imagine for most people. Not to mention the problem of: how do you show the ones for them to guess? Also, it might not be that fun. But maybe it would be!

Another idea is to approach it like the inverse of Miegakure, and have a traditional 3rd person platforming game where instead of rotating the world through 4D, you rotate collectible objects (found in the world). You might find a baseball for instance that turns into a ramp to solve a platforming puzzle, or a pebble that rotates into a cathedral needing to be explored.

4/3 – An area control video game where you simply claim points (I could have also called them locations or coordinates) on a gameboard in real time. After each point, there is a cooldown before you can claim another point. The cooldown is directly proportional to the amount of area of the gameboard that you already control. Each point has a sphere around it that is directly influenced (primary influence sphere). If no other influence is exerted, that area will be under your control. Each point also has another sphere (call it a secondary control sphere) that will be influenced if it intersects with another of your point’s secondary control spheres. If a primary influence sphere under your control has territory that is under more influence due to your opponent’s points than your own, that point’s primary AND secondary spheres will shrink proportionally. For instance, an equilateral triangle where the primary spheres of influence overlap all the points of the triangle, made up of two of one color and one of the third, the third would essentially disappear entirely, since the other to points would shrink its influence to zero. That’s it. Basically you want to balance putting points closer together for more stability with getting more territory. Note: this could be 2D or 3D.

4/4 – Once upon a time, I took a T’ai Chi class at the U of MN when I was still a senior in high school through the post-secondary (i.e. free college credits) program. I have super fond memories of that class, and when I eventually graduated and had a real job, I started going regularly to T’ai Chi classes taught by the same instructor. I haven’t been in a while, but I got to thinking about how it would be nice to do it in my living room. I do think working out in room-scale VR will be a thing eventually, so I sketched out some notes for what I think would make for a decent Thai Chi VR application. I definitely think there’s a market there, but the tech might need a while to make it practical. (I just googled, and not only is T’ai Chi included as one of the many activities in “Your Shape Fitness Evolved 2012” for the original Kinect, but there is also a T’ai Chi specific program for Xbox One called “Body Wisdom”.)

4/5 – This game idea practically wrote itself, so I expect to see one soon: A VR Cloudbursting Game. Lay on the floor and aim your gaze at the clouds. Maybe as the game progresses it gets more and more overcast and clouds are darker and deeper and the entire “feel” of the game changes from a beautiful sunny day on top of a hill, to a dark and dreary day with pouring rain and lightening and thunder interrupting your concentration. This also changes it from game where you can actually get rid of all the clouds to a game where your only hope is to get rid of all the HUGE thunderclouds before they leave the screen, as it would be impossible to get rid of everything.

4/6 – I came up with a maze traversal game idea for the bit-jam, a game jam with the goal to “make a game in 1-bit colour, on a 1px × 1px display with no audio; the minimum (non-zero) feedback that a game could possibly have”. First of all the theme screamed maze game to me since you can generate a maze where each grid coordinate is only using 1-bit to indicate whether it’s a wall or path space. Only two path spaces on the edge, entrance and exit. The player starts at the entrance. Input is directional, either with a controller or arrow keys (or ASDW). The game states: At rest – solid color A; Movement to another space – flash of color B; Hit a wall – solid color A (maybe a MUCH shorter flash of B, or two short flashes); Find the exit – Flashes A & B (until more input is detected, then it generates another maze?). This might not be super fun, but hey, it meets the qualifications of the game jam!

4/7 – Thinking about being an animal in VR, led to thinking about being eaten alive by a snake in VR, which led to thinking about eating yourself as a snake in VR. (Too bad ouroboros was the GGJ theme already however-many years ago.) This may have been influenced subconsciously by the Verge article about being a bear in VR, which I actually thought was about a game by @punchesbears until I read it.

Well, I thought last week’s post was late, but this one is clearly even farther from Friday than that. I’m still going to assume this will keep happening on Fridays, so the recap covers 3/25 to 3/31. I’m actually writing this from Clonmel in Ireland, and I’ve been in London most of the week! (So between jetlag and vacation craziness, I have plenty of excuses for being late.)

3/25 – I spent some time musing about games I am especially suited to design (write what you know), and ended up asking myself: What would a game based on resolving text file conflicts look like? I came up with a mutating grid-based game, where you have a “map” of branches, and must recreate the final “resolution state” from the pieces presented. Sort of a puzzle game, I guess.

3/26 – Circles intersecting circles – A 2D game that might look a little like a circular (or arc-based) version of Qix. Maybe instead of inside an area, you start at a point on a circle, and expand your territory outward. You make circles by holding the button down which shoots a line from your current point in the direction your analog control stick points. When you let go, that begins an arc where your point of origin is the center of the circle. The first line it intersects will fill in the arc you have created, and you begin traveling along the path again.

3/27 – I’ve been thinking about some game ideas for the Donutron for a while now, and figured I’d document some of the ones that I’ve basically rejected as being unoriginal / boring, figuring, if I write them down, I won’t have to keep thinking about them again:
– A donut-tetris (donutris?) – Maybe standard Tetris with some Donut-inspired bonuses, like making a circle around an empty space clearing the board, (or filling-in with jelly), or maybe it really is just swapping the sprites for donuts (donutronimos).
– A donut-platformer, where the protagonist is a rolling donut, (JellyTron?), and rolls over hills and valleys. Maybe this is inspired by Wibble Wobble, and the floor is constantly moving.
– An idle donut game – Maybe you start out mashing buttons to eat donuts, but then eventually you’ve eaten a dozen, and you get the option to invite a friend to come eat with you. And then you mash some more and invite a few more friends, and suddenly you’re eating a dozen every minute or two, and then you get the option to bring donuts for the office, and suddenly it’s a dozen every second, and you get the option to deliver to more offices, and you are consuming septillions of donuts…

3/28 – The barest hazy notion of an idea for an abstract strategy game thinking about the ways that The Duke and Onitama are similar. I decided I have to come up with an original movement mechanic, or it’s pointless. The closest I came in this entry was each piece having a directional arrow, (or more than one?) and the distance / type of movement is calculated from that arrow (with additional variables). One type of piece might spiral around itself a certain number of squares, starting from the square its arrow points to. Another piece might move diagonally in exactly a specific number of spaces (a different number for each diagonal).

In the past, “ideas” like the ones I had for this entry would probably not have been written down, but I have found that game ideas do sometimes percolate for a few days before producing something interesting. (My entry below for 3/30 is basically the result of continuing to think about these ideas.) While I was thinking on this day, I was also thinking about process, and though my entry doesn’t capture any of it, I was conscious of how this “percolation” aspect of game design has been sort of ignored in my “Game Idea a Day” series. I’ve basically tried to think of ideas “whole”, without giving them room to grow very much, (generally because the following day I need to think of fresh new one). There have been some exceptions, but mostly for ideas I already thought were really good on the first day. I guess this one is not really an exception, because even though I didn’t come up with any specifics I thought were really good, I did think that a game based on The Duke and Onitama was a good enough place to start thinking that it continued in the back of my mind for a few days. Part of that was practical, as my friend Tysen has already been programming an AI for Onitama, and I was also thinking about how to capitalize on that work, even if we don’t end up making an app for Onitama specifically.

3/29 – I feel like this might have already been done, but I saw a broken umbrella in the gutter in London, and it evoked this strangely sad feeling and got me thinking about a game that does the same. You play as the umbrella, tethered to one human after another, helping them get to their sheltered destinations. The wind and rain will change and apply physics meant to pull you out to the hands of your current person. All you control is the angle they hold you from, and maybe how far up they are gripping you? Meta gameplay would be is a bit like crazy taxi; the people walk themselves, all you have to do is keep them dry enough until they get to their destinations. When you fail, you end up in the gutter.

3/30 – As mentioned above (3/28) I came up with what I believe to be a pretty good abstract strategy game. I think I want to keep thinking about this one before I make it public. It’s fully realized (I think), but I haven’t done any playtesting yet. Suffice to say that it has variable piece movement done in a way I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. The only piece I’d like to keep thinking about is the end-game condition, as right now it’s basically just stealing that from Chess (and The Duke).

3/31 – I continued thinking about the ideas from 3/28 and 3/30, coming up with another interesting square grid piece movement mechanic. This one involves combining two of your pieces to then move much more powerfully on the following move. Each piece can move a single space (to any of the 4 adjacent spaces) by default. But if you have two pieces on the same square, you can move one of them in any of the following ways: forward one or two spaces, forward two and over one (like a knight), or forward 3 and over one or two spaces. Note that you can only move one of them, so there might be a nice natural balancing thing that happens where if you keep your pieces on the same space long enough, they are much stronger, but also more vulnerable to attack. (Of course, this is probably only true if there are other pieces that move in different ways.) I called this movement mechanic zipper movement. One idea is for each piece to have different specialized movement somehow, but they can only take those specialized moves if they have been “activated” by moving them on top of one of your other pieces first.

I may have been in a bit of a post-GDC slump this week. And I’m running a tad late with this blog post, since it’s technically already Saturday morning. But I did write my idea for Friday before the midnight hour! Here are last week’s idea summaries:

3/18 – Spent a lot of time this last week thinking about first-person puzzle games. At GDC I got to play Manifold Garden in the “Day of the Devs” area, and The Metareal World at the Indie Megabooth, both of which will blow your mind (in different ways). That got me thinking a bunch about other first person puzzle games I’ve loved, and what new ideas I might bring to the table. (I still haven’t played The Witness, or Talos Principle.) So far, I’m not convinced I have anything super substantial to contribute, but the entry on 3/18 was about using different weights in a puzzle game, dragging them around to open corresponding doors or onto floor switches. One thing that would be cool is if the whole environment were squishy, and you used the weights to bend your way though the puzzles.

3/19 – A game set in a convention of some kind. (Science fiction, or comic book, maybe?) Something like one of those Kairosoft games, but simulating hotel room parties and con suite, and registration.

3/20 – Two ideas here, both coming out of a long rambling paragraph about using the glitch aesthetic in a first-person puzzle game: The first idea was essentially thematic or story, just that you are trying to get a computer simulation to glitch out, but one that you are stuck inside of, Tron style. The second idea was that maybe the rooms each have a switch in them (they could be different in each one, or hidden in some way), and each one represents a bit of data, and overall, the rooms make up a byte, or more. Maybe the goal is to make ascii letters and spell out something.

3/21 – Sysyphean Sokobahn: Block pushing game, but in 3D, with hills. So the blocks are constantly rolling back down the hill. The puzzles would primarily involve floor switches for doors, and pushing boulders with different properties onto them. So for instance an early puzzle might involve pushing a rock to some point above a switch, where it begins to roll slowly back down the hill, hitting the switch, at which point you must quickly get through the door it opens.

3/22 – Musing about an idle game that lets you play idle Tetris. Lots of details here, and I’m really tempted to make this one. Love the idea.

3/23 – Whilst having lunch with my friend Lloyd, we discussed my idle Tetris idea, and then collaborated on a different idle game idea, involving hexagons and organic growth patterns inspired by Conway’s game of life (as well as the hexagon tiles on the floor at Runyon’s, where we were eating).

3/24 – A VR physics game inspired by Paul Eckhardt’s beach ball simulation, presented as part of his Unreal for Vive Development at the VR & HCI meeting last week. Essentially just more and more complex “batting a ball in some direction”. First level would be more or less 2D, a stream of balls falling in a single column that have one of two colors, each color corresponding to a direction away from the player. With increasing frequency the player has to hit the ball in the correct direction. Eventually there could be different sized balls all falling at the same time, 4 (or even 8) directions, and possibly even with the targets changing locations as you play.

This week saw my first forgetful day. It was my daughter’s 6th birthday last Sunday, and then later I was on (and waiting for) a plane to get to GDC, (which was even delayed by a couple of hours). So actually I had a bunch of time in the airport and on the plane where I could have spent the time brainstorming, but I just plain forgot. I used the time fairly productively to work on Puzzle Prison, and I did a couple of ideas on both Monday and Tuesday to make up for it.

3/11 – 2-player abstract strategy game that is essentially a Blokus variant. This was an extension of my thinking on 3/9, and so players can play any piece from either their own supply or their opponent’s. Object is to surround more of your opponent’s pieces than they surround yours.

3/12 – A game where you have to feed the monsters lunch. The lunch is humans. (I wrote a bunch of details, but nothing all that interesting came out of it mechanically.)

3/13 – Missed a day. I’m actually surprised it took this long to happen.

3/14 – #1 – A word/sentence writing game where everyone starts with the same sentence. You have to write the sentence 10 times, and change a single (different) word each time. You are competing to be the fastest, so maybe hilarity will ensue? (I don’t really try to think about party game ideas all that often, so this was a challenge.)

3/14 – #2 – An idea for a game you could play with a grid of 3×3, 4×4, or 5×5 trackballs. A sort of match-3 game where you rotate orbs with different colors on them. Match 3 or more in a row, and they are removed like bejeweled.

3/15 – #1 – A tetris style falling block game where you don’t get to choose when (or perhaps even where) the blocks fall, only their rotation. They fall to the beat, so you have to position them in time to the music. Each (short) level is played on a grid shaped like a wave, and that wave corresponds to the music somehow.

3/15 – #2 – Vive game where your hands are fans. You move/aim them with your controllers in relation to your body, and they then give you movement/force vectors. You move through a giant level this way. Maybe you are a robot on a gas giant planet. Maybe you are a robot in a fan making factory, cobbled together with parts just laying around.

3/16 – Another idea inspired by thinking about the game idea on 3/9. This one more inspired by the name of that brainstorm than the gameplay. I didn’t originally mention the name, but I’ll mention it now: Othelloop. This is a mashup of Othello and classic Snake. Essentially you pick an othello piece in your color, and move it around the gameboard like in snake. Each time you do this, one additional piece is added to the snake. (If there are other stones behind the one you choose, they will also be part of the snake.) Whenever you hit something, the stones are “placed” on the board, and normal othello flipping / color changing rules apply. The thing I like the most about this idea is that it could be a real-time game, or it could be turn-based, and played with physical pieces, meeting the criteria for “combinatorial”.

3/17 – Thinking a bit about a chess variant where both sides are controlled by an AI, but you influence the game in some way. (I like this as a concept.) The idea I came up with was to tap/select a piece to “hold” it in place, and make sure the AI doesn’t consider it for play. So you could potentially tap all the pieces but one to ensure that it was the next piece to get played. Not sure yet what the goal would be, but maybe to get the pieces into a specific configuration, or prevent captures in some way. More thinking on this concept is needed.

Game Developer Conference is next week, and as I prepared for that this week, (especially polishing up some rough edges on, and making appointments to show my Puzzle Prison prototype to whoever I can), I also began working on some enhancements to the enemy AI behaviors for the locally made multiplayer platformer game Chimera Genesis.

I have also been watching the AlphaGo games this week, and talking about the implications with whoever will listen.

Without further ado, here were my game ideas from the last 7 days:

3/4 – Another VR puzzle game concept. This one with falling blocks and slow-moving gravity. I imagine it sort of like Klax you are actually standing in and catching the blocks with your hands instead of a machine. You then have to stack the blocks yourself.

3/5 – A street-fighter like fighting game, called instead: Treat Fighter. You pick from characters like donut, candy bar, cupcake, ice cream cone, slice of cake, slice of pie, buttered popcorn, or bag of candy. Each with their own unique special powers, of course.

3/6 – Thinking more about a solar system simulation in VR where you can zoom in and out, and move around the system instantly, at a glance. It would be fun to form additional planets and set them in motion by pushing them with your hand. Could be like some of the circular Osmos levels in a way, but maybe it needs to feel simpler than that since it’ll already be in 3D. Just make a set number of planets and get them spinning around the sun without colliding into one another. Maybe they have to make some number of rotations, or last for some period of time. (Incidentally, later in the week I discovered a game on Steam already that sounds a lot like this. I didn’t see any mention of VR though.)

3/7 – Thinking about playing simultaneous games of Tetris. I came up with a variant on probably my first VR puzzle game idea, where you would simply have a bunch of games of Tetris floating around you and control the one you are gazing at. (Attempting to keep them all from hitting the top, of course.) This new idea is just that you control them all at once. No VR necessary. The goal would be to survive the longest, of course, but maybe all the boards would clear after some increasingly difficult threshold. Pieces are random, of course, so there would be no completely optimal solution. Or maybe you could optionally clear them between levels, giving you a multiplier for each one you didn’t clear.

3/8 – A candy crush clone, but with some extremely personal narrative pasted on. The heart-wrenching narrative would be the incentive to unlock further levels, but the game itself would be very commercialized and monetized. Lots of paywalls, and requests for you to share the experience. This is a money-wrenching tear-jerker. (And the ultimate point of the narrative would be about how gross it all is together.) Bonus points for a political message as well. Note that I would never make this game, but it’s funny to think about.

3/9 – An abstract strategy game played with a go board/stones, where you attempt to surround the opposing color with your color. The twist is/was that you can play either color stone on your turn. I finally did just the smallest amount of playtesting this morning, and the game doesn’t really work mechanically as written. The color choice is a neat idea, but it needs something else.

3/10 – I had a few different ideas yesterday while riding the light rail:
* An adventure/exploration game where you play as a skill toy (I was specifically thinking a Kendama), exploring a world populated with other skill toys.
* An Excalibur VR game, essentially I just think it would be cool to be able to act out various scenes from Arthurian legend in VR: finding the sword in the stone, pulling it out, throwing it in the lake, having the lady in the lake bring it back to you.
* Another VR puzzle game, this one played around a smallish (table sized) 3D block of cubes. Maybe from above the block is simply 3×3. You must touch a square of the same color on either side of the block, ideally in the same row, at which point the entire row is removed from the block.

The big news this week is that I made a gameplay trailer for Puzzle Prison. I hope you like the VR game ideas, because there are a bunch of them this week!

2/26 – An idea for a sort of idle/unfolding game where there are floating stores in the sky. It’s a side-scrolling platformer type game, but you can’t jump, so you have to buy tetromino shaped ground pieces to get to each new store (where you can buy upgrades and additional ground pieces, etc). I’m not sure I’ve seen any idle games with character movement in them, much less the “building” aspect of the tetrominos.

2/27 – Thinking about first-person puzzle games, and scale. I like the idea of pushing really giant things around. The idea was a sort of sokoban style block pushing game, but the blocks are HUGE, and also contain their own push puzzles inside them. So you have to push them around to get to the puzzles inside them. (And presumably find collectables or something inside them.)

2/28 – While watching visualizations at an Animal Collective concert (my first concert in years, thanks Dan for the ticket!), I started thinking about a territory game played on some colorful images. Essentially the first player picks a pixel in the image, and then the second player has to make a 2D polygon using that pixel. Your score is a percent of the volume of the polygon used, based on how close in color the other pixels you chose are. So if you manage to color-match perfectly, your score would be the entire volume. Then you pick a pixel for the other player. (I just had the idea to try and play the game with a vine, or other looping image, instead of a single image. That could be interesting.)

2/29 – Had a simple idea for a cat painting game. (I like the ambiguity here, so I’m leaving it at that.)

I also spent a bunch of time documenting some thoughts I’ve had about level progression in Puzzle Prison.

3/1 – Thinking about a sandbox game that literally takes place in a sandbox. I’m surprised I haven’t seen this before, but essentially a minecraft for kid’s playgrounds. Kid’s playgrounds are already these elaborate fortresses with hanging walkways and tubes to crawl through, elaborate slides, etc. And what kid wouldn’t want to spend a bunch of time designing their own?

3/2 – I recently backed Overload, the new 6-degrees of freedom game by the original makers of Descent. 3/2’s brainstorm started with thinking about what it might be like to strap yourself into one of those full-body gyroscopes, but with a VR mask strapped to your head. And again I was thinking about puzzle games played in VR. I ended up with three separate game ideas:

– A puzzle game on the inside of a sphere, centered on your viewpoint. I actually played a VR game at IndieCade last year called Darknet that felt a bit like what I am imagining here. Essentially just a sphere around you, but instead of (as in the case of Darknet) a simple RTS, this is more like a block-fitting puzzle. (I guess sort of an inside-out Tetrisphere.)

– A farming sim style game, played on the inside of a rotating sphere (or just cylinder-shaped) spaceship built for the purposes of growing plants.

– Final idea, some kind of game where there are points of light inside the sphere, and you have to connect the dots on the edge of the sphere, to make a “Web” through the points of light. This could be super cool even just with a standard Vive setup. No need for the sphere. Just the 3D points of light in a box. How few lines can you use to connect all the dots?

3/3 – Two more VR ideas:

– A Vive game where you have some geometric target. A shape or weird polygon. You are inside a cube to start, and you can attach ropes to the walls of the cube (probably just at certain anchor points), and then pull the rope to deform the cube (then attaching it to something else, another wall, or another rope, or something like that. You can then zoom out and see if you have matched the target shape.

– Second idea: A fantasy aesthetic 3D map where you can grow or shrink at will, perhaps with a trigger button on either controller. When you press this, the world rotates around you, as you shrink or grow.

I originally cut/pasted the following paragraph from my journal, but it doesn’t really count as a summary at that point. Anyway, I liked it, so consider this a bonus description of the previous game idea. (Usually this is the kind of rambling narrative I save you from by summarizing each entry.)

I’m imagining you emerge from a city, see a long (and empty looking) road ahead of you, so you grow to be giant, take two steps to the mountain range that had previously been in the distance. You see what looks to be a mouse hole at the foot of the mountain, so you shrink until you can walk comfortably inside. But then you notice that you are still standing twice as tall as the trees in the nearby forest, so you shrink even further, until the mouse hole is actually a gargantuan cavern. You walk inside in awe of the massive stone working and grandeur. You notice there are dwarves nearby, but they are hiding from you as if in fear, so you shrink even further, until you are their size and they come out of hiding to greet you. Later in the game, you come upon a pool with fairies hovering above it. Your instinct is to catch one in a jar, of course, but instead you shrink to their size, upon which they pick you up and take you to meet their queen. Maybe this is how the game should begin, and maybe you’ve been granted this magical shrinking and growing ability by the fairy queen. (Perhaps in order to battle an evil giant, who lives high in the clouds? Probably your name is Jack.)

Here are this week’s game idea journal entries:

2/19 – Another IF (Interactive Fiction) game idea, this one inspired by Jamie Brew’s excellent predictive text shenanigans on twitter. Essentially, I think it would be fun to do some generative IF, and see how it plays.

2/20 – Spent a bit of time thinking about a visually upgraded Minecraft, and that led me to imagine an ice castle building game. Minecraft for winter wonderlands. More light options and blocks that glow and melt and reflect. Find frozen wooly mammoths and fossilized neanderthals. A different block type for each of the eskimo’s 100 words for snow.

2/21 – An amazon/eBay selling/shipping/rating simulator. Essentially this is like an idle game, maybe? But it you basically start out with an apartment full of stuff, and can sell it on amazon or eBay. You can also buy stuff on Amazon or eBay or craigslist (where it will be the cheapest). As you progress farther into the game, you have opportunities to buy more expensive things and sell them for more profit until you are essentially a millionaire buying private jets on Craigslist and selling them on eBay.

2/22 – Tuesday this week I had a couple of entries, (and was oddly productive to boot, so I was on a roll, productivity-wise). One of them was a rant about elements of action puzzle games, and about how puzzle is the operative word. I ranted about the failure of some games in the genre to provide a decent puzzle, and the blurry line between action puzzle and straight-up action. Someday, maybe I’ll turn the rant into a full-blown blog post.

The other entry was about a couple of random match-3 musings. Mechanics, I guess, but more re-framing the “board” of match-3 puzzles. This was specifically about “swapping” puzzles, like bejeweled, but the ideas could probably apply to any grid-based puzzle game. Essentially thinking about two different ways to make the game boards themselves infinite. (Ways I haven’t seen before.) One of them involves moving to 3D, the other is more about recursion.

It’s worth noting that I spent pretty much all week working on the Unity prototype I mentioned last week. I’ve got a crashing bug that I need to track down, but otherwise the game is at a place where I’m super happy showing it off. (It doesn’t crash in the Unity IDE, just when I publish it to my iPhone.) Anyway, this idea, as well as the rest of the entries from this week reflect how “in the headspace” of puzzle games in VR I’ve been.

I posted an informal poll on the MSP GameDev Slack, and the name that was the clear winner was “Puzzle Prison”. Also in the running were Drop Cage, and VR Drop. Another one that I’m not seriously considering is Collapse-in-a-box.

2/23 – This variant on Puzzle Prison was essentially to make each of the blocks two-sided. Tapping would rotate to the other color, and no longer break blocks, so a group would only disappear once you have three in a row, or something along those lines.

2/24 – A brainstorm around what a VR puzzle game in the vive would look like. (Where you can move around in the space.) I had a couple of different ideas, both of which involve dividing up the volume of space into cubes, and putting “guide lines” into the space. The first idea was to turn your hand into a hammer, and allow you to push around blocks in the space until you have a decent sized group, and then “break” them by hitting them swiftly with the hammer. The second idea was to fill the space up arm (controller) height by default, and then allow you to swap them, making matches of the same color to “dig down” into the cubes. Maybe you have to dig your way to the floor, or maybe the cubes keep rising, and if they get to head height you lose.

In both ideas, an open question is whether you would be able to see through the cubes, or whether they would occlude the cubes behind them.

2/25 – Another brainstorm about Puzzle Prison, both about level progression, as well as three new possible cube types (not powerups, but new game types, like the entry from 1/23). The idea was that as you “beat” a level, you are introduced to additional cube types, and eventually you play them in the same game. I’m not sure if I will add this to the game, or if it even needs it. I’ve got to have it more playable and get some more feedback, first, I think.