Another Project: First Look

I'll have an update on my drinking game app "Drunky Pants" soon enough. It's getting to a playable state and I should be able to start testing out in the real world soon! I just want to get the rules dialed-in a bit more since some of them don't make sense with recent changes I've made. There's a brewery near my house, so I'm thinking of just heading there to strike up a game with strangers and get some feedback. Is that weird? Depending on the feedback, I may rustle up a small Kickstarter to help cover some development costs and make it really official (and bring it to iOS!) if people seem to like it enough.


Anyway, just a quick post today about something else I started on. Every once in a while I'll get an itch to start something new and take a break to rapid-prototype an idea or learn a new skill unrelated to the grind of finishing my current app. Oddly it helps me stay motivated and I get more done overall, even though my focus is split.

Sometimes out of that comes something interesting and unexpected. Here's the first screenshot of a recent quick prototype I did. This came out WAY differently than the original idea, but I like what it's become.

Yep, that's a platypus.

This idea came from me wanting to learn to use xbox controllers. It's a big goal of mine to move on from mobile and make some fun little experiences for PC, and I personally just love the feel of a gamepad. Game Maker makes it super easy to get data from the controllers so I was up and running quickly!

While my original intent was to start on something akin to Towerfall, I found myself fiddling with multiple control stick inputs on a single controller somewhere along the way. I found that controlling two things on the screen with a single controller was really difficult but fun, so I'm making a quick game out of the concept to see what people think. I liked this enough to create a quick design doc and even a name.

The working title is "Venn". In short, an image will appear in the middle of the screen (the platypus in this case). The player (represented by the red circles) must use their cursors, each controlled by a separate stick on the gamepad, to highlight two objects bouncing around the screen that can combine to make the image in the middle (since it's a platypus in this case, there is a beaver and duck that bounce around).

I had the main idea and controls for the circles working after my first session with the game. But it's taken me weeks to get back to it. While in the shower, where I get a ton of ideas, I thought of an "easy" way to do the scoring system (which only increases if the player has one object in each circle) and after a couple of tweaks, it's working great!


I have a couple more systems to put in but this is already sort of working after only a couple hours of fiddling. I still want to make this multiplayer but once I get the main systems up and running, it will be relatively easy to add in more people. Exciting!