Would you look at that: another abstract 2-player game! Like with paper puzzles, it seems that once I get into the mood, it tends to last for multiple things before I run out of steam.
Malsymmetric is probably the messiest of the three I’ve put on Itch.io (and also messier than the 4×4 one I haven’t posted on Itch but posted pics of earlier). I hope this won’t be too much of a problem, because the playtime appears to also be rather short. I playtested this (and the others) on playingcards.io, which I can recommend for simple boardgame designs, but I’ve (again) gotten the hankering of implementing a personal BGA-style rules-enforced boardgame engine, both for ease of testing and fun.
I worked a bunch more on this boardgame idea, and thanks to some good suggestions from pinchazumos & quantumpotato got it into a way better shape! Thank you! Anyway, the game felt like it was ready to be published to the rest of the world so like with Cylinders of the Wise, I put the rules on Itch.
One change was that the board size increased from 5×5 to 6×6, which meant that I had to craft a new board for the physical build. Pretty happy with the result – the hinges are way nicer although the board doesn’t sit quite evenly when open.
Don’t mind the silly name: it’s what I ended up with with the boardgame I posted about earlier. I got to playtest the game a bit and it seemed solid enough as it was, so I decided to call it done and put it on Itch.io. I also submitted it to Ludum Dare #53, which feels a bit silly in hindsight.
I had another idea and more components at my disposal and thus another prototype was born! The idea here is to get your cylinder to the opposing end of the board while preventing your opponent from doing the same. It has felt somewhat nice and maybe more promising than the earlier prototype so far, but for either a better judgement can only be passed once I’ve tested them against another person.
I made a small abstract boardgame! It’s so small, in fact, that all the components fit in a normal playing card box:
I’ve accumulated a lot of boardgame components over the past ~2 years because I was playing more boardgames in general and got the itch to design my own. To a large extent buying components was one of those unhealthy “I can justify this as vaguely useful and it gives me happy feelings” shopping habit things; I have currently more various game pieces, coins and other such bits than I’d probably need. Not great, but ideally I’ll eventually utilize all those bits and pieces in one way or another.
Anyway!! I recently read the book Lautapelien Historia (translates to ‘History of Boardgames‘) by Ari Saastamoinen; it was fairly interesting, although fairly lopsided in favour of chess & go. The book concentrating on abstract games (combined with the aforementioned accumulation of boardgame components) made me want to design a simple abstract boardgame. I’m not a very skilled boardgame designed but crafting the board and pieces was fun. I’ll probably post the rules here once I’m happy with them.
In other news, I’ve been steadily working on several projects for the past months. ESA2 progresses at a fairly steady pace, while the Keke rocket game and the Into the Breach -esque puzzler have had some chugs in development, followed usually by bursts of activity. On top of these 3 there’s also a collection of solitaires I’ve been making in Löve2D, inspired, again, by the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection. Compared to the others, this game is a bit more limited in scope, and as such I managed to even put out a beta version with 8 solitaires included (including Babataire & Babataire EX, now with more appropriate names)! You can download that version on Itch.io.
I’ve drawn a ton of different fonts over the years for various games without really thinking about it that much further. Some time ago I wondered if it’d be cool to extract them from the Fusion project files and put them available for download, and seeing the cool font packages by SysL convinced me to do it.
Sadly, since I have very low skills at fontmaking, I wasn’t able to figure out FontForge (suggested by Shinmera) to make TTF files to accompany the fonts; so for now, the bundle contains just a spritesheet with the symbols. Hopefully this can change later.
Baba coming out of their well to destroy all existence (1896, watercolours on paper) Like with the previous piece, I had done the lineart for this already in 2020, but it took me this long to actually get to painting it. The stream painting setup worked ok again!
I tested painting on-stream, and it produced this thing! I did the lineart almost 3 years ago but never got around to colouring it. I have another similar, slightly larger piece waiting for colours so I’ll probably do another painting stream later.