I am tired of talking/thinking/wondering about "killing gameplay"! The more I try to spin around the idea through text and words, the more confused I get... This format has exhausted its usefulness for me! So, I need to make something and just see what happens.
So I'm making a piece of software!
My Idea is that it will involve sticking stickers to things. Perhaps a diary tool of sorts. I've developed this idea a bit, and you might control a little cyclops.
(https://mossysound.neocities.org/cyclops.jpg)
And I'm going to keep a diary of its development, so that I have an ostensible audience which I must give coherent thoughts to (tricking myself into confronting the idea fragments floating around), and so people can look at it and say things if they want, and maybe say "hey I should make something too".
So, I've actually already started. I think like 2 3 days ago. I'm using Adam Le Doux (of Bitsy (https://ledoux.itch.io/bitsy) fame)'s Cartlet 'found software' format. (Read about it here (https://www.adamledoux.net/cartlet/index.html), make your own!)
The first two days, I basically spent a while just going through the Cartlet tutorial and reading the source code for Adam's WIZARD GARDEN to figure out how this thing works. I formatted the code properly since it had been condensed into one very long line, and then threw some console.log() statements in there to see what some of the numbers were doing. It was pretty cool (I've attached the formatted source code to this post, for your reading pleasure). By the end of day 1, I had drawn a little guy and made them able to move around the screen in a tile based fashion.
(https://mossysound.neocities.org/cartlet1.gif)
I haven't really coded in a few years, but I did learn Java once upon a time. JavaScript is, unsurprisingly, very similar. So after getting comfortable with all that, I added some animations to my little sprite.
(https://mossysound.neocities.org/cartlet3.gif)
At this point I had my sticker idea already, but I didn't know much beyond that. How would you place them? What are the essential qualities of stickers, and their placement? Do I actually like the way I made the little guy move? Will you be exploring somewhere or just placing things? Should you have limited stickers? Is that gameplay?! Woe!
I'm writing this, as I have stated, 3 days after starting, and have now answered some of these questions for myself, I think... But that's probably a good place to end this first entry.
So that's post #1, thank you for reading! I don't do much writing besides for university, so hopefully I'll get better at it. Please feel free to post your thoughts or whatever here, let me know if you're wondering something or have suggestions.
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