Well, this is a new one. I’m finished, or as finished as I’m going to get. I chose to build a game where the primary (indeed, only) mode of interaction is movin the mouse around and frantically clicking — and apparently something I did yesterday set of my carpal tunnel something awful. I can no longer play what I’m writing! Oh noes! Ah, well…At least it’s feature-complete, if somewhat lacking in content.

Download Turbulent Lake for Windows

Game is a mash up of Hamumu’s Still Pond, and some, err, other stuff. Yeah. If you find it frustrating, press spacebar to toggle ‘wimp mode’. Makes things easier.

Wimp.

Well, after a couple of hours playing old LD games (which tend to be amazingly good, btw), here’s my screwball idea.

Only Forwards + Mondrian = Ondrian Fordrian

In this mashup, I intend to mash extra hard, almost beyond recognition. In other words, I will be interpreting my inspirations loosely.

In Only Forwards, the avatar is always moving forward and the player’s inputs cause the avatar to turn left and right. In Ondrian Fordrian, the avatar is either moving forward or not moving at all; input consists of exactly one key, the MOVE FORWARD key. The player’s goal is to move forward as much as possible.

In Mondrian, the visuals are inspired by the De Stijl artist Piet Mondrian. In Ondrian Fordrian, the visuals are inspired by the Bauhaus artist Wassily Kandinsky. Or who knows, once I actually have a game maybe I’ll go with someone else, someone whose work is more gamey, like Mondrian’s friend Theo van Doesburg, founder of the De Stijl art movement. I totally just looked all that stuff up on Wikipedia.

In Ondrian Fordrian, the avatar is a Kandinsky doodad attempting to traverse the frightening, bewildering Kandinsky miasma. His goal is to move forward along his curvy, Kandinskic path. Everything moves. Some of it pushes him backward, some of it can hurt him.

Never Look Back. This is the second (way more boring) title for this game.  Never look back, Kandinsky doodad. The past is past, and the only way is forward.

I will be working in Flash with AS3. I intend to finish the game this weekend, but it’s going to be meager, for a couple of reasons. Chiefly, I have a lot of other stuff on my mind, plus the weather’s so damn nice.

I love the theme of the mash up and am scouring the archive grid looking at old thumbnails.  I’m trying to find a concept that won’t be too ambitious at all.  The reason?  Because this weekend I will make some progress towards learning AS3 I hope.  I have my Essential ActionScript 3.0 book handy.  I have my Flash CS4 Professional book handy.  I have healthy snacks…  I have angry chihuahuas.. (well not really, but my wife and I are picking up a new puppy tomorrow!  Shiba Inu mix, not chihuahua I’m afraid.) 

I have already made 1 Flash AS2 game so far but know nothing about actually using the Flash tool for making animations and such things.  I also “know” AS2 in that sense that I’ve been programming in other languages a long time and can now brute force any kind of ugly code into working but I’m far from the land of knowing best practices so far!  I really want to push on past AS2 though.

I think it would be fun to find a mash-up game that will ideally not be too large in scope that will allow me to get to know the Flash authoring tool and AS3.  It does mean I have to make some more progress in the AS book.

Only time will tell what will happen.  Epic Fail?  We shall see!