My non-game game idea

A few months ago, I thought of writing a game. And my brain went through these phases. None of them stuck.

1. A browser game where people would edit the map collectively and something would happen in the game. But I couldn't figure out what.
2. Then it became a game where players have to navigate to find each other in a large map with hints. But that would require a lot of manual level design which I wanted to avoid.
3. It became a game about leading a tribe to sustainability all the while manipulating the world around them.
4. In the end it became about squirrels and deers navigating a world which the player would interact with. Not sure how it will work, but I started out anyway.

I started out with PixiJS on the browser. I managed to put a on tree on the screen. And then moved to make some sort of map editor.

Then I tried to draw on the screen with a cursor, that worked rather well.

Then I tried to pre-render the trees!

I changed up the spirts, bought some more sprites from itch.io. Made it possible to draw bigger houses on screen with bigger footprint.

At some point, made a character move around the world.

I wasn't really happy with the sprites that I was working with. Also it was tedious to mix and match sprite packs, and of course I lack any artistic skill. So, I thought maybe I am better off painting my own sprites. That did not go very well.

Pardon my sprites

At this point, I also had a web server where painting was possible.

Then there was gap...

Few days ago, I realised that a project too big for my brain to comprehend is not going to go anywhere, specially given my limited time, so I started with a smaller bit of task. Instead of building a game, what if there was no game anymore. I thought of making someting that would ostensibly be a rudimentary simulation with characters or creatures with their own behaviours. Probably a game would come out of it, or not... if nothing comes out of it, a maze solving game would be a nice web toy.

So I started writing a world generation system (in Rust). I am still figuring out the wave function collapse algorithm, and I am a complete n00b in Rust. But at least I now have the tool the see how the world could look like in a rudimentary interface.

The edge of the world did end up looking rather interesting...

Edge of the world

22-12-2023