Games from Nothing

CONVERGING LINES This one is a simple rhythm game.  Lines will shoot across the screen, and you have to tap/click when they converge. It’s condensed Rhythm Heaven but with none of the Japanese whimsy. And instead of scoring the player’s…

CRYPTOGRAPHIC WHEEL OF FORTUNE (based on Arcs and Lines) The player spins the money-wheel and then bets that money.  Everything’s mechanically the same as Wheel of Fortune but instead of betting letters, words and phrases, the player’s betting on the…

All Combinations (36) of Six Geometric Figures: The RPG. This concept recasts geometric figures as RPG characters.  There are heavy-hitting characters and mages and summoners and healers and whatever else, separated by shape.  Their shapes tell you what they do….

CLAUSTROPHOBIC “NOT-STRAIGHT LINES” The player draws vertical lines at the indicated spots on top and bottom of the screen. The game decides where the lines break. Breaks in the lines form the player’s path, and the lines are walls.  Once…

NON-COMPETITIVE ‘DRAW SOMETHING’ VARIANT Instruction ——>Unique Reinterpretation One player writes out instructions (or pieces them together from the available word bank) for some kind of shapes-and-colors picture.  For example: “Red circle in top-left quadrant, Green line from top to bottom”.Player…

MOUSE NEEDS HOUSE (Based on All Three-Part Variations on Three Different Kinds of Cubes.) A mouse appears in the margins of the screen and shows you which three-cube stack he wants to live in.  A bunch of cubes then fall…

CUBE CAPTURE This is one of the more video-gamey ideas.  It’d play something like Geometry Wars except with no shooting, only avoiding.  You move your little character/ship/whatever around a square arena filled with things charging/shooting/generally trying to kill you. If…

COLOR RACE 4 different colored lines swim from the left side of the screen to the right.  They’re racing to the edge.  The player has no input except for a speed boost, on cooldown, which instantly kills the player if overused….

MASSIVELY COOPERATIVE CROWDSOURCED EMERGENT SCRIBBLE-DRAWING GAME (could also work in a singleplayer context but that’d be a lot less interesting). Exactly what the people in this video are doing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnKgSWugUWU but divided between hundreds of people, each contributing a tiny square,…

I worked on two different projects for this one. The first experimented with more forced perspective. The particle system of objects is being transform-rotated, but the scale of the objects is also being increased and decreased at the same time….

I’ve been applying the aspects of the hider/seeker code with particle systems to create interesting particle systems that are fun to manipulate around on screen. At one point I got the idea that it would be really cool if the particles…

For this exercise I chose to make a rotation-based ‘ride’ that spins, but also modulates the shape of the ride itself. I envisioned something that started with one shape and morphed to another shape while spinning. I wanted to create…

Space Journey is a single-player game based on the hider/seeker concept. In this game, the player is controlling a yellow circle that can move anywhere in the screen. An orange triangle, the seeker, is chasing after the player. At the…

Fire Box is a game based on a simple particle system. The player is presented with a white box, and every tap will move the lid slightly to the right. The idea of having only one object on the screen…

Photo Booth is a game built on the transformation code (lab 8) for the “amusement park” assignment . On the center of the screen, a simplified, abstract character is formed with a combination of geometrical shapes. This character has a…

For this assignment (Amusement toy), I modified the solar system code to make it more fun to play with. The player controls the light blue circle, and based on their positioning, the center white circle increases or decreases its radius,…

I’m really enjoying coding Inversion because each time I run the code, I feel the difference in play from the tweaking I do. Initially, I had the player (square) move around freely while the enemies (triangles) did the same. Then…

Blip is the particle game that I’ve been working on. It features a  cloud of generated circles that change color based on mouseX and mouseY positions and slowly move towards the cursor’s direction while the mouse is pressed. A stream…

In our group game, rather than choose between designing a simulation based on behavior or designing a game with a goal state, Ben and I decided to combine the two. We designed our game “Attendance” to make players understand and…

For the particles lab I didn’t make so much a game as a digital toy to play with. The game starts with this cool image. The green circles are all orbiting the red circle using the solar system code, with…