35A4

second game made for idiosyncratic games fall 2026, second michael brough idiosyncracy study (following 35A2).

in the initial design inspiration stage of creating 35A2 (linked above) i had wanted to explore the underlying zugzwang-partity dynamic in michael brough's games, but in doing so i created a 'complete' game with no room for abilities. i could, of course, add abilities, but there was something wrong with that -- it felt as though adding abilities would be creating something 'extra', unnecessary. so with a couple days left in our 'making' week for the idiosyncracy class, i decided to create another game.

in this one, the basic idea was spells move towards the player unavoidably, and the player manipulates the order in which they reach them. touching a spell casts it, evoking some specific effect. the big idea here was to create something where unique player-controlled effects or abilities were part of the core design from the start, unavoidably, thus creating room for more interesting future effects/abilities. whereas with 35A2, player abilities would need to be added, this game already had an avenue for player abilities that simply needed to be changed into a more interesting distribution or set of abilities.

i realized that i could develop a very limited set of such 'spells' that would force the player to think about 'spell order' in a very blunt way.

the player sprite's colours are drawn from some palette elements from P1 Select (namely: the background maroon, and the player sprite blue), a wonderfully stripped-down 'broughlike'.

so the end result i'm moderately happy with? it's fun and there are interesting risks and choices to be made. it feels loosely complete, but with definite room for variation. unlike 35A2 which has a very fixed level design (implementation-wise) and limited design space, 35A4 (this game) has a lot of levers to crank: how do the pool balls spawn? how do they move? how quickly or slowly? what happens when you touch one? does it do something good or something bad? etc etc etc. as it stands, this version  is playable, but not satisfactory the way 35A2 is.

i don't know if i'll continue down this route. i'm still more interested in repetition than in variation. variation can certainly serve repetition, but i'm not there yet.