eventually, a goal emerges - what if you have to get rid of the ruins? well, that's easy, you just need plants to tear them apart... ok, well, if the ruins are in the desert, you'd need water to grow the plants....

the rhythm was still off tho, but a "hand" of tools creates a natural pace i like...

there's still no GOAL or like... gameplay there though, it's just a little stepped sim, no like interference from the player... i initially thought it could just have tile placement, but it was more interesting to have "tools", clicks that affect certain tiles in certain ways...

the adjacency sim was a little flat and mono directional tho... you can see it ends up being "trees take over everything". so, wrinkles - dry dirt vs wet dirt was interesting right away, it creates a connection between water and where plants can spread. i also started experimenting with "ruins"

evolution of an idea!

the last game started with hourglasses and then veered hard into a totally different direction, which was fun, BUT i was still interested in the hourglass effect

this time i tried making a super light adjacency sim thing. plants spread across dirt, isolated lakes dry up, etc.

no environment markup here, no special camera guides, just this plugin slamming into some rotated cube colliders !!

that was running on the original "dragging a satchel" code tho. with a little re-architecting, we can have a more flexible "item + tile = ???" ruleset system, so as you ram things into other things they can proc in more elaborate or interesting ways... e.g. here you can use scissors to trim flowers

That got me thinking though, if shoving backwards is so nice, I bet it would be fun if like... you knwo when you get the key, you don't just walk thru the door, you have to like drag the key back and stuff it in the door proper

i liked how this makes the goblin feel kind of small and weak ??

the goblin's sack / satchel was initially put in just to make sure there was some extra friction as you maneuvered, but it was kind of bleh (if cute)... so i added the option to shove it backward if there was space. Slightly more forgiving but also opening up gameplay a bit, new solutions appear...

the test level was a little... something. like there wasn't any surprises yet, not much to notice. maybe what it really needed was a little sokoban... here, you have to scootch a crate over in order to have enough space to turn around and avoid the time bombs...

evolution of an idea!

this morning i was determined to sketch out a new "overworld" game (like sebastian's quest or vampire vs pope army) and i had a cool idea - "time bombs" (hourglasses, here) that would cause your inventory to erode or decay... can you get the key to the door before it rusts?