To move the chair, you must become the chair. I’ll probably do some more work on the camera, but I think the movement controls are working pretty well. You click on the furniture you want to move, and then control it with WASD to move and QE to rotate.

Now it’s time to dig into the game mechanics of furniture arrangement.

I can now procedurally generate chairs, tables, and beds!

Next step is to work on the furniture arrangement controls. The current version lacks a certain… finesse.

I’ve decided to build a game about arranging furniture in a room. Working title is “Table Jockeys”. The rooms and furniture will all be procedurally-generated. I’m imagining a first-person puzzle game, along the lines of Portal, Talos Principle, Antichamber, etc.

I’m using Unity, and the Procedural Toolkit which came with a neat chair generator. I had to write my own collision generator for the chairs, which basically mashes together a bunch of box colliders. I also grabbed this nice smooth mouselook script from the Unity wiki.

I’m gonna get some sleep. Tomorrow, I’ll start generating some tables. Once I’ve got a few basic furniture types, I’ll make a grabbing/moving interface, and work on rules/puzzles for furniture arrangements.

You now get points for every canoe that you spear! Also, now the game keeps going with more and more rounds. Still need to add an ending screen.

Once this is finished, it’ll be time to add some much-needed sounds and music. Then I can finish it all off with some additional levels, enemies, maybe even more gamemodes…

Made a fancy title screen for the game. That’s some hand-pixel’d typography right there! It even uses authentic retro techniques to squeeze the most out of the pico-8’s limited sprite and map memory! Not that I think I’ll be using all of it…

Next task: adding polish to versus mode. Scores, results screen, etc. After that, I might do some music and sounds. Or I’ll finally get around to improving the enemy AI.

Made some very primitive canoe AI. It just randomly paddles around while throwing spears everywhere. Also, the game now has an actual win state, so I think it can officially be called a “game” now!

Now I’m gonna try improving the canoe AI. After that, I’ll probably do a simple title screen to pick modes and the number of players.

Canoe controls are feeling pretty good, and I’m pretty satisfied with the animation. Still not sure I like the paddle color. Might change it to black or white. Here’s the PICO-8 pallete if anyone has thoughts on the matter:

I took a break for a couple hours, and now I’m gonna make a sandwich. Will also try to get some sleep in the next few hours. Zero stress at this point, and feeling pretty confident that I’ll have a decent game by the end.

Next task is to weaponize the canoe, and then start putting in some opponents!

First time using PICO-8. Got a canoe that can paddle around and collide with rocks.

Next step is adding some animations for paddling, then time to start adding the other ancient technology: spears!

Final gameplay feature: the player can shapeshift into different animals.

✔️All game mechanics programmed

✔️Level editor works

✔️Energy drink drank

Time to start making levels!

This bear has an interesting block-pushing technique:

No errors or crashing, at least! Time for some debugging.