#squidee

[noisemx]

Stan Manoukian - Cephalopod Sculpture theme: 01. Mr. Polypus (2015). & 02. Squidee (2015). Magic sculpt, glass eyes, & acrylics.

[toboldlygame]

Prototype #1: Squidee

You're just a lonely little squid swimming through the deep sea. Changing your colors attracts different prey and predators. I'm not sure if I want the game to have a set end, or for it to just keep increasing the difficulty until the player loses.

I've rediscovered my love of coding thanks to this frustrating, simple little game. Do you know how hard it is to simulate ropes/chains/squid tentacles!? So hard. I shake my fist at you, physics. Implementing the flocking algorithm for the schools of fish was really fun, though.  I spent about a week on this, and it's probably going to go on the backburner for a bit until I work out some design flaws.

[toboldlygame]

An idea begins. A couple days ago I had a vague pondering: What kind of mechanics would be involved in a game where you play as a squid in the deep sea? How would your own luminescence effect the game?

I tried to take that idea further by researching cephalopods. I looked first at cuttlefish, who didn't live nearly as deep as I thought, then Nautilus...but they don't glow. Google brought up something I had never seen before though, the deep sea glass squid. He's the little bugger on the bottom left. A deep sea squid with a very, very interesting behavior: it defends itself by breaking off its arms. Which it can regrow, of course. This strikes me as a potentially interesting mechanic. A kind of abstraction of "lives" in a sense: but the lives slowly regenerate. It's cute, it glows, it brings up a cool new mechanic. I think I'm onto something, and boy does it feel good after being stuck in a design rut. Is Squidee a good name? I hope Squidee is a good name.