So I dicked around with crossing the theme with Pretentious Art Game and doing something about “people as islands” and making connections between them (d’awww), but I wasn’t able to come up with mechanics which reflected the idea I was trying to get across while also sounding like fun.

So I tweaked the mechanics a bit and ended up with this concept: Island Repair Man! Your floaty island in the sky has been broken apart by an attack of Giant Flying Island Rodents, or something like that, and it’s your job to rope it back together.

So far I have a glorified molecular dynamics system / particle simulation. Now with added verlet. Woo.

The white bits are the island pieces which you’ll have to jump between and thus rope together, and the spiky red bits are Generic Bad Guys to avoid. They repulse each other with inverse-square forces so everything floats around and makes a nice dynamic playfield. Now that I’ve changed themes I should probably swap out the art; but gameplay comes first!

The roped-together islands will be constrained to stay at the same distance they were at when first roped together, so you’ll gradually put together a neat-looking structure as you hop from island to island. Hopefully that won’t make anything explode. Verlet integration is supposed to be able to take constraints in its stride, so it should be okay.

More importantly, I have no idea if this will be fun at all; I guess I’ll find out tomorrow. Or rather, later today, as it’s past midnight. How the heck did that happen. Sleepytime, pronto.

Tags: screenshot