To drink from the bottle, turn to pa-- I mean, click red or purple
July 25, 2015 10:16 PM   Subscribe

Stephen "Increpare" Lavelle - creator of many strange free games, one-going-on-two strange paid ones, the sound effect generator Bfxr and the excellent tile-based puzzle game engine PuzzleScript - released three much simpler game makers a couple of months ago: Flickgame, Tinychoice and Plingpling. Flickgame and Plingpling have help pages, each with an example game; Tinychoice needs no help page and starts with an example game in the text box. More detailed info after the break.

Flickgame is an exercise in constraint: a graphical choose-your-own-adventure maker with a maximum of sixteen 'pages' and sixteen colors - and each color on a page can be turned into a clickable link to another page. A tip: your cursor should turn into a pointing hand when over a clickable color. If all else fails, click 'edit' to see all pages and links. There's a very new Increpare-run Twitter gallery of flickgames, and, apart from the example game, here's three by Increpare himself: 1 2 3

Tinychoice is a simple text-based choose-your-own-adventure maker; compare and contrast with Twine. From Increpare via Twitter about its size constraints: "none, except what github/javascript impose (/please don't abuse it!)" A tip from me: it's possible to implement variables in the kludgiest possible way: making multiple versions of all rooms corresponding to all the possible gamestates you can be in while in them.

Plingpling is a simple goal-based pinball maker. The goal is to get the ball to the target by using the plungers, flippers, bumpers, gate switches and table-bump and respawn functions. A game can consist of up to six levels; designs are hand-painted.

All three game makers have a 'share' function that generates a link to a playable version of your game; Plingpling's help page has a guide to making a pinball game changeable after it's been shared. Flickgame and Plingpling also have export/import functions for saving to and loading from disk; Tinychoice's 'save to disk' function saves a playable HTML file. All three makers are open source (the Tinychoice share button bug mentioned in the comments appears to have been fixed).
posted by BiggerJ (6 comments total) 30 users marked this as a favorite
 
Pretty sure bfxr would not exist if it weren't for sfxr by Tomas Pettersson.
posted by smcameron at 10:21 PM on July 25, 2015 [1 favorite]


smcameron: I know, but I didn't think to mention it; anyway, Lavelle lists the full history on the Bfxr page.
posted by BiggerJ at 10:42 PM on July 25, 2015


Cara Ellison wrote about Increpare a while back.
posted by kmz at 10:55 PM on July 25, 2015 [1 favorite]


Just discovered something about Tinychoice - you don't have to follow the format of 'description, two carriage returns, text, two carriage returns, link, etc.' You can have non-link text in between link-lines. You can also use single carriage returns. A link must, however, take up an entire line or paragraph; everything up to the next carriage return.
posted by BiggerJ at 11:15 PM on July 25, 2015


I made a game as a result of this post! It's a silly little thing about visiting an unusual yarnshop (is it ok to link something I've made as a result of this post? anyway, there it is)

My first game! Thank you for silliness :)
posted by kariebookish at 5:41 AM on July 26, 2015 [5 favorites]


Neat! Tinychoice reminds me a little of Diorama Club (Previously) but the syntax is a little clearer, reminds me of wiki or markdown.

Here's my effort - ifTree - probably a nonstarter as it requires the game structure to be written up in JSON and it's a bit fiddly - unless you go full on Twine and have an editor simplicity is probably a must.
posted by Artw at 7:09 AM on July 26, 2015


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