A Door-Key Minigame
reading time:   ·   tags: Game Design   ·   by nicky case
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UPDATE: This minigame is out! T'was noticed by @notch, apparently.

When I was 8, I drew a maze with pen and paper. In this maze, there was your character's starting point, a door, and a key. On Valentine's Day, I gave this maze to my teacher-assigned mandatory playdate, (Singapore is weird) along with a red marker. I asked her to draw me the solution to this puzzle! Here's that maze, and the path my playdate was supposed to draw:

That day, I learnt the value of playtesting, because I did not playtest my maze, and the path she drew looked less like a heart and more like a cashew nut.

Anyway, that's the first game I ever remember making.


tweet as design doc

I feel like making a dorky door-key minigame for Valentine's Day. Like, mini-mini-game. Something you could finish in less than a minute. And it's a project I could finish in less than a day.

What interests me most about this is its one "mechanical plot twist" - you go through this rather typical minigame, and only at the end does it reveal what you did. You did something and you didn't know it. This might be a pompous comparison to make, but I think of the ending of Braid, where you run through the final level, but once you get to the end, everything plays backwards, revealing the true story behind what you just did.

And, heck, I could let people share the game with To: and From: names, and add a lil' Patreon link to myself.