I’m new here and have no blinks yet. (Kickstarter Backer.)
I have been watching some lunch episodes on youtube and saw a mention of combining two games that were not meant to be combined.
But what if you intentionally wrote two different “games” that could purposefully interact?
You’d get twice the amount of space to program your game. You could make for example one army blink and one terrain blink. Maybe they each can even function as a game on their own but could also be combined. So this setup could provide you with three games.
Or you could create a puzzle with a lock and key concept. One game blink would be the key and one would be the lock. Make a board with locks and pick a few keys en figure where to position them along the edge of the lock. Selecting one color on the key-blink on one side of the blink. Putting that side against the lock. And press it, “shooting” a beam of that color in the lock. Thereby prompting the lock to respond to that color.
These might be some wild ideas and I have no idea if this is appreciated here.
I’m also not yet sure if I will be buying the developer ad on.
I had been kicking around the idea of Blinks that are very abstract in their purpose but send out different signals based on whatever state you place them in - almost like a “monkey wrench” to the Widgets blink that you can try throwing in to any game and see what happens.
Id definitely be curious to see a full game based around the concept you mentioned though. I definitely think there’s some fun room to explore here.
EDIT: Now that I think about this, I’m definitely making “Monkey Wrench” after I finish my current project lol.
I definitely love the idea of having two games working together, also it can work pretty well for expansions, for example you have a game, basic game for two players, but if you have this other blink attached to the game, it starts a new different game with mechanics updated and up to 3 players!
Of course this make sense only if you don’t have space for the expansion, if you have it, just update the game and put an option to choose if you want to play with or without expansion!
FWIIW, I started wondering about this myself and here are things that came to my mind.
1 - This only makes sense for space constrained games as it does put some burden on the user (figuring out which blink does what, having to have enough of the different blinks, etc).
2 - It seems to me it would work pretty well (again, when needed) for games where blinks can be physically moved around (say, blinks that have special abilities in a game and can be connected to the board to do them).
3 - A good approach to do this would be by setting up game messages. These messages would be computed on a specific blink based on whatever complex criteria but the target blinks (the ones receiving the message, would most likely just have to set some game state and switch color or something, which would require a lot less code (in theory).
Luckily, I have not run out of storage — yet. 