I have given JustMeet, a website for organising events with your friends, a new makeover!
So give it a try if you want to organise an event, and these features look good to you:
Free to use No sign-ups or emails Participants can enter how convenient an option is for them, from 0-100This marks the fifth year that I enter 7drl, a yearly game jam in which participants create a roguelike in 7 days. My entry is Perimeter:
Perimeter by sunil.
I'd wanted to make a monopoly roguelike for some time. I envisioned a game in which you complete circuits of a board, picking up items and fighting monsters as you do so.
Karvi marks the second BGA implementation I make this year (after Botanicus). Again, it's a Euro game by Hans im Glück, but it's little meatier than Botanicus.
In Karvi, workers take the form of dice, upon which pips represent "beer" or the resources available for that die to spend on actions. As you move dice around the board you can deplete their beer levels to perform various actions.
I received an email about a platform for building multiplayer games called Rune, and it intrigued me. Having already started my own multiplayer platform, Kangaroo, but never managing to find the motivation to finish it and polish it up, I was curious what alternatives were out there.
Rune is super easy to use. You can test locally using a dev ui, from which you can add and remove users, simulate different latencies and test spectators. When ready to publish, you simply push to their platform, and once approved, the game becomes available to their users through the Rune app. Rune supports both turn-based and real-time games, although I didn't try making anything real-time.
In 2018, I was asked to make an educational physics game about Neutrinos, an experience I really enjoyed. And, I've been asked again – this time a game to explore Causal Sets. Both of these introductions were made through my partner who is also a Physics PhD.
Causets Game aims to introduce how causal sets work geometrically, whilst also being fun to play. It is a twist on Square Worlds, but instead of placing objects you are placing tiles which contain "nodes" or "events". There are various ways in which connecting these nodes together scores points.
In February this year, I said goodbye to Board Game Arena as a full-time developer after having worked there for about two and a half years. Working with the team there was a total pleasure, both because I liked my colleagues so much and because I was (and remain) a big fan of the website. I was sad to leave, but felt I needed to take control of my own time again and return to freelancing. As a freelancer, I have the freedom to dedicate the hours I want to my work, and to explore my personal projects when I wish to. I also get to have many different projects with various clients on the go at once, which suits me very well: I thrive on variety!
My submission to 7drl 2024 is Trichromat. You play as a spectre who has discovered that they can perceive three colours...
As per usual for this game, I've tried to make a game in the Broughlike style. A small grid, with some cryptic mechanics.
trichromat by sunil.
I've been playing Worldle daily for almost two years, and I love it. It's a game in which you are shown the outline of a country, and you have to guess what country it is. To help you, with each wrong guess you make, you are told how far and in what direction the target country lies.
It became popular following the Wordle craze of late 2021, appearing along with a whole slew of similar daily, shareable games. Many of these were geography games which I also enjoyed, Flagle and Tradle for example. However, it's Worldle I kept coming back to...
I've just released a micro update to Magpie which you can play over at Itch.
Magpie by sunil.
I'd been wanting to neaten the edges since I submitted the game to 7DRL earlier this year, but I didn't have time or energy to work on it that much until now. Still, I'm very happy to finally have done it! I've reset the leaderboards, because the game has changed a little bit and I figure this is fairer.
Magpie is my submission to 7DRL 2023. As appears to be my habit for this jam, it's another Broughlike. You play as a trinket-loving Magpie, navigating a garden full of worms... and various scary predators!
Magpie by sunil.
My entry to Deck-tember is Loco Card. You can play it on Itch, via the link below:
Loco Card by sunil.
Deck-tember is a game jam for Decker creations, taking place in December. It's very much an analogue to Chip-8's Octo-jam, to which I also sumitted an entry this year. Decker, also an Internet Janitor creation, is a tool for creating things. It brings to mind a holy union of Flash combined with PowerPoint, except it's way cooler and has a very specific aesthetic. It takes inspiration from HyperCard, an old Macintosh program of similar vein.
When planning an event with various people, it's hard to know when and where would be the most collectively convenient for the attendees. Recently, in trying to solve this problem, I made a spreadsheet in which each invitee would answer how convenient each option was to them: 0 meaning they would not be able to attend, and 1 meaning they definitely could attend.
Yesterday, we concluded our three-set Cloudpierce block by drafting and playing Steepleclimb . We introduced the set in a spoiler post earlier this month.
Busting open packsEveryone showed up with their cards printed and trimmed, meaning we had a brief period where we had to sleeve the cards, but otherwise we got started very quickly. We prepared packs each with 1 rare, 3 uncommons, 10 commons, and one non-basic land, and put them into ziplock bags.
Puzzlescript is a simple-yet-powerful game engine for tile-based puzzle games. I've played some really cool games made in Puzzlescript (you can see an absolute wealth of creativity in the gallery), and I've been intrigued by it, but I've never actually tried making a game with it.
After Cloudpierce (from 2018) and Towers Besieged (from 2019), our collaborative fan Magic: the Gathering block is due to conclude later this year with Steepleclimb .