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What I'm building next: Skim
The next game is called Skim: Stone Skipping Game. You stand at a lake, you throw a stone, and you try to make it bounce as many times as it can before it sinks. That's the whole pitch. It's been on TestFlight since mid-September and this is the first time I've written about it.
Where it came from
Sliceball is about one release. Skim is about one throw, but a throw has two halves: how hard, and where. So the launch is two taps. The first tap stops a vertical meter for the arc. The second stops a horizontal one for the aim. They're drawn as a crosshair on the water, and if you stop both dead center you get a perfect throw, the game freezes for a beat, and a banner says so. Chain perfects and the stone goes further each time. Miss the center and the stone still goes, just not as well. Nothing punishes you for a bad throw except the score.
What's on the lake
From level two there are orbs floating on the water. Hit one mid-skip and you get a feather (a lighter stone that bounces more), a magnet (pulls the next orb in), a double (score) or an extra stone. From level three there are ramps; land on one and the stone launches into a super-skip, about three times the distance of a normal bounce. The ramps are the part I'm least sure of. An early first tap makes the stone drop short of them, and I haven't decided yet whether to widen the ramps or fix the throw. If you try it and they feel unhittable, that's the thing I most want to hear about.
Things that took longer than they should have
The lake didn't draw. For four builds the water was invisible, and the gray band I took for water was the sky fill, because the water quads were wound the wrong way and getting culled. Everything also rendered about 40% too pale for a while, which turned out to be a color-space setting. None of this is interesting to play, but it's why "the lake looks right now" is a milestone I'm happy about.
The sounds have been redone twice, first synthesized and then replaced with recordings, and the recordings won. There's a short boot animation with the studio mark, and the far shore has a camp on it now, with trees and rocks from Kenney's Nature Kit, which is free and which I'm using with thanks.
What's not done
Android hasn't been built yet. The store page doesn't exist. It runs at 120 Hz on the phones that can, and it'll be free with the same rules as Sliceball: ads, no purchases, no account.
If you want to try it before it ships, email [email protected] and I'll add you to TestFlight. The next post will be when there's a date.