Trying to take it easy in April, so I'm only working on two game projects

I need to focus on work this month (again), so I'm deliberately trying to take on a small project. Unfortunately, I've got two small-ish projects, and I haven't yet chosen, meaning I'm sort of working on them both.

Maybe I'll get one done early, and then defer the other one for May.

Idea 1: Crystal Golf

For my first idea, I'm thinking of a puzzle game where the player is shown a maze (a little like a sokoban configuration), with walls on a rectangular grid. Also on the grid are several crystals, and a ball. The player has a fixed number of "swings" to putt the ball around the level and collect all the crystals.

Nothing too challenging there code-wise. A handful of square images for the level, a few images for crystals and the ball, maybe some particle special effects when a crystal is collected.

Today, I did a first pass of generating a grass square, a grey stone square, a ball, and a crystal. Not much, but it's a start.

Idea 2: Branching Adventure Game Book

I've been toying with the idea of making one of those branching-path books that I read over and over again as a kid. You know, the one where you make choices at the bottom of the page, which would direct you to turn to page 31 if you wanted to explore the spooky cave, or page 63 if you wanted to check out the abandoned amusement park.

My idea is that this might take less code to do, especially if I use a tool like Twine / Twee. I saw somebody do a similar thing in March, which wasn't the origin of my idea, but it gave me encouragement.

One idea that I had, to make it portable and useful to people who might want to play this on tablets, was to make my book as an EPUB file, which I figured could make it easy to read - if I could figure out how to get links to work.

I spent a fair amount of today tinkering with the tutorial code from python-epub-builder and opening it up in Okular, the app that seems to want to handle .epub files on my Fedora Linux box. I've been getting weird behavior with the links, where sometimes they'll be underlined, and sometimes they won't be, and sometimes they change the cursor on hover, and sometimes they don't, and sometimes they react to clicks, and sometimes they don't.

I teased out some of the reasons for some of the weird behavior, but I still have behavior that I can't explain. I opened up my test book on FBreader on my tablet, and Aldiko, and to my surprise / relief / consternation, things seem to work fine over there.

Just now, I installed FBReader on my desktop machine, and it works OK here. So, maybe I'll work on getting an .epub book working in April - I'll still end up doing a little bit of programming, including getting a little bit of styling working, but presumably not as much work as if I were making a real game.

The working title that I've got for now is "Escape from Puzzle Island", which I'll probably abandon - or, rather, I'll probably keep that title for a different project (much) later, where the player will actually have to solve puzzles to progress.

The first book of this kind that I read as a kid was the Choose Your Own Adventure book "Space and Beyond", which boasted 44 different endings. Maybe I can get a dozen endings and call it good.