Plektangle Devlog 01

Plektangle is out! What's available at the time of this devlog really is a minimum viable product in all senses: The barest bones to get across the vision of the game both as a puzzler and a music toy. Making games is hard, and every new thing I create feels like it could be the last, so I wanted to write a little devlog up to talk about the inspiration and what I hope I could achieve with it should I find the time to build it out a bit more.

In what little time I have for playing games I've been sinking more into puzzle games of all sorts: Crosswords, Sokobans, Picross, etc. Beyond puzzling being on the mind, there were a couple core concepts that came together that formed the vision: I had just listened to the Eggplant Podcast "game of the year" episode, which in usual fashion included many not-game or roughly game adjacent entries to the collective GOTY list. The Tenori-On, a music device created by Toshio Iwai and manufactured by Yamaha, was one such game-ish entry. Ages ago when I was a try-hard music student I had probably heard of this device, but the reintroduction to it as a work within Toshio Iwai's greater creative practice was a breath of fresh air. With that reminder was also a fond reminiscence of Electroplankton, another of Iwai's works that I hadn't registered beyond being one of Nintendo's great DS oddities.

I was having a lazy Sunday watching some random documentaries and was introduced to the works of Olafur Eliasson, who talked at length about the concept of framing art, spaces for art, and somewhere within all these things I saw the idea for Plektangle. Little things (Electroplankton) bouncing around a grid (puzzle game norm) with this neat little bloom effect (Eliasson's light-oriented works) all kind of coalesced.

The main idea came about as an audio toy, something that would be fun to mess about with and make a sort of digital wind chime. Any prototype I make now will inevitably go through the, "will it puzzle?" phase of putting up rails, setting abstract goals, and seeing what comes about. I don't quite love how the puzzling works right now in the current state of Plektangle, but I see the potential to build out mechanics and mesh things together more.

In the future, I'd love to build out a version that's a little more high fidelity in visuals and audio, just to see how the concept scales. When in doubt, juice it. I'd like to make scalable to see what an 8x8, 10x10, or 12x12 grid could feel like on the creative side. Puzzle-wise, the 6x6 is definitely limited, about as tight as is reasonable to watch the Plektas bounce around, so I think developing mechanics would also benefit from expanding the relative scale. The sound element was fun and fairly simple to implement, so I'd love to make a version of this game that has contrasting sound fonts for different moods. Angry overdriven guitars, church bells, mandolin, vibey synths... I could really space out just on the sound design aspect.

If you gave the game a go, don't hesitate to reach out or leave a comment. This low-res prototype is admittedly a bit terse and unfriendly, but I am oh so curious if any puzzle people picked it up and intuited the mechanics despite it all. -Jonah