I'm going to be partnering with my six and a half year-old daughter to make a game during the 2021 Playcrafting Global Game Jam.
Follow along on the blog!
Once upon a time, there were a bunch of frogs. They were going to have a fly breakfast. So they sat on a golden lily pad. But the flies got lost on it. The frogs went home to eat more flies, but they didn't know where they were. All they remembered is that they were on a golden lily pad. So they went to search for one. It's was fall, so the lily pads could break. They hopped lily pad to lily pad, but they couldn't find the golden lily pad. Then, they saw another lily pad. As soon as they landed on it, it broke! So they had lost two of their energy to find the golden lily pad. There was only one more lily pad left, and this was their last energy! They hopped to the plain green lily pad... And they turned golden and the lily pad turned golden! And they found their flies and ate them.
~by Julia
I took a page out of the Move38 school of design handbook and avoided the pitfalls of having setup modes in the Blink code. BUT! There is a setup phase for this game. Read on...
In general this game can be played with as many players as you'd like. We recommend that you have approximately six Blinks per player.
When the Blinks are done learning the game, each Blink will start as a lily pad. You can double-click a lily pad to turn it into a frog. Double-click a frog to turn it back into a lily pad. Make sure each player has a frog.
Choose one of the lily pads to turn into a golden lily pad. Triple-clicking a lily pad will turn it into a golden lily pad. Long press to lock in your decision and hide its color. You can reset the golden status of locked in lily pads by switching to a frog and back again.
A player will then secretly shuffle the now-hidden golden lily pad in with the normal lily pads. Lay out the lily pads in the playing field. None of the lily pads should touch each other. Keep them about four inches apart. If any lily pads accidentally touch during play, simply detach them and play on.
The last player to see a frog in person goes first. If no one has seen a frog in recent memory, the youngest player goes first.
Players take turns hopping from lily pad to lily pad in search of the golden lily pad, which attracts all of the delicious flies. Click your frog to see how many hops your frog can take on its turn. The number of hops a frog can take is shown briefly every couple of seconds.
Hop to a lily pad by attaching your frog to an adjacent lily pad Blink. For the first hop of the game, players must chose any outer lily pad. This costs one hop.
There is a small chance that when your frog lands on the lily pad, it will break and turn to water, which will cost another hop. If you don't have at least one hop left after landing, you lose a turn. The Blink will let the player know if you've lost a turn by flashing red during the normal energy display loop. You can hop to water tiles, but this costs two hops total.
First to find the golden lily pad wins!
Water tiles:
- Change up the game by single-clicking any lily pad to turn it into a water tile. When you're done shuffling the lily pads, create boundaries in the playing field with the water tiles to force players to make choices about their search patterns.
Game start:
- You can make each player start on the same lily pad.
Win condition:
- You can have more than one golden lily pad to find if you have a very large amount of Blinks.