Cozy game without a game engine - Devlog 1

This is a 2D tile based game where we start with one tile.

Here are the basic rules.

• There will be only 365 days to play.
• Everyday players will get 5 random tiles. They’ll have to choose any 3, and place them on the grid.
• Tiles can only be placed in vacant cells. The vacant positions are top, bottom, left and right of a cell.
• Once you place all the three tiles, the day ends and the next day starts.
• The goal is to place these tiles strategically to maximise the score.

Now coming to the devlog, I made a home tile and rendered it on the screen. This will be our starting tile. I also made a green tile indicator, which follows the mouse position.

The next step was to calculate which cells were available for a tile to be placed and also update the newly available cells. This was simple 2D coordinate geometry. I just had to iterate through all the tile positions and check if their adjacent cells (the top, left, bottom and right cells) were vacant. If they were, I just render a yellow square indicating that it was empty.

I then made some more tiles. I just want to keep the art style simple and minimal.

After that, just to test and see how it looks, I wrote a sample script to choose a random tile to be selected every time I place a new tile. So far, it turned out to be pretty good.

I also implemented camera zoom and pan, and a dock where 5 random tiles will be displayed every day.

That’s it for this devlog. Catch you in the next one.