I completed my first playable sketch for the Experimental Gameplay Project ASCII in February challenge. After reading the short brief, the most obvious idea seemed to be to make a game using ASCII to recreate graphics, but given my recent conversion to loving scrabble, I chose to think about word games. A double-switchback of obviousness.

I also wanted to get into Processing a bit more, so this first sketch is a java applet.

Like with Rectangulous I have chosen to make a contemplative toy free of time-limits but with a specific goal.

Performance is not very efficient, but this is the point of the rapid-prototyping methods of the Experimental Gameplay Project. I did improve word lookup speed a bit by splitting the wordlists into separate arrays by initial letter and sorting them by word length offline. I admit it's not graphically advanced or pretty at this point either. However, I think it has some interesting gameplay points, like zero-tolerance of mistakes. It seems to be quite good for practicing certain scrabble skills, especially learning the valid two-letter words and making use of minimal vowels once you start to run out.

Play it here.

In this longer piece I will outline the history and process of making Rectangulous, a puzzle game for Flash and iPhone. I will talk about the creative and design decisions as well as the technical implementation details in chronological order.

Inspiration and concept

After seeing the Van Doesberg exhibition at the Tate Modern I was thrilled by the persistence of the De Stijl movement in their investigations of such simple elements
and strict rules. Having recently got into the Rubik's cube again, I had an idea to devise a puzzle game based on the patterns and dynamism of really basic
geometry explored in the paintings of Van Doesberg and Sophie Taeuber.

Counter-Composition V by Theo van Doesburg

I am a fan of simple puzzle games on the iPhone like Trism, reMovem, Flood-it!, Unify, Bejeweled and LineUp. I like them best of all when I can play as quickly as possible. SameGame is perhaps the grandfather of many of the games mentioned. I prefer the games that are more like toys, the way the Rubik's cube is. There may be a goal, there may be scoring, and you may choose to play competitively, but there are no penalties built into the Rubik's cube. I like that I can spend as long as I want thinking about a move, be that very short or very long. I like games in general that I can enjoy thoughtfully, exploratively and playfully without the stress of impending imperatives - perhaps the very opposite of twitch gaming. I'm also very attracted to the way these games have simple, visual mechanisms that satisfyingly slot together in their consistent internal logic.

I wanted to make a puzzle game that combined all of these values: utterly simple, with a limited colour palette; a rigorous, clean visual logic; very quick to launch; no time limits, no penalties. Ideally I wanted to capture the feeling of the minimal De Stijl paintings - the feeling that I wanted to manipulate those shapes - push around those adjacent rectangles held in mutual tension. Ideally the game would equally be a kind of interactive painting, and the user would want to take a screenshot when the composition was particularly attractive.

Some months later, after playing a lot of these games and reclining to dream, I came up with the basic idea for Rectangulous: a grid of colours, where the user can move coloured squares into empty squares, and so combine "joined" areas into larger shapes. The working title was "Stijl".

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