Words and images from the development of Stable. A video game about a hand, tube, fruit, flow, and open ends that aren't always open ended.

Team of two

I'm building Stable together with a friend at work. He programs, I draw visuals. We both throw ideas up, down, and around. It's much fun!

Idea

Stable is a 2D hand drawn puzzle video game where you move a hand to grip and drop blocks from a tube into boxes. Until the end of time. Or when you've pooped. We don't check.

Over time, trinkets and doodads constipate the tube. Pull the thing out of the tube opening and into your end-of-tube-pedia.

The tube may not be a tube.

Sketch

I put the pencil to paper and drew quick sketches that focus on what you, the player, do in Stable, and how that looks in my head.

A photograph of a paper on a table, with a pencil drawing of the game design concept for Stable, with annotations written in Norwegian
Digital visual concepts of Stable, exploring other placements of the tube, Grep the main character in Stable, and a light switch for difficulty

Kitchen sink, also known as rough ideas

Physical reward when you reach a score. Score should be difficult to achieve, maybe top 0.2% of players. When score is reached, show an in-game message on how to obtain reward.

Tube can get constipated and might explode when trinkets, artifacts, or doodads get stuck in the tube opening. You need to pull the thing out of the tube end to release the plug. Max limit to how much the tube can constipate before exploding.

Achievements. Yep.

End-of-tube-pedia. Thing to show things you've collected from the tube end.

Grep. Grep is the player character, a four fingered hand with two eyes and a mouth.

Plop. Plop is a non-player character. Plop is Grep's biggest nemesis. Plop eat the blocks that Grep fail to catch. Maybe Plop is related to the tube?

Inspiration

Stable's visual style is inspired by games like Thank Goodness You're Here, Wilmot Works It Out, and Plug & Play.

Stable's game design and feel is inspired by many games we've played. Game feel is all the good stuff like sound, look, color, timing, movement, haptics, rhythm, flow. Game feel is what I think is the best about games.

To get the game feel, you have to play the game.

Prototype

We have physics! Today I adjusted numbers in a Python file to place collision on the image of the box. So that when you drop a block into a box, the block collides with the box.

To do

There's a lot that goes into making a video game. I've written super simplified lists of what's done, doing, and to be done in the making of Stable.

To make some sense of the making, you can map all the parts to be done into lists.

Earlier

Now

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