Follow along as Stable is thought, drawn, and developed into a video game.

Team of two

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

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, or 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.

Plopp. Plopp is a non-player character. The nemesis of Grep, who eat the blocks that Grep fail to catch. Maybe related to the tube?

Inspiration

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

Stable's game design is inspired by many games we've played. And game feel. 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.

To do

There's a bunch of doing that go into making a video game. Before you make anything, making the thing can feel endless, almost monumental. Like when you stand at the bottom of the mountain, and look up.

I like lists, I have a lot of them laying around. I use lists, a lot of to do lists, to feel progress and get a lot of things done. And to reflect and know what's next.

These lists are a rough, incredibly simplified, way to break down what have gone and continue to go into the making of Stable.

Earlier

Now

Later