A Bit of Fun

December 1, 2023

Two quick things to share. Three? Two quick ones, one long one? Okay, a long poorly edted intro, followed by two quick things and one medium thing. Great! I’m good at blogging.

Daily Higgs

I’ve been posting some Higgs levels each day – resetting at midnight eastern time (US). I know it’s been a while waiting for the *full* game, so I figure why not post a level each day. Why not indeed. Go try it out! The same URL works each day. (Pictured here is the level for December 1st… which may or may not be today anymore?)

Feel Bad Friday

The weekly video series has returned. I mean, the every-four-years video series has returned! Listen, I got another subscription to one of those video recording programs… so I’m hoping I’ll use it for more than just the one video – but no promises. That all said, this week I played a level in The Electric Shocktopus: Choose Your Own Adventure, created and shared by player “1235” in the Discord server.

You can see how I do here.

And to try this level yourself, you can follow this link.

Agent Higgs 2

Were you expecting a game? So was I! With something like a September 2023 release – which let me check the clock – I don’t think is going to happen.

Two things have happened – one, life’s been, as always, extra busy so things are going slower than I’d like. And two, there’s more to do than I expected. I put the game in for a round of playtesting, and came away from it not with the specific, detailed bits of feedback I had hoped for… but rather ideas for how to change things in broader ways. Rearranging the chapters, changing how fast the new physics is introduced, etc.

The quick description is that the game was originally envisioned a bit like Candy Crush, where you just have a thousand levels you can play somewhat endlessly.

But what I’m coming around on is that if this is an educational game, or at least used for folks more interested in the physics than the puzzles, I don’t want to gate the science behind extra puzzles. Some folks may just want to play a few dozen levels and feel like they’ve learned something.

Which means, I’m trying to rearrange things right now to make it easier to branch in different directions. If you want to play challenge levels – they’ll be there. But they’ll be fewer required levels to get you through each chapter. At least that’s my thought.

And with the daily levels that I’m releasing, I’m hoping to make the mechanics in the game *mostly* approachable enough that someone can understand them without doing a lot of training in the game. If you see quarks, maybe their behavior is clear and sensible, even if I tend to hold those levels until later in the game.

That’s a long (medium?) way of saying the game is still very much in development. If you’d like to see behind-the-scenes, you’re always welcome in the TestTubeGames Discord server, linked somewhere at the top of the page here.

Thanks for reading, thanks for playing, and thanks for your support!

-Andy