Version 5.0 - Idle Motivator Proto

CHANGELOG:

• Tiles quantity is now limited and you gain more through prototype of passive idler
  
• Added new "Bridge" area (Thanks DearFox for pretty water tile pixelart)
• Blocks now have baked-in contrast on each side
  

BLOG:

I've been taking a long break from this project. The original intention was to just scratch an itch of coding placeable tiles, so that was done. And I've got to found out that I have no personal interest in pure building games with no external stimulus, which, too, was an original experiment. I don't think it's possible to appeal to other players with pure blocking game either, because if they want to explore themselves, they will do it on famous AAA gaming platforms that have huge playerbase and ease of sharing. Thus the new project direction from now on will involve: 

1) Gamification as a method to interest myself in pure block building genre

2) Adding a piece of my soul, giving environment its own personality, in other words give exploration value for other players in this game in particular

This one will stay a pure building block game, because I think it's better for me to make other projects for when I will want to explore my hunter-scavenger type of fun.

I have implemented a minimal idler and inventory system. We have a limit of blocks we can place, and we have an idler system with no interaction. Values of wait time and max quantity right now are chosen arbituary and I will be getting a feel for it by using these myself. It works by waiting offline too.  I call this system "metagame" since it's not tied to any world. I do think that this is way too basic, but I want to learn to game design such system at my own pace through methods of minimalism.  The idea is to simply see if it makes me feel any more interest in actually playing this, even a tiny spark.

By the way, while "Metagame" option gives you "Save metagame" option, I am making sure it autosaves as much as possible. It's still recommended to press it. Especially on HTML5 version that I can't make "run this code when closing browser page".

We have a new "Bridge" area which not only has a nice visual mood, but gives a more definitive, albeit non-explicit, direction of building.

And the last, contast of block sides. I want to stick with as lo-fi graphical quality as possible in order to capture simplicity. Yet "Cave" type of a level that I've added was impossible and ugly, using a single block to define environment that also doesn't have any recognizable pattern in stone pixelart (which was intended to have that alpha feel I longed for). Remembering that certain Doom style games implemented fake wall contrast depending on wall direction, I have baked contrast right into textures of the blocks. I could have used shaders, but I don't feel ready to learn them yet, and it was a fun exercises in a way, to automate later. 

Looking at the result of adding contrast, it is a good improvement that actually gives the world a bit more sense of order. You can compare it with older screenshots. I will think about it more later.

Ok, time for another big break, this project is just going to be a side toy to sometimes try ideas on.