Started work on a sorting game
My wife owns a book "The Art of Cleanup" by Ursus Wehrli. It was given to her by a friend, who was very impressed, the first time she set foot in her house and it was so neat and tidy. I saw it in our bookshelf and found it funny, but also inspiring for a game concept.
You see, The Art of Cleanup is a collection of before and after photographs. The before one depicts a normal situation, and the after one depicts the same situation after someone had obsessively tidied up the scene. This deconstructing and resorting of things that have no need of sorting makes for a very humourous read. And the best thing is, the book does not use any formal language, but our understanding of order. I've found that I could put it in front of anyone, and they got the joke pretty quickly.
At the same time, I've seen an interest in (re)stocking and organising videos, where you can see a fridge or shelves be stocked in a very meticulous fashion, through a heavily edited timelapse video. The result is a highly soothing experience, as viewing these allows you to experience some of the satisfaction tidying up can bring, without doing any of the work.
This coincided with me abandoning yet another game prototype because the scope was just too big for me to handle, while being a father and husband, and hold a full time job. And this idea of sorting things that have no need of sorting would make for a small and cozy game idea. And best of all, I only saw two problems that needed to be proven feasible: drag & drop, and clustering.
Prototype
So I got to work on making a prototype, and I am happy to say I managed to make one in a week. You can drag the cubes and spheres and the game will automatically detect clusters and assign them a colour.
Downloads