Scribble Exploration was originally made in 48hs for the Kenney's Game Jam with the theme "Exploration". I had and still have a lot of changes and features I want to implement, but for this little update I wanted to address a piece of feedback from the previous "testers":  get rid of the minimap and show the painted (explored) tiles on the game "board" itself. Also, I wanted to add menus and make the game feel more complete, at least from the game loop's perspective.

If you want to know a bit more about the original game, my design decisions and my future hopes, check out my previous devlog / jam postmortem.

Improvements

To achieve the goal of this jam I added/modified/erased these things:

• Local coop support / singleplayer with multiple pieces
• A new view into the enemy to better visualize its progress in the minimap's place
• Changes in the HUD's layout
• New menus: Main menu, settings menu, pause menu.
• New video and audio settings (minimal)
• Turn management overhaul
• Painted tiles are now seen on the same plane as the "board pieces"

The future

The way I see it, the current set up is a very rough and very bare bones sandbox which is impossible to win or lose as it would take ages to complete one loop. Kind of aweful for the Jam experience. My idea going forward is to create levels that are much smaller in scale and can be completed much faster, with some puzzle elements to make the player think about their moves and also add more moves to the players, like abilities or different movesets like chess.

I currently have a system on which the players compete to fill up the map, but what if I want to add enemies at random and have the players fight them? I'm imagining that painting all the tiles the enemy has painted and completely surrounding it would render it "dead". These encounters would provide difficulty to the puzzles and start engaging the player a bit more. The current system gets boring after a bit I imagine.

Let me know your thoughts! (I'm kind of wandering about without an aim in mind but this plan I just thought about makes sense to me atm)