Shape-shift miner. The window is the game
A Python game jammed together at Torshus folkehøyskole. You mined, built turrets and mines, upgraded yourself (standard small-game stuff), but the trick was the window. Some upgrades did not just buff your character; they extended the OS window itself, sprouting irregular limbs out of the rectangle so the play space became a shape no game window has any business being.
A minute of testing.
The mechanic
- Mine. Swing a pickaxe at procedurally generated stone, get resources, build turrets and mines.
- Upgrade. Normal upgrade-tree stuff, plus one strange upgrade type: extend the window. Each extension stuck a new rectangle onto the existing window at some angle.
- Result. A play space that was no longer a rectangle. Different game-feel, weird occlusion problems, lots of fun edge cases.
The state of the build
The latest copy I recovered is a half-finished testing version: still on Python 3.8, the shop is mostly empty, only one stone type is generated, and a mining bot is just standing around as a placeholder. The video above shows me poking at it alone, but the core mechanic is visible: the window changes shape as the game progresses.
What I took from it
That the OS window is part of the game, even when nobody is looking. Most games treat the window like a passive frame; treating it as a piece of state the player can deform is a whole design space I would happily come back to.