Notepad Games

For a while now I have had this idea stuck in my head that I keep coming back to whenever I have a notebook and a pen in front of me. I am calling it Notepad Games for now.

The idea is simple. Notepad Games are a series of procedurally generated games that can be played on a plain paper notepad. Each game is generated from a seed, so every notepad is unique, and the same game can have infinite variations just by changing the seed. You print it (or draw it), grab a pen, and play.

The part I find most fun is that you can also combine multiple games into one notepad. A maze on one page can lead into a different kind of puzzle on another. More on that later.

I have been sketching out a few of these in my own notebook to see which ones actually feel good to play. Here are the ones I have so far.

This is the most straightforward one to explain. It is a multi-page maze game, with several exits and entrances on each page.

The rules go like this:

• On the first page, start at the entrance. This is marked with s.
• On each page, find the staircase. This is marked with ↑ or ↓.
• Reach ↓ to go to the next floor. On the next floor, start at ↑ in the same spot. Once you reach a staircase, you must take it.
• Some floors have multiple staircases. Progress through the floors to reach the last page.
• On the last page, find the exit. This is marked with x.

I drew a simple two-page prototype first, just to check that the floor-to-floor idea worked at all.

And here is the solution traced out in red, so you can see how the path flows across the two pages.

Once that felt right, I drew a more complex version with five pages to see if the "must take the staircase" rule kept things interesting across a longer run. It does, especially when a floor has more than one staircase and you have to commit.

I also put together a small PDF demo of the Labyrinth game so I could print it out and play it properly away from the screen. Here is the PDF if you want to print one for yourself.

This one is inspired by the ice skating sections in Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal, where you slide until you hit something. If you have played those games, you know exactly the kind of head-scratching this leads to.

The rules:

You can start at any point on the top left. From any square you can go down or right. But once you pick a direction, you can only go straight. You keep sliding until you hit a wall, and then you can pick a direction again. Repeat until you reach the stairs to go to the next page.

Here is my single-page prototype for it.

And the solution.

This is the one I am most fond of conceptually. You are a lone astronaut lost in space. You send a mayday signal out to all the stars around you to find your way home.

You fill in the circles with arrows (←, →, ↑ or ↓). Each signal travels in a straight line until it hits an arrow, which bends the signal in that direction. The goal is to connect all the stars by placing the arrows just right. It is a quiet little routing puzzle, and it has a nice theme to go with it.

This one is still mostly an idea in my head. It is inspired by Trick Room from Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald, where the usual order of things gets flipped around. I want to play with that idea of inverting the rules on a page.

Beyond the ones I have actually prototyped, there are a few more rattling around that I have only written down so far:

• Continuum — like Portal, but on paper. This is the one I would love to combine with Labyrinth, so a portal on page 2 could drop you onto page 30.
• Paper Duel — a monster battle game. This one needs a lot more research. The idea is that you collect energy across a few pages, and face monsters every five pages.
• Prairie — basically a grid version of Sheeping Around.

There is something charming about games that need nothing but paper and a pen. No batteries, no screen, no updates. And the procedural generation angle means I can make as many of them as I want, each one slightly different.

It is still very early, and most of this lives in a notebook and a couple of PDFs right now. But it has been a nice change of pace from my usual projects, and I wanted to write it down before the idea drifted away.

If you want to follow along or poke at the code, I have started putting things together over on GitLab: gitlab.com/himkp/notepad-games.

Until next time...

~fleon