groovelet.com is a a a world wide web enabled videomatic game experience.

"What kind?", you are probably asking as a response to that first paragraph.

It's a massively multiplayer real-time card game about being a robot living in a cabin in the pacific northwest.

I know, that is a lot of things to be! Every 45 seconds in real actual time, you get a single turn where you can play a single hand of cards. Every hour in real actual time, a day goes by in the game. And after two weeks in real actual time, the entire universe is destroyed and your save file is deleted.

h2> okay, elevator pitch aside, what do I actually do?

The core mechanic is a little weird and hard to describe to people: you can play cards out of either the Forage or your Backpack.

(You play cards either by clicking-and-dragging them or by selecting them and hitting the "Play Card" button that appears.)

Once you've played a card, you have to wait until the turn ends (every 45 seconds) for your turn to actually resolve.

When you play a card out of your Backpack, it activates immediately, and most of the game’s puzzles are driven by playing the right combinations of cards out of your Backpack. Once played, the cards go into your Discard pile.

The Forage is a constantly rotating set of free cards that you can grab whenever you want, but when you play them out of the Forage you don’t activate the card right away - instead, the cards go into your Discard pile.

The Discard pile isn’t the end of those cards, though, because any time you want you can spend a turn playing the Rest card to move your Discard pile back into your Backpack. So, every turn you get to choose between snagging a free card from the Forage to add to your deck forever, or actually playing cards from your Backpack to try to accomplish goals.

This keeps happening again and again, until the end of the day, at which point a whole mess of your cards get eaten by MIDNIGHT and you start all over at the beginning of a new day.

h2> massively multiplayer solitaire

As of right now, there aren't actually any multiplayer interactions in the game. The whole thing has a bunch of complex server machinery under the hood, but you won't encounter another soul while playing it.

I haven't quite figured out which parts of this want to be multiplayer, yet. I'm thinking maybe an in-game post office?

h2> it super doesn't work on your phone

This game is PC only baby, all of the game's windows are just way too small to click on an iPhone or android.

Adding a portable client is scheduled for "if the game ever has more than 0 fans" and also "when I have time" and also "maybe when the game is more complete"

h2> retro vibes

I learned to computer 30 years ago and I'm not going to let anybody forget it.

h2> slow games

This is a slow game. Some of its bones are stolen from games like The Longing and Cultist Simulator. It takes a pretty long time to build up anything, and, on top of it, no matter how much you build, in two weeks it will always be destroyed.

The story of the game is intended to be slowly layered in over real actual human years, with the game and its story getting a little bit bigger and a little bit more complete on every cycle. If I accidentally fuck up a cycle really badly, well, retcons should be pretty easy in an environment where the entire universe gets destroyed every two weeks.

You don't have to feel stressed to play any given cycle: the game will always still be there for you, mayble a little better, even, on the next cycle.

h2> art nouvelle

I'm entirely too weird and indie and experimental to be able to afford to pay an artist, so all of the art for this game is either developer art (see: badly scribbled by me, an ape), cobbled together out of cheap royalty-free content packs, stolen from the 90's, or AI-generated.

I'm proud of the terrible music, in particular.

If you, an artist, make fan-art out of literally anything you find, send it to me and I will cherish it. @cube_drone / [email protected]

h2> what do I do?

The best thing to do in the alpha build is to break the log-conomy wide open, make friends with a crow, then get fucked up on hallucinogenic mushrooms and raid your dreams for powerful cards that cause the game to crash.

h2> alpha build

it's really important to note that this game is in alpha, now. there is something like a 900% chance that if you open it up, the game might crash and accidentally destroy all of your data. worst-case scenario? your computer lights on fire. dd

However, and this is pretty important to point out, the game has reached the point where I find it fun to donk around with for about 45 minutes. That is a new record: I've made a game that's fun (for me) for any length of time.

So despite the possibly-intentional lack of polish on display here, I hope that you give this a try, and then tweet your opinions at me, @cube_drone / [email protected]

Or, if you know me in person (at this phase of development, I have trouble imagining anybody playing the game who I haven't directly coerced with cookies or cornered into talking about it at a dinner party), uh, just tell me what you think in person.

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