It's been a while since I posted anything here, but I've been playing with lots of ideas! Here are some of them:
Tourist
A pathfinding puzzle game. Visit every unvisted tile without going back on yourself.
This started as me wanting to make a game that uses only black and white tiles, which is an effective resolution of 25x15. This kind of simple puzzle might be familiar as it appears in games like Zelda and Pokemon, and it can often be found as a standalone game using a "lawn mowing" premise.
The dpad is used to solve the puzzles, while the B button is used to reset the current puzzle. The puzzles are arranged vertically so that the crank can be used to scroll through them. I also aimed for consistency in having the puzzles start in the bottom-left, so the player knows (roughly) where to look to begin. All of this was to solve for not wanting any other tiles, including text.
At first I just tried making abstract puzzles. They were kind of fun, but lacked charm. Switching up to picross-style images-as-puzzles felt a lot better! The releasable game I'm aiming for has several sets of puzzles, each around a theme and with their own linear progression. The clip above shows the start of a Resonant Tale set!
Splitting the game into sets does mean I now have a horizontally scrolling menu which does use text and tiles other than black/white in appearance, but I think that's a fair concession to making a more polished experience.
Little Hungers
An uneasy walk through the woods.
The forest at night is a dangerous place for a mouse.
I've only made a few screens, but I envision Little Hungers as a micro adventure game or walking sim. It's horror-adjacent, but more about general vibes of unease than actual frights or peril. I want every screen to be unique and visually appealing with differing perspectives yet minimalistic in use of tiles.
This is the last room I created, faking a scrolling forest that is larger than the screen. It's all fakery, the trees arranged to make a nice repeating pattern and with the player actually looping around the centre of the room, with the player's "coordinates" tracked in code (shown here for debugging) and the animals drawn in based on those coordinates. I think it's pretty effective!
Bunk-A-Bust
A vertical orientation crank controlled bomb survival game.
Back when I was playing Little Big Planet on PS3, "bomb survival" levels were all the rage. I'm not sure where the specific genre originated, but in LBP they were quick and easy to make and fun to play, so there were loads of them. I thought a crank controlled Pulp-made variation would be a fun project, but I lost motivation given real-world events. It's parked for now, but I would like to revist it as the core gameplay is fun!
Pulp Fishing Prototype
A proof of concept for top-down fishing with the crank!
Probably the most complex code-wise of all of the above, this proof of concept is fully playable. It's hard to tell without UI elements and actual visuals, but there are multiple stages to fishing. You can move around to find a spot, then get locked in place when you cast your line. Casting involves you selecting distance and direction which are based on rod stats. You then have to wait for a bite and press A quickly enough to hook the fish, then reel it in with the crank while it fights against you - there's line strength in there too, just without any indication yet! Similarly unclear is that the fish you hook have their own stats (like exhaustion) and each water tile has its own set of fish that are catchable, with odds that can vary by tile and can be modified by your choice of lure.
That's all I'd like to share for now... but I've also been thinking about possible sequel ideas for Resonant Tale, as well as wanting to revisit some of my earlier pulp prototypes! I should definitely pick something to stick with through to completion but... that's always the hard part!
I'd love to hear what (if any) of the above people think is most exciting 
