Halfmoji

The Beginning: One afternoon as I was taking a break from doing manual labour on our new house, I realized a brilliant accident that I happen to implement in one of the games that I created. It was so good that it cuts the development time of my games by a significant margin compared to designing them from scratch. What was that happy accident? Icons, UNICODE standard icons. I used them for my game Wild Kingdom, a sorting logic game where you sort the icons by similarity in their own respective lanes.

Having realized this "shortcut", I did some thinking as to what other game I can create using the same or more icons from the UNICODE standard. Hours have passed and I still couldn't think of a new game to create that utilizes them. The next day, while I was about to pee, I was looking for the left foot of my slippers. I found it somewhere under my bed one of my dogs probably pushed it there, I pulled it under the bed then slid it beside the right pair, and then it hit me. CUT THE EMOJIS IN HALF THEN FIND AND MATCH WITH THE OTHER HALF!

The Revolutionary Mechanic: The revolutionary mechanic I've thought of is cutting the existing emojis in half using some programming magic, and then find the match and move them close together to make them whole! I've never played a game like that before, and so I think this one is the first? I could be wrong but that's not the point anymore. A flash of genius!

So I hopped on my keyboard to work on the prototype (after peeing of course), and then an hour or two later I had it. A simple matching emoji game that utilizes the Unicode emojis. I showed it to my dad, he was not impressed lol but I loved the game. It is the most casual game I have ever played, there was almost zero cognitive load. It is probably the most casual game I have ever played in my life.

The Design: I wanted the design to be as simple and as chill as possible, I decided on using a baby blue background and simple black text and icons. I have also decided to add a leveling system just so that the user has a sense of progression with the game. As you level up, an icon is added to the pairing.

There is not much complexity when it comes to the design because I really just wanted the most chill game and I think this is the one that takes that spot. I added some simple cute sounds to it using JavaScript so as not to use an external audio file and keep the file size small. I also added the most basic buttons just a continue button in the start if you are level 2 and above, and just a Start button if you are starting fresh.

There is something about creating a game so simple that makes it so satisfying. It did not require too much brain power for complex instructions besides the ruminating for the core mechanic idea.

The Name: Believe it or not it took me hours of thinking about the name, this is probably the hardest part in creating this game and is still the hardest part when I am creating a game, thinking of a name. After a few hours of testing out different name ideas, all of them sounded like a dating app if it add a "pair" or "match" with it, so all the names I've thought of with those words are scrapped.

I thought, what in the world can I call a game that matches a pair by matching their halves..... half... half of emojis... HALFMOJI!

And so the name was born: Halfmoji.

The Lesson: What I learned creating this game is that not all good games have to be complex. It could be as simple as matching a pair of a whole cut in half and it can still be entertaining, and fun, and cute, and very casual.

I have proven to myself that in this game development journey:

it's not always about inventing something new; what matters is creating a new experience from things that already exist.

Closing thoughts: I will keep updating this game with more icons in the future, but for now, I am happy with what it is.