Fifty Days of UFO 50: Day 41

Screenshot of the ending to UFO 50's Magic Garden. Tiny sprites of the female protagonist wearing purple and the "jealous witch" Cloveranna wearing blue on a black background. They're facing each other on the right of the screen under the caption "WE NEED TO HELP EACH OTHER, NOT TEAR EACH OTHER DOWN."

    Man, oh, man does it ever feel good to finally get the gold cartridge on Magic Garden!
And what a vindication of my ability to pick up on vaguely Sapphic vibes, given the tone of that post I wrote long before seeing how it ends.

[The, *ahem* rivals-to-friends tone implied by the character designs were not exactly subtle, but you're unusually dense when it comes to such things, so perhaps that's why it feels like some sort of prediction feat from your perspective...]

I didn't score highly enough to get the cherry, but this should loosen the grip of cuteness that I've been subjecting myself to at the start of every play session for several days now. It starts with a puzzle or two in Block Koala, which has only resulted in clearing something like twenty of what I hope is fifty block pushing puzzles. I'm not exactly a Sokoban slouch per se; I've yet to get properly stuck on any of them, but they're only going to get harder.

After that dose of pastel checkerboard adorability, I'd been getting in a few Magic Garden runs before moving on to larger games, so that was an additional dose of grid-based sugar and spice! The base mechanics I'd gleaned on my own only got me so far prior to listening to the Magic Garden episode of the Eggplant: The Secret Lives of Games podcast. I doubt one NEEDS to know about details like the oppie counts at which potions cleanly pre-upgrade to gold in order to beat the game, but it helped. Shame on me for not noticing that the pink-oppie-in-play count increments only when you collect a gold potion, right?

In the end, the main factor that cracked it was just time, which should be a lesson to me and never a surprise. I'm sure the two or three runs a day I was engaging with were better practice than nothing, but an uninterrupted string for something like twenty attempts cracked the 200 oppie condition on Magic Garden wide open.

The other big game design takeaway is just how much mechanical depth an arcade-style game can have. I don't spend a lot of time in those spaces, and Magic Garden's got more nuance than most of its root inspirations, but it's got me wondering...
When I think about potential game projects these days, they inevitably scope creep themselves into a series of shelved briefs and paper designs. It never occurs to me to bring some "quarter munching" energy to the task, perhaps because arcades started to close down right around the time I got my first job and had enough money to hang out in them. If I ever manage to create something with half the charm of Magic Garden packed into that small of a design space...
Well, let's dream small before dreaming big, shall we?

Now, if I can just stop ping-ponging back and forth between failed runs in Campanella 2 and Rock On! Island for long enough to solve more block pushing puzzles...

Screenshot of the level select area in UFO 50: Block Koala. A verdant green pixel art garden filled with stones hedgerows, and planters laid out in checkerboard tile patterns. Cartoon worms are coiled near locked gates and issuing the dialogue "YOU'LL NEED 30 STARS TO OPEN THIS GATE!"

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