It’s a shame we can’t embed playable text into Substack, isn’t it?
Also a shame that I didn’t have time to make a new version of Ice Dive, as I’d been planning to. This version is a little buggy, the mechanics are unbalanced and many of the lines need further shaping and shuffling.
But I wanted to end the advent calendar on a ludokinetic poem and this is the only ice-themed one I have — even counting the many pieces sitting around in various states of completion in the workshop. It was originally devised so as to be playable over a Zoom call — the player merely has to shout “Stop!” when they want to come up for air, whereupon I (the person in control of the game) click once to bring them back to the surface.
For what it’s worth, it is possible to finish the game, collecting all seven pieces of the ‘something’ it is you’re collecting. I’ve only managed it once, though.
This was so much fun to play -- I ran it several times! Is it just me, or do the words actually change with each run? 😅 I’m not sure if I collected all the pieces the first time, because I managed to go more than 140ft down (and I was focussed on the words!), but after that I couldn’t even reach 100… 🤭 How deep does it go anyway?