Follow the development of Stable, a video game about a hand, tube, and stuff.

Team of two

We're a tiny team of my friend and I. He programs, I draw. We both figure out ideas on how to have most fun. It's great!

Idea

Stable is a video game where you control a hand to grip blocks from a tube and sort them into boxes for points until the end of time. Or when your toilet break is over and you go back to what you usually do. We don't check.

Sketch

I put the pencil to paper and drew quick sketches that focus on what you, the player, do in Stable, and how that looks in my head.

A photograph of a paper on a table, with a pencil drawing of the game design concept for Stable, with annotations written in Norwegian
Digital visual concepts of Stable, exploring other placements of the tube, Grep the main character in Stable, and a light switch for difficulty

Incredibly rough ideas

When you reach a super secret special score, show a message on how to obtain a fancy limited edition physical reward.

Tube gets constipated and might explode when stuff get stuck in the tube opening. You need to pull the thing out of the tube end. Max amount on how much the tube can hold before exploding.

Achievements. Yep.

End-of-tube-tome. A thing that show things you've collected from the tube end.

Grep. Player character. Four fingered hand with two eyes and a mouth.

Plop. Non-player character. A worm like thing with two eyes and a very large mouth. Grep's main enemy. Plop eat blocks that Grep fail to catch. Maybe Plop is related to the tube?

Inspiration

Visuals are inspired by the strange clay chomp, munch, eating creature in the animation below, and please let me know if you know what it's from. Also mouse cursors, the ones that look like Mickey Mouse hands.

Game play is inspired by Tetris, and that annoying claw machine that never awarded you with that amazing plastic toy that you really wanted as a kid.

Game feel

Game feel is all the good stuff in a video game, like how everything sound, look, move, shake, and flow. Game feel is what I think is what's most fun about playing any kind of game, whether it's physically on a board, cards, or digitally.

Prototype

We have physics! So that when you drop a block into a box, the block collides with the box.

To do

There's a lot that goes into making a video game. Below I've written very simplified lists of what's done, doing, and to be done before Stable is done.

Earlier

Now

Later