I can't pretend it's play testing any more. These are the levels I keep going back to.

In 3D Waka, it's OMG and The Glasscherries. Waka is accomplishment. I finish a board and I feel like I did something.

Stonebreaker is a little of that, but mostly it's what I like watching happen. The Disco Balls. Bouncy House. The Jellies. Stuck Balloons: I never tire of the way they bounce around.

The Long Wall, where I'm constantly trying to beat my own five-minute points record. Same for The Rally.

I'd put The Game of Life on this list too, but it was all out in the open and over too fast. Good for speed-record chasers, not much else. So today it got two thick steel bars, one across the middle from the right and one higher up from the left. Now you have to thread the ball through the gaps to get at the colony.

I grew up feeding quarters into Pac-Man, and I always wanted to draw my own maze. Now anyone can.

The 3D Waka level builder is open to everyone. It's a free maze maker and level editor that runs in your browser. No download, no install.

Paint the walls, the dots and the power pellets. Drop in the monster pen and your starting spot. Add stones you lean into to shove, cog bars that turn, moving walls, gates and gate openers. Boards go up to 60 by 60. Press Play it and you're inside your own maze in 3D, straight away.

Sign in with Google and your mazes save to your own folder. Make one public and anyone can play it and give it stars. The most-starred mazes top the builders' board, and the best ones can go into the game itself, in a Community Mazes menu: Scott emails you an offer first, $30 or $10 plus a lifetime pass to the whole game, and your name goes on it. You can also vote on which new pieces get made next.

I built this for the people who still remember where the arcade was in their town: the 80s arcade crowd, the Gen X players who never really stopped. Come build with me.

Oooooh, so spooky ...

The Corn Maze at Night is a 3D Waka board in a cornfield by lantern light. The monsters are in bedsheets tonight, and in the dark you see only their eyes. Free to everyone until Nov 2.

What feels good?

If it doesn't feel good, my brain can't continue working on it.

That's true across the entire game, right down to every level of every arcade cabinet.

I noticed the Stonebreaker walls I like playing are the ones that move on their own. The steel ring turning around Little Green Men. The planets going round in Solar System. Bricks that loop. Walls that are fun to watch BEFORE you even serve the ball.

So I went looking for more of that, but nothing like those two.

That turned into The Kaleidoscope: two mandalas of coloured glass, mirror images of each other, turning opposite ways and breathing in and out. Hit one piece and the congruent pieces break everywhere else too.

Also working on a clockwork of meshing gears and a row of pendulums that drift in and out of step are still under construction - they don't look great - yet. Like everything else, if they become too much of a pain I'll just delete.

3D Waka got a stack of new mazes out of a big brainstorming session. In The Ducklings you lead a line of ducklings to the pond. In The Fog, SPACE blows fog around and you sail right through the monsters. The Greenhouse needs you to get every plant blooming at the same time.

Way back I wanted a conveyor belt in Contraption with little workers at it, and never followed through. It's there now. The Loading Dock has two workers and a belt, and a box that drops in while your ball is in the air. It came with a crane, a press, a sorting office, a water wheel, a kiln door and a lift. Everything over level 15 is very much a work in progress.

Two of the cabinets also play themselves now - Stonebreaker and 3D Waka - just like the old arcade games. Open the cabinet, wait 18 seconds without touching anything and it starts a demo.

Now the hard part.

This dev log is part of building in public. And building in public means people have to actually see it. Up to now I've mostly built this for myself, and I have to start putting it in front of strangers. That's the part I've been putting off.

So this week I'm starting an email list, just for letting you know when new walls and levels land, and an itch.io page is coming after that.

For now, I'm leaving myself wide open:

My email is [email protected].

Text me at 705 710 1074

I was expecting to run out of new wall ideas for Stonebreaker.

But with enough ADHD, it seems like there's no end to them.

Little Green Men: a green planet of tiny bricks inside a ring of steel, and 4 UAP's.

The Volcano: Self explanatory.

And many more.

The main thing I want now is your feedback and your ideas for new walls to build.

Progress continues apace to improve and declutter the appearance of everything in the Township.

I may be a 60 year old man but I have to say, I like the cutesy stuff, like the faeries that yell at you when you chop down trees, but then use their magic to regrow them.

Run of Five is a playing-card based board game that hits my sweet spot in terms of complexity and strategy.

Jacks replaced with:

I keep researching what games are popular now.

What games are GenX playing? Is it pointless for me to try to build for younger people? In most cases, yes - because I don't like the appearance of today's frantic visual noise games. I only want to game on my laptop.

I don't want to be a "Get off my lawn!!!" guy but I worry about the kids and their phones, genuinely. I know I'm not getting enough exercise now, but even as a kid with asthma, I used to get plenty, well into my 40's. I don't know what I'd be like now if, back then, I'd had my face buried in a frantic dopamine micro-reward onslaught black rectangle a foot from my face for 8 hours a day. Implications for eye health alone are staggering.

Huge realization: what Contraption "wants to be" is intentionally complicated. It was subconscious at first but it turned out to be the whole point.

So I changed the rules:

Moonwalk just expanded into a space travel arc. Solve the moon's surface, then its depths, then travel to Mars, solve Mars, head off to, I'm guessing for now, Saturn's planets.

If I go beyond that, it'll probably be a leap into extended cryosleep, a transfer of the astronaut's consciousness to a computer, or even dimension-hopping. Who knows. My brain is pretty much out of control right now.

I made some old-school text adventures this summer, and I wanted them all to look like they were being played on a Commodore 64.

THE DROWNED FAIR is the one I built by hand. A real parser, real rooms, and a map that draws itself as you go.

The rest have a narrator running them: STARWARD DRIFT, AFTER THE LAST VISITOR, THE FORGETTING LIGHT, ORIENTATION, THE SAND CLOCK.

The thing people ask about is the look. Light blue border, dark blue screen, blocky white type, a cursor that blinks and waits.

It might just be a preference I can't argue myself out of. Is my brain too old to want a new version of something I already loved? Possibly.

I don't know, but I do know that if I tried to optimize it for whatever younger people want right now, I wouldn't have bothered to keep working on it.

The C64 screen isn't nostalgia bolted onto the front. A CRT screen that's only 320 x 200 pixels is the perfect tool for the job - it needs the full extent of your imagination to make it real.

Also it looks fantastic, and I'm 60, and it's my game.

You have to understand - I was NEVER a game dev before, but at 60, I suddenly am one. And it's the little things that are the most satisfying.

Contraption begins: stone walls, levers, plates, a catapult, a green exit portal ... trying to make my vision for a no-rush visual puzzle game real. I can "feel" what I want it to be, but it's quite hard making it visually real.

My Boulder Dash, Montezuma's Revenge, Jungle Hunt and Robotron tributes get relegated to behind-the-scenes, "under construction" status. Which is sad, but this is what ADHD does in real life when you're being creative - it constantly creates a fractal explosion of failed projects, limited by the fact that it's just you working on it without a team of programmers, designers and managers.

But I'm growing happier with what has survived and expanded.

Moonwalk

Oddly I think it's the weird connection between my 1980's obsession with Omega Race (an Asteroids variant) and the Tokyo Drift phenomenon - acceleration, then foot-off-the-gas and controlled slide.

Moonwalk gave me the same controls (but without the slide) - hold down the Up Arrow key, use left and right keys to slightly adjust my path. Everything evolved from there - rewards (diamonds), limits (oxygen), enemies (meteors and UFO's).

Turns out the whole origin of this was simply a Montezuma's Revenge clone called Covert's Revenge. It was going to prove to me that the latest tools really could let me finally create games, and weren't just hype I saw on YouTube.

That worked. And ironically, it's actually better than the Monty Zoom version I spent much more time on. My brain exploded from there, and I began going in wild new directions with old favourites.

game.html - that's it, one file - I had to dig up a version from Google Drive to remember what it was and how this started.

One file, game.html, built with no plan and low expectations - was just an experiment and I genuinely had no idea it would launch a big game build.

I had to dig up an old version to find out what game.html was: an attempted rebuild of Montezuma's Revenge, the 1980's game for Commodore 64 and other consoles. I still love the graphics of it - so blocky but they made it beautiful. The actual rebuild didn't work out, but it led to a lot of the things currently in the Alderhoard universe.

I made a C64 game (text adventure) in the 1980s called The Fortress Of Grishnak, resulting from my love of the Infocom text adventures. I even made my own 6502 assembly language to run it - a brute force simple language parser to run the game faster than Commodore Basic could.

God I feel old.