Grésil, an idle game where the only thing to look at is your money

There’s a fourth thing on the bench and it’s called Grésil. It’s an idle game where cubes fall on their own into a shape and where those cubes are your currency, so when you spend you watch the screen empty out. Everywhere else money is a number going up in a corner while you look at something else, here there’s nothing to look at but your money.

Every purchase shows on screen

You start with an empty shape that fills up with cubes. You spend them to go faster, to store more, to open bigger shapes. Up to there it’s a normal idle, except the counter and the scenery are the same thing, so a purchase costs you what you were looking at.

Then you unlock families of cubes and that’s where it starts. A family has its colours, its gravity, the parts of the shape it avoids and the parts it joins. All of that is set by hand, slider by slider.

With several families tuned together, you get asked for figures: rebuild the French flag with three families, reproduce sand running through an hourglass. They end up solving themselves if you wait, but you can solve them yourself too.

441 commits and nothing to show you

There’s no build and no screenshot. What exists today is the core: the simulation that drops the cubes, the economy tuned by simulation rather than by feel, the solver that checks a requested figure can be reached.

The rest sits in a design document I’ve been rewriting for a month. It’s the longest thing I’ve ever started, so I’d rather tell you now than put out a page with three render images that wouldn’t be the game. No date. When I have something to show, it’ll be here.

The flashing limit never turns off

There are a lot of cubes on screen, they can pulse all together and their rhythm is a setting you control, so nothing would stop a dangerous frequency from going in.

The game never goes past 3 flashes a second. The limit sits in the code at the one place everything passes through, so neither a modified save, nor a share code, nor the autopilot can get around it. It NEVER TURNS OFF, because it’s a safety limit rather than a comfort option.

3 a second is the W3C flashing threshold itself, not a margin taken below it. I’m saying so because the difference matters if you’re photosensitive.

What it won’t be

The game will ship on Steam, on Windows. There’ll be no Mac version, no version running in a browser, nothing on mobile or on itch, because those are ports I can’t handle on my own. There’ll be no multiplayer and no mods either. No telemetry will send anything back from your game.

What’s next

The core runs, so the next step is making it watchable: the families on screen, the sliders under your hand, enough to judge whether it holds past ten minutes.

Until then there’s the Grésil page, which says the same thing in more detail. If the idea sounds bad to you, tell me now rather than in six months.