—- .-. .. —. .. -. … ORIGINS —- .-. .. —. .. -. …
Whilst running a collaborative workshop showing the capabilities of the Makey Makey, I got hold of some clothes pegs. After building a tiny piano, the idea of using pegs to build a morse controller sprung to mind.
I mulled over a couple of prototype routes on paper - Morse whispers (Chinese Whispers with Morse Code), Mastermorse (Mastermind with Morse), but decided to test the mechanic with a good old fashioned game of Battleships. After discovering that getting the player to input the position of their ships initially to be a tedious process, I chose instead to have the game spawn ships randomly and drift across the screen as moving targets. I originally settled on the name Dot Dot Splash (I LOVE MY PUNS), but I wanted to explore the possibilities further.
Looking into adding depth to the game, I used the First World War as the setting, which opened up the possibilities for air and land. The trenches leant themselves quite nicely to this kind of gameplay, as I can remember from Secondary School history lessons discussing how artillery would be fired in tactical formations for varied use (e.g. The Creeping Barrage).
The thing that’s fascinated most about working on this project is within the first month of working on the project, I went from having no experience with Morse to being able to remember most of the Alphabet and all numbers, something that has only become more fluent over the time of developing the project. It might be considered a dead language (as we have tech that can perform the same thing faster and clearer), but you never know where this skill might come in useful.
Stay tuned for more updates coming soon! If you’re wanting to find out more about Morse, check out the links below:
PLAYABLE BUILD.—. .-.. .- -.— .- -… .-.. . / -… ..- .. .-.. -..
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