Pencil Flick
(August 2006)
An action game that fits on a business card. Mark a path by pushing a pencil out on the surface of the card. Get from one end to the other without hitting a block.
"Pencil Flick" business card.
When I set out to draw up business cards for myself, it was only natural that I would want to make a game out of them. I set some constraints on the exercise that made it more challenging: it had to be a game, not a puzzle; it had to be a single-player game; it couldn't interfere with the practical functions of a business card (no damaging the card or obscuring my contact information); the rules had to fit on the card itself.
Since a business card doesn't contain a computer that can track game state, I looked away from video games for inspiration, and instead thought about the simple pencil-and-paper games with which children have whiled away boring study halls for generations. After settling on the pencil-flick mechanic, I drew out a level that supported the natural motion of a sliding pencil, and allowed for multiple paths across the card.
The instructions were kept terse, partly because of the limited space available, and partly because I was inspired by the haiku-like pithiness of instructions on old Pong arcade machines: "Deposit Quarter / Ball Will Serve Automatically / Avoid Missing Ball For High Score."