Playing with the Apple II at the computer history museum felt cool. Things were so simple back then. Can I give a similar feeling of simplicity and toy programming?
Monochrome big-pixel graphics. You don’t need to be able to draw to have fun.
Low hardware limits to make things interesting. Doing complex stuff should not be trivial :-)
Restylable consoles from Ender’s Game. Why shouldn’t you be able to receive messages and display them bouncing around the border of the screen? The screen is a shared resource. The console is a shared resource. Background programs can manipulate both. How do you avoid the flickering that happens when two programs both draw to the screen? Need some consistent priority.
- notification (on top)
- application (main body)
- daemon (no show)
What makes a wizard different from a programmer? Cost of wizardry. If a programmer has the control structure in their head, it’s easy to put down. A wizard who knows a Great Spell still has to sacrifice to enact it. Or spells have Side Effects(TM) that build up over multiple castings and must be dealt with (flushed purged consumed mopped up) or 5422 Bad Things will Happen. The purely functional wizard is all-powerful (ecological reduce reuse recycle).
Wyrd Energies build up over multiple castings. A Tidy Wizard deals with them as they go. A Desperate Wizard lets them build up for the advantage that they have in casting spells faster. Some sort of meters or discrete elements that build up and interact with each other. The danger of letting them ride is violent interaction (antimatter x matter with a side of Dark Plutonium).
Shooting marbles into a box and if they touch other marbles they interact. Throwing dice into a box and hoping they don’t bump the other ones.
Wyrd energies are scary because they’re unpredictable. Each one makes it harder to predict what something simple will do.