Stamptory: A multi-tasking challenge

I was spending an evening at Starbucks with my friend Rocky. There wasn't much for me to do besides waiting for my Frappuccino. I was scrolling through WeChat, checking for new messages until I unconsciously began swiping the chat boxes.

Swipe to delete. A common feature of many apps. But I found a ‘pattern’. If you swipe one of the rows, the other row, if have been swiped, would return to the normal state. This gave me an inspiration for a game. Since you only could swipe one item at a time, given enough design, it might be a challenging and fun experience.

If you rotate your phone by 90˚, the swipes become stamps that “stamp” onto the edge of your screen. That was the game idea - Stamptory.

In stamptory, you operate a food factory where raw food has to be “stamped” into process food. Like WeChat, you can only operate one stamp at a time. Each stamp is only valid for a specific item, if you stamp an item with a wrong stamp, you lose. This makes the game challenging because, if you aren't paying attention, you might easily miss an item passing through your stamp.

Here's how the gameplay looks like. Of course, this might be too easy for some people. Difficulty can be increased by adding more stamps.

The 5-stamps is so hard that I fail at times.

A lot of my friends tried Stamptory and agreed it was a challenging and fun game, with a very unique core mechanics. When I told them I got the inspiration from WeChat. No one believed me! Well, it does show that good game design comes from unexpected places.