EmoToon

Everybody who is not a complete psychopath 🔪 or corpse 🧟‍♀️ likes emojis or at least uses them to some extent 🥰. Emojis are pretty to look at 🦋, yet invisible 🫥. I actually enjoy modern communication 📡; we use emoji reactions to show that we read a message 👍, without the necessity of firing up 🔥 our internal word processor 🧠 to formulate an actual response 🤔. There are several problems, though 🚨, such as how emojis are displayed differently on every device 📲 and interpreted differently from person to person 🤦🏻‍♂️. Or that many emojis are still missing 🚫, either completely (seahorse, microchip, water bottle) or just on specific systems 📵.

However ☝️, these problems pale 🙀 in comparison ⚖️ with my biggest problem 😠: how randomly 🎲 they are assigned to their respective groups 👥. For example, why are the cat faces (😺😸😹😻😼😽🙀😿😾) under “Smileys & Emotion” but the monkey (🐵🙈🙉🙊) and sun/moon faces (🌞🌝🌛🌜🌚) under “Animals & Nature”? Why is there a combined super group that includes emotions (🤣😍😤), gestures (🤘🙌👌), body parts (🫀👂🦿), professions (👮💂🕵️‍♂️), minorities (👬🏻👨‍🦼🧜‍♀️), as well as clothes (🧥👔🎩), while another group is dedicated to just flags (🇹🇩 🇧🇳 🇪🇪)? Unfortunately ☹️, the search function 🔍 is usually worthless 📉 due to how I interpret certain emojis 🙇 differently than the developers 👨‍💻 and designers 👩‍💻.

• Smileys & Emotion: 😀😂😭😍😡
• People & Body: 👍🙏👏🙌🤝
• Animals & Nature: 🐶🐱🌳🌸🦋
• Food & Drink: 🍎🍞🍕🍺🍰
• Activities: 🎮⚽🎨🎵🏆
• Travel & Places: ✈️🚗🏠🗽🏔️
• Objects: 📱💡🔑✏️📦
• Symbols: ❤️✨♻️☮️♾️
• Flags: 🇬🇧 🇺🇸 🇯🇵 🇫🇷 🇩🇪

Since I always wanted to create a game ⚽ with emojis, I decided to make one that lets you train 🚅 the emoji groups at least subconsciously 😵‍💫. EmoToon is a tile-based arcade game 🎰 similar to Tetris 🪨, Connect Four 🖇️, and Candy Crush 🍬 (broad assumption since I never actually played the latter 🐝). It is coded entirely in PyGame 🐍 so you will not become addicted 💉 as it only runs on Windows computers 💻 (for now ⏰). Despite its casualness 👕, EmoToon does have some addictive elements 💊 to it, such as starting a new grid 🐣 and being greeted by all the lovely emoji tiles 😻.

In a bombshell 🌰, the game features a grid of 9-by-9 emoji tiles. You connect neighboring tiles of the same emoji group, and the longer the chain is 🧶, the higher the score you get 📈. The order within a chain does not matter, allowing you to backtrack 🔙 and even pass through dead cells receiving just a tiny score malus ➖. I even allowed diagonal ↗️ selection, which started as an accident 🦺 but became a core feature 💎. No idea how other developers solve ⚗️ the problem, but I did it by using octagonal 🛑 instead of square colliders 🟥, essentially allowing for dead spaces around the tile corners 🌽. The controls 🎛️ are so simple I do not have to explain them: click the mouse 🖱️, drag across all tiles you want to add to the chain 🧲, and release 🤯.

I quickly 🏃 gathered that learning the nine different emoji groups by only looking 🔎 at the emojis was too difficult 🧩. Therefore, I deviated 🔀 from my original goal 🥅 to make it a learning game 📚 and instead color-coded the tile background 🧮. That way, the game is played much faster 🚀, but the emojis themselves become less relevant 🦟. My sister Marlene 💃 (aka NannoCloud 🌦️) kindly helped with finding a harmonic 🪗 color palette and also contributed another great idea 💡 for improvement, but more on that in a second ⏱️.

As an active iOS user, I am familiar with the Apple emojis to a degree 🌡️ where I find most other emojis kind of ugly 🦢 (looking at you 👓, Facebook 📘). While the font Apple Color Emoji cannot be used on non-Apple devices, I quickly found a workaround by importing 📦 the emojis as PNG images instead of a font file 📁. As the emoji tiles are small, the overhead 👑 in terms of file size and loading times ⌚ remains bearable. I quickly found a repository 🗄️ of some 750 Apple emojis 🍎 as image files, which was incomplete 😶 and a bit outdated 📼 but enough to keep me motivated throughout development 🚵‍♀️. Only after I realized that Apple does not permit free use 💰 of their emojis for artistic projects 🎸, I started looking for alternatives ↩️. Trying to switch to an emoji font instead of image files once more 📂, I tested Noto Emoji by Google and Segoe UI Emoji by Microsoft ⌨️. However, I was immediately hit by more technical, licensing, and aesthetic issues 🪲.

Hence, I stuck with the image-based approach 🩻 and eventually stumbled upon OpenMoji 📖, which features open-source versions of all modern 🏙️ emojis in different sizes, in color as well as black and white, and as vectorized or rasterized graphics 🧺. The first results looked awful 🤮, but my sister suggested re-colorizing the emojis using the palette of nine colors 🎨 we already developed. The rest is history 🏛️: I quickly wrote a script 📝 that replaced all individual colors 💵 with the nearest one 💶 of the proven nine, giving EmoToon a look both pleasant 😊 and original 😮. Since emojis are identified by unique hex codes 🧙‍♀️, e.g. “1F6AC” for “smoking symbol” (🚬) or, to showcase joined emojis, “1F64D-200D-2640-FE0F” for “woman frowning” (🙍‍♀️), I could use this document to automatically 🤖 look up the respective emoji groups for each emoji image 🖼️. The resulting dataset 📊 contains 3,830 emojis in total and can easily be expanded 🐡 as new emojis are being developed 👨‍🔬.

Another decision I had to face early on was whether I wanted the emoji tiles to be affected by gravity 🌍, similar to Tetris, or not. While non-gravity 🛰️ leads to empty tiles, which allows for some interesting chaining strategies, gravity 🪂 feels more exciting, also enabling you to quickly remove useless tiles 🚮 and cluster the remaining tiles to create extremely long chains 🦩. Consequently, I implemented 👨‍🌾 both modes and let the game switch back and forth 🔄. Initially, one phase is 40 seconds long 🐌, but becomes one second shorter each round, down to a minimum of 5 seconds 🐆, which should install a sense of urgency 🏇 in the player. As a sort of non-numeric timer ⏳, a thin line moves around the grid, flashing to indicate imminent phase toggle 📸. The feeling of urgency is further exacerbated by the fact that the bottom row falls 🍂 through the floor at the end of each gravity phase, possibly removing tiles that are valuable 🏆 to the player.

To distinguish the two phases at a glance 👀, I made the empty (or dead) tiles dark 🔳 during gravity phase and bright 🔲 while gravity is disabled. Purely for aesthetic reasons and to instill a sense of mysticism 🪬 in the player, dead cells are also filled with letters 📧 from my own cipher font Caidoz 🕵️, which I somehow manage to sneak 🥷 into all of my game projects 🎳.

To spawn new 🆕 cells, I used a simple yet highly effective method 🎓: whenever a chain is released and cells are destroyed 🧨, all of the 9 columns are checked ☑️ individually. With K being the number of alive cells in a column, the chance for a new cell to spawn is random(0,1) > K/9, meaning 0% if the column is full (K=9) 🔋 and 100% when entirely empty (K=0) 🪫. This keeps the total number of live cells balanced around a half-filled grid 🌗, which the player can change by destroying 💣 either few or many cells during each chain release. In case you wondered, individual emojis can never appear twice 👯 on the same grid.

After I had the core loop ➰ up and running, I wanted to spice 🌶️ things up by enabling the player to save 💾 points for special events 📅. These are accessible by a button 🕹️ but limited to one use per round. While the individual events are determined uniform-randomly 🥼, they have different costs 💸 to account for their respective usefulness 📶:

• 📗 New (1 🪙): start a fresh board with a new selection of 81 emojis
• 🎲 Shuffle (2 🪙): randomly rearrange all alive and dead cells across the grid
• 🌊 Swap (4 🪙): randomly rearrange only alive cells
• 📥 Add (8 🪙): insert up to 9 new tiles into random dead cells
• ⏳ Fill (16 🪙): fill all dead cells with new alive tiles
• ♻️ Revive (32 🪙): flip all previously dead cells back to alive
• 🌋 Panem (64 🪙): keep 2 random groups and destroy the rest
• 🎇 Eliminate (128 🪙): destroy tiles from the 4 least-populated groups
• 🌄 Stock (256 🪙): convert tiles of the 4 least-populated groups into the 4 most-populated groups
• 🌌 Sort (512 🪙): reorder cells by their group

Furthermore, what would a video game be without a compelling soundtrack 🔊? As usual, my talented friend Lars-Ole Kremer provided one that fits the sci-fi theme well 👽. Some of the beta testers already complained that the core loop gets repetitive soon, calling for longer audio tracks 🦒. Personally, I am leaning toward a more dynamic soundtrack that lets the player further distinguish gravity from non-gravity phase. Nonetheless, Ole did this one for free 🆓, and I do not want to abuse his kindness 🙏🏼. He even made eight different release sounds 🎶, each one more satisfying 🤤 than the next to account for different chain lengths. The release sounds are divided into two groups 2️⃣: unobtrusive sounds 🔇 for chains of up to five tiles 🐁 and exhilarating sounds 🎺 for longer chains 🐘. Upon releasing a chain 📤, a sound is then picked randomly 🍒 from the respective group, allowing for some variety 🏳️‍⚧️ (as opposed to associating one sound with one specific chain length, which becomes repetitive fast 🔂).

While the game is quite playable in its current ⚡ form, it still lacks a sophisticated high score system that forces players to combat 🪖 each other, aiming 🎯 for higher and higher scores. As of right now, the game features a session score as well as an overall level that is saved for future sessions 🔮. Not a scientifically proven model 🔬, but the score is calculated 💻 as 2 to the power of N, with N being the length of a chain of selected tiles that share the same emoji group. In other words, the score is doubled with every additional tile ➕, thereby growing exponentially 🧫. Selecting tiles of different groups interrupts the chain, whereas adding dead cells 💀 to the chain only decreases the score slightly (-1 for one dead cell, -2 for a second dead cell, etc. ♾️). Since exponential growth is much stronger 🦾, selecting dead cells to form the longest chains possible 🦕 is always advisable ⛓️.

On a side note 📝: while I did not implement a global scoreboard yet, I managed to hash and save the score using SHA-256 🤓. This makes it a bit more difficult to temper with the local files keeping track of your score 🧱. Cheating is still far from impossible, so do what you must ⛓️‍💥. My games shall not punish cheaters but encourage them 👹.

Eventually, I developed my own strategy to quickly raise the score to display-breaking widths 🖥️. But who knows, maybe you will come up with an even better playing style because EmoToon permits many different ones 💐. Of course, the game contains many details and tiny animations I could not mention in this post 🥱. You can find out about all of them by playing ⏯️ the game prototype, which I published on itch.io 🦠.

Admittedly, a gameplay video 🎥 would help to bring the game across ☦️. But as of 2025 🗓️, I do not know how (or am too lazy 🦥 / uncommitted 🎈) to make one 🔕. Can you imagine that I originally intended to write this post 📥 without emojis 😂? Cheers 🍻.

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