Many years ago I built a simple Flash-based toy for making virtual 'perler bead' art, a silly thing to amuse my friends. It actually got covered in a game dev blog run by Vice. In 2018 I was looking to learn how to build and publish an app on iOS using CoronaSDK (now called Solar2D), so I completely revamped the project with a fresh look, character art and a full hip hop soundtrack as "MeltyHeart". While my friends had a lot of fun sharing their creations, and the chill vibes definitely won a few hearts over, I don't think it was ultimately well suited to a phone screen.

As Apple's app store began to get more hostile towards solo indie developers (myself and several friends had our completed, functional apps removed from the store simply for not updating them in a year), I decided to pull all of my apps from the app store, which left this project in limbo.

I've had the idea for a while to rebuild it as a desktop experience, which is probably what I should have done initially. So when I saw in Portland Indie Game Squad's newsletter that their Summer Slow Jams theme for August was 'crafting', it gave me some motivation to dust this off and completely rebuild it for Mac/Win using Gamemaker. I'm really happy that this chill little project can now live on here, and friends can enjoy hanging out making bead art with Crafty Cub once again.

I have a couple of minor updates planned including adding a feature that will save your work in progress so you can come back to it later.

I hope you enjoy playing with MeltyHeart! Please feel free to attach any pieces you make with it on the game's comments page for others to see.

Pete