ektopy is a 48-hour game that uses the player’s breathing via a microphone to create a sense of urgency and claustrophobia. The original concept was to create a horror game that used a feedback loop between an in-game heartbeat determining the required rate of breathing and the players own response to tense situations to artificially heighten the horror experience, but we ran out of time for that.
Won the Innovation award at the Sydney Global Game Jam 2013.
Best with headphones.
EP2 is nearly done. It has a completely new engine which can handle hundreds (probably HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS) of simultaneous plumbers, new powerups (three times as many in total), new levels, a level editor so you can make your own puzzles and a sharing system so you’ll have a zillion player levels to play too. Stay tuned!
Made in a few days for the Glorious Trainwrecks GDC Pirate Kart. It’s a mashup of Wolfenstein 3D and Minecraft, sort of a Wolf3D construction kit. Unfortunately it needs kind of a beefy PC. If the default level runs badly, you might have to stick to building your own little stage in the empty sandbox level.
Here’s the web version, but the downloadable Windows version runs a little better.
Remember: Enter toggles creative mode, and you can open the crafting menu with Tab.
Edit: updated to v1.02, with some major performance improvements and bugfixes.
Noisrucker was put together by Daniel Baker, Bryan Ma and myself over last weekend for the 2012 Global Game Jam in Sydney. It’s a game about being a level, navigating a level, navigating a level. Your body is full of time: to survive you need to gouge chunks from your body, descend dimensionally, and then consume your remains. You can also expend time to create temporary chunks of yourself to ascend vertical steps or to bridge gaps.
It’s weird. It has neat music, odd visuals, and strange dark atmosphere to make a game that’s basically about grey cubes a little more interesting. Play it if you want.
It’ll also be playable to the public at the Powerhouse Museum on Saturday the 4th, where there’ll also be presentations and awards for this year’s Sydney GGJ entrants. Noisrucker recieved nominations in the Technical and Theme categories (the theme this year was Ouroboros), so wish us luck!
We won Best Technical Direction (look)!
An old prototype I rediscovered recently. It’s one demo in a little experiment that uses breathing as its only input, allowing a player to control the games with just a (cheap) headset.
I should mention that although you can hear me breathing in the video, that’s due to needing to breath louder due to a combination of being under a ceiling fan, with a blocked nose, and using a mic that’s even worse than the one it was developed with. Ideally you can play the game while breathing normally, and if calibrated properly it can tell the difference between silently breathing in and out ‘deliberately’ and just breathing to, like, not die.
There are a couple other demos in this file that I didn’t show, mainly because they’re boring.
Something I worked on last year. Originally the project was meant to be for an exhibit thing, later it became just a Flash game where players could share scores and compete for weekly prizes. I did the minigame design and animation, and the implementation and Chinese social network integration stuff.
It’s no longer available to play (the campaign’s over) and it was never released in English.
(It’s possible to get “PERFECT!” multipliers in the jianzi game, but I couldn’t capture it. My timing sucks today.)
