16Jan2012
Star Fox clone: week 1
25Oct2011
Mech game: week 1
23Oct2011
BLOGMODE
I’m currently in the process of converting my site to a blog. It’s going to take some time to do entries for every game, and I’m working roughly backwards. In the meantime, you can still view the original page with its longer list of games here.
23Nov2009
Mario’s Macross
06Nov2009
Popovkast games
Popovkast: Arthur “Mr. Podunkian” Lee’s occasional get-drunk-and-make-shit-in-an-hour IRC challenge. Since he and I tend to be the two drunkest people around, we’ve done a couple of these where the only two participants have been us.
THE WORST MISTAKE:
The Worst Mistake was built for the theme “the worst mistake”. You are a sperm who bounces off annoying crap looking for the joke.
Pod made “mistake“. Nobody else made anything.
GARFEILD ADVENTURE:
This time the theme was this image. I can’t remember where I found it or why, but it’s from the Japan-only Garfield: A Week of Garfield.
Pod’s game this time was Garfield Knight. Both of these were KNP originally, since this happened after he wanted to participate in KotMK but missed it.
10Oct2009
Annabel Chong’s Killing McChambers
Annabel Chong, if you’re unfamiliar, performed “251 sex acts with about 70 men over a ten-hour period” in 1995. For feminism. 300 men agreed to participate; of those 230 were nowhere to be found on the day leaving only the creepiest and most pathetic. The result is one of the most awkward and depressing adult videos ever, which considering the state of ordinary American porn is sort of an achievement in itself. Good thing she was doing it for philosophical reasons, because supposedly they never got around to paying her the thousands of dollars she was promised.
Anyway. This game is an attempt to make a stereotypical awful Klik & Play game for Klik of the Month Klub #28. My usual KotMK games are either jokes or little prototypes or an attempt at KLIK WIZARDRY, so making something deliberately bad was a novelty. It was built in one hour because the usual two is just way too much time.
This game hasn’t been converted to Flash; it’s an original KNP executable, which means it won’t work on 64-bit systems. But you shouldn’t be playing it anyway, because it is really terrible (or it might be art).
21Sep2009
Lonely Hermit Dorf
Another KotMK game. Question: can you make Dwarf Fortress in two hours with Klik & Play?
Rather than managing your dorfs, in this game you play a single dwarf carving out a home solo. Your goal is to really just to survive. Or whatever, there are elephants to milk too. Once you get the ULTIMATE WEAPON and put down a pachyderm or two there’s not much left to do, but getting to that point takes some figuring out.
20Sep2009
KILL GOD
Isn’t it interesting how the beautiful patterns which appear in “bullet hell” danmaku shooters derive their beauty partly from repeated patterns which are actually helpful to the player. While at first they can look too intricate to be anything but aesthetic flair, if you build attack patterns from bullets to which you’ve given a brain with a couple of simple rules you start to see the effect emerge naturally once they’re flying all over the screen and layering with one another. It’s easy to see how we evolved from random bullet shitstorms.
Built for Klik of the Month Klub #27, the idea here was to see if I could do a shooter with pretty bullet patterns in 2 hours and with KnP. Turns out: just barely.
Features the god from Drawn to Life (it had just come out and people were still talking about it) with three phases and a bunch of attacks, and a special cameo by a John Romero impersonator.
04Sep2009
2XUE
As kids, we’d use whatever was lying around to create games. A Cluedo set has everything you need to craft an exciting role-playing experience or a violent unit-level wargame. Chinese Checkers is nicely colour-coded to represent the forests, snowfields, lakes and volcanic plains of a star-shaped continent with some yellow bits left over for dudes. All you need is a box of bits, and two players can invent a game and then play out the story that emerges between them. It’s possible to roleplay without anything at all, but having some bits enforces limitations upon which a structure can find some footing.
Computers ought to be great at this sort of thing, after all if the bits can be entirely virtual then they can be virtually infinite. But still paucity sparks imagination better than the blank page, and while some games let you use their bits to make other things it’s a deliberate, focused activity totally unlike the convivial act of arguing over whether Colonel Mustard represents a Genestealer or a teleporter node.
So the idea was to make a game that’s totally about high-speed editing. One player wields the mouse and designs levels concurrently to the person next to them playing through the previously-designed level on the same screen. Ideally it should take roughly as long to design as to finish a stage (something I failed at here, since I didn’t have anybody to test the game with), but then again, won’t players make any downtime part of the game? Maybe it’s a valuable storytelling intermission! That’s something that’s going to vary from player pairs to player pairs, and the sort of thing that made this an interesting experiment. Originally it was to have been a platform game but I switched to top-down Gauntlet-style play to build the game in the 24 hours I had remaining after my first attempt at Ludum Dare 15 attempt didn’t work out.
Since then I’ve learned of other games that do similar things, but I think most of those are more recent, so this may be the first that set out to provide a bits box for this type of emergent play. It placed first out of 144 entries in the Innovation category of LD15.
While working on this I told my girlfriend that I was making something we’d be able to try together. But she hates games so I haven’t ever played this game, even once.
17Aug2009
MOTORCYCLE COCK
The Ys series of games are interesting. They’re action RPGs, but combat is simplified to simply walking into enemies. While the damage you can do to one another varies based on stats as usual, whether or not you hit is totally positional–if you hit an enemy off-centre you’ll always score a clean hit. The inspiration for MOTORCYCLE COCK came while playing a Ys I & II on the DS. Originally it would probably not have been about a motorcycle with a penis, or even an RPG. Rather something like R-Type with all of the weapons stripped away leaving you a vulnerable ship behind an invulnerable weapon, always in a left-right configuration, exploring an omnidirectional environment where threats may either be impassable or trivial depending on from which side they are approached.
Instead the idea cycled back into an RPG for a small 48-hour RPG-making challenge, although there’s a remnant of the original idea in the final upgrade the player receives. It again takes inspiration from Ys, this time borrowing the drastic difficulty curve which takes the player quickly from being incredibly vulnerable to basic enemies to being able to deal with foes an orders magnitude more deadly, via a very rapid-fire level-up loop.
I approached it like a 48-hour Klik of the Month Klub. That means using Klik & Play, lots of hideous library graphics and stolen sound effects, dongs jokes everywhere and doing some wizard shit to manage enough global variables with KnP to make a large multi-screen RPG work.
Note: I didn’t emphasise this enough in-game, but you can spare yourself some grinding by using spacebar to teleport back to town for 100gp at any time.
