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.
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)!
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.)
[Ssshifty] was whipped up in a couple hours pre-KotMK to try out a little block-swapping mechanic. Although it’s a puzzle game, the solutions are simple and the prominent timer and high-tempo Hebereke music are intended to drive the player on because it’s cool when played recklessly.
Ssshifty served as the basis for our pitch to Adult Swim Games which eventually became Escape from Puppy Death Factory (Although I left the project some time before the final release, leaving it in Arthur Lee’s capable hands: when I was still working on it the project was still dubbed K9 From Outer Space), a SNESsy puzzle/exploration game partially inspired by Anna Anthropy’s Redder. The very first pitch wasn’t about dogs, though: it would’ve been a pastel 60s sequential puzzle platformer about a spy outsmarting guards with his handheld block-swapping raygun.
[Cloud Control] was developed immediately prior to Enough Plumbers, but was released a while after. It’s a simple precision puzzle game about clouds: when your cloudmass touches a neutral cloud they are assimilated and move along with the rest of you, changing your shape and limiting your ability to navigate the storm clouds which serve as obstacles. Pretty straightforward. But there’s also a story unfolding in the background which progresses as you advance. However, being clouds, you don’t care. Clouds don’t care about anything.
Surprise origin story: the prototype for this game was a rough Klik & Play thing for a Halloween Klik of the Month Klub, and was about crappy klipart zombies assimilating humans while avoiding fruit (zombies don’t like fruit).
[Enough Marios] was put together in two hours (plus twenty minutes for the poster/title screen while I was SO EXCITED chatting in the event IRC pre-game) for Klik of the Month Klub #33. It’s an “ascended glitch” kusoge thing and a bit of a gag about a franchise star’s disposability (and… frequency) as a product.
[Enough Plumbers], the full-sized sequel, expands on the original with many more levels, a boss, and great tunes by Arthur “Mr. Podunkian” Lee. It’s more of a love letter this time, and with something like 20 million plays by this point, probably my most widely-played game to date.
Gnilley was my solo entry for Global Game Jam 2010, put together in under 48 hours at the Powehouse Museum’s secret underground caffeine dungeon. It was originally about pitch and colour, but ended up being about screaming and colour instead. Just watch the video.
The hardest part of a jam can be settling on a single idea, so my initial approach once the theme is announced is always to think back through cool ideas I’ve had and shelved for later. Reminded by the interpretation of the jam’s theme of “snowing” (which can refer to white noise on a television screen), Gnilley originated from one of those ideas: a horizontal shmup where the player’s ship emits a beam attack in a cone which is wider the louder the player shouts, and changes colour depending on pitch. Having your beam at the correct pitch/colour would make like-tinted enemies die faster, and adjusting the beam width would allow you to concentrate fire on tough foes or spread it out for groups. I might still make it one day. Anyway, in the fifteen minutes we were given to come up with a pitch, I quickly simplified the idea to a Zelda-like thing (and even ended up using Zelda tiles thanks to the time limit) to make implementation a little more sensible given the time limit (scrolling shooters can require quite a lot of level content, unless you make them random, which always looks lame) and because I thought it would appeal to an audience better, as we’d been told there’d be some sort of presentation at the end.
The presentation went well, the video went viral for a couple of days, and Gnilley ended up being one of the most downloaded GGJ games of that year. It appeared in dozens of magazines and online news sites, and there’s like a million LP’s on youtubs. Check that out some time if you really like hearing people yell in German.
I’m hoping to finish a game-sized sequel for PC, Mac and mobile later this year.
