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.

[DOWNLOAD (16bit windows, 1mb)]

[DOWNLOAD (32bit windows, 1mb, introduces some bugs)]

I taught English to kids in Guangzhou for a while, and I’d sometimes come up with original board games or computer games which ran on the projector to make classes interactive. This isn’t an original one, this is just a simple implementation of PDQ, because sometimes you have five minutes left at the end of a class and need something for them to do. It’s a game where you make words by drawing three random letters and adding your own (so we draw T, A and L, so you yell out “pTerodActyL!” and get some points). It’s up here in case anyone finds it useful. One day I’ll dig up some others and make them releasable.

It allows you to roll letters and assign points to two (definable) teams with a three-button mouse if you have one, which is useful for jumping around or roaming the room with a wireless mouse. You can enable a timer, and set the letter pool. You can also use a word list, from which the game will pick a random word and then select three random letters from that word in order, which is good for avoiding difficult combinations like XWQ. A short default word list from a Chinese junior high textbook vocabulary is included.

[DOWNLOAD (windows, 1mb)]

An expanded sequel to my first ever one-night game, Ball Bastard. BB was a straightforward precision platformer: get to the end without dying, hope you like jumping through these levels I made for you with spikes all over the fucking place, have fun. It featured nine levels and a boss, and was put together in something like six hours. The main character, an angry pink ball bent on ridding the world of happy yellow balls, was intended as a mild reference to the tendency in the games development communities in which I participated at the time to use unimaginative circles with feet for everything.

A neighbour in my dormitory played a whole lot of BB. There wasn’t a lot else to do sometimes, thanks to the university’s catshit internet policies. He discovered you could beat every level but one without taking damage (something I didn’t realise was possible) and that you could usually kill every enemy on a stage as well (sometimes in ways I hadn’t anticipated). He’d often try to do both.

Bastard World is built around these optional challenges, this time deliberately. It features something like thirty stages, each longer than those in the original, and three bosses. Five worlds of ten levels were planned, but only two were completed before the game was abandoned for a couple of years. On a school break in 2006 I dusted it off and finished the now-final third world. It’s possible to complete each stage killing every enemy without taking a hit, earning a star medal in the process. With enough of these medals you unlock a bunch of pointless upgrades and the levels of the original Ball Bastard as a bonus. None of this is communicated to the player in the game, making it all sort of a wasted effort.

It wound up on some magazine cover CDs (along with the first two Santasm games, Defiant Black, Kaiser Kitty and I don’t know what else). I don’t remember which because they never send copies. Additional trivia: this isn’t the original title screen. Turns out it is hard to draw circles fighting without it looking like circle sodomy.

[DOWNLOAD (windows, 2mb)]

Three games, all released on approximately the 25th of December for successive xmas-related competitions.

Santasm (2005): the competition theme was “Mario-like”, so that’s pretty much what it is. The screen is way too tiny. A lot of my old games have a tiny resolution, but in this case I mean relatively; your sprite is huge and you can’t see anything. I believe I was was basing this on certain licensed Game Boy games which tried a giant sprite approach, but it wasn’t a great idea. Still there are a fair few levels and several varied powerups which add variety. As I recall the game’s score in the competition was torpedoed by one judge who didn’t like the Nazi themes.

Santasm 2 (2006): a tribute to Cocoron, a Mega Man-like action game which allows you to custom-build your character from different parts which completely change the way you move and attack. A much more solid game than Santasm 1. Continues the “story” from the first game (I almost never do games which would benefit from a story, and although it’s something I’m interested in exploring, on the few occasions I have tried to include one I’ve half-arsed it). Your character initially sucks, but can be upgraded with different parts purchased using coins collected during the levels. If you die, you may continue as long as you have enough coins to build a new dude. You choose which levels to play before the boss level (three, I believe, out of a possible five) and which order to play them in at the beginning. Which is neat.

Santasm 3 (2007): straightforward puzzle game based on the Adventures of Lolo games, which is to say it’s Sokoban but with the addition of enemies which you can attack with a projectile to transform them temporarily into a moveable block. There are several other powers, based cookies Santa can collect.

[DOWNLOAD (windows, 5mb)]

 Weirdly, the first game started off as a faux-voxel experiment. At some point I added a little red plane as a perspective aid, then decided I’d like to make a little shooter and took out all the voxel code and renamed the source file from “yscale”, which referred to something I was testing, to “elacsy”. That’s why I don’t capitalise the first letter. So there’s no remnant of the voxel stuff remaining (it never worked properly anyway), but I made a neat little shooter in a day.

It’s an endurance shooter. You get one life and can rack up a score by staying alive, shooting things, and grazing bullets. That’s pretty much it. It was also a basis to test out an idea for procedural generation (before I knew how to write a proper PRNG), so in theory if your keyboard entries are exactly the same you should get the same game play out every time. This would permit replay recording but the idea didn’t occur at the time. The difficulty does increase gradually but it’s really subtle.

2elacsy (07 January 2006) is an enhanced version of elacsy, built over two days during an instance of what my family considers a vacation (rent a cabin somewhere together and get angry at each other for a week). It features a giant invulnerable B-52 that hates you and a new way to score in the form of cargo planes and the crap they drop. There’s an online high score system, but the server’s long dead. Overall a better game, although I broke the procedural system out of laziness.

[DOWNLOAD both (windows, 2mb)]

These two served as the basis of my first Flash game, simply titled elacsy.

Cycloid is a horizontal shooter with keyboard control and mouse-aim, and about four challenging levels. Or four totally trivial levels if you upgrade your weapons fully and keep them.

Originally it would have been a much more difficult game (or, equivalent difficulty to trying to play through without fully upgraded weapons), but at some point MMF, the game authoring tool I was using, decided to corrupt the source file. Corrupted source files in MMF can either break your game completely or lead to interesting and unpredictable glitched-out effects, as it did in this case: the missiles began emitting weirdly-behaving bullets rather than smoke trails as they were meant to. The effect was really cool so after restoring a backup I promptly implemented it as the game’s ultimate weapon.

The music is great since I just ripped it off from modarchive.

[DOWNLOAD (windows, 3mb)]

A gravity-flipping action/puzzle game. Originally meant as an entry for a “make something in Klik & Play” competition, the complex puzzle premise (for 2004, in fucking Klik & Play) of influencing everything in the room by reorienting gravity was meant as an interesting challenge for myself. It was, and it worked, but the amount of redundant code to get something like this working got irritating and I started over in The Game’s Factory, an upgraded and slightly less horrible descendent of KNP that includes revolutionary features such as copy/pasting.

Developed on a laptop when apparently everyone was still using CRT monitors, it turned out dark enough as to be unplayable at the time for most people. Still it somehow scored “Top Dog” on HOTU (mirror of the review here), and wound up on a couple of cover CDs.

[DOWNLOAD (windows, 1mb)]