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.)

[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.

[DOWNLOAD (windows, 1mb)]

[elacsy] was my first Flash game, and first exposure to AS3 and Flixel. It’s a remake/port of features from elacsy and 2elacsy, with a few elements originally intended for the the incomplete 3elacsy. It still features Nastyman’s great musics. Rather than regular levels the game features procedurally generated stages seeded by a word the player enters, so players pursuing the achievements or high scores can choose to experiment with different worlds in addition to honing their skills.
While development only took a week, it ended up serving as a multi-month learning experience regarding Flash game licensing and dishonest portal operators, before eventually finding a home on Newgrounds thanks to the awesome Tom Fulp.

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.

[DOWNLOAD (windows, 1mb)]

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.

[PLAY (flash, 3mb)]

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.

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).

[DOWNLOAD (windows, 1mb)]

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.

[PLAY (flash, 300kb)]

[DOWNLOAD (windows, 300kb)]

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.

[PLAY (flash, 2.5mb)]

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.

[DOWNLOAD (windows, 2mb)]

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)]

Starman was my first Klik of the Month Klub submission.

KotMK is my favourite jam. It’s the ultimate in low-effort, low-expectations game challenge, which makes it a fantastic place for free expression and experimentation. Most klikwreckers use build their submissions in Klik & Play, an ancient and extremely limited 16-bit game authoring tool which was terrible even when it was new. There’s also a two-hour time limit, which means the entries need to be slapped together with ludicrous haste, from the nearest art and sound assets within arms’ reach, mortared with a sort of congealed paste-like form of love.

In this game, the player’s first steps into ostensibly familiar territory take silly unexpected turn. I took this surprise further for the intended audience (veteran KnP users) by disguising the game as a KnP game when in reality it’s built in Construct, allowing it to do something entirely out of the blue.

Jump on the goomba!

[DOWNLOAD (windows, 1mb)]

I’ve seen a couple of other spins on the idea since, but I still think it’d be cool to finish a really faithful FPS adaptation of Legend of Zelda 1. By faithful I mean pretty much a tile-for-tile remake with any necessary changes (for balance since it’s an FPS, etc) coming directly from the game itself. Like harder versions of the enemies taken from later areas or the second quest (eg Stalfos with projectile attacks), or bombs acting more like thrown grenades inspired by their behaviour in BS Zelda. The whole overworld should be there along with every key and puzzle and bombable wall.

So why stop working on it, especially when the demo got a whole bunch of cool attention? Well, it was developed in Construct, based on the engine from Standard Waiver. In fact originally I was just planning on putting together a more fully-featured demo to give out to people, adding enemies and weapons (later, y look and jumping). I like using Zelda graphics as placeholders. Here they’d replace the original rough Ludum Dare game walls and the previously-boring map tiles used to build a level (it’s a 2.5D fake 3D thing, if you’ve ever looked at the map in Rise of the Triad you’re looking at the “real” 2D level; this is just like that). Here, look:

It turned out to be gnarly in practice, and worth making a game out of. Trouble is, Construct has/had a nasty Z buffer issue with transparency on cube faces. Like this:

There was one update that fixed it, but introduced a way worse issue that broke the whole thing. So the plan was to either wait for an update, or do some other projects then come back and start over in an alternative engine.

You can check out the original thread on Tigforums, or just find a download mirror here.

Longish postmortem on the LD site if you’re interested.

[Download (windows, 8mb)]

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)]

With the thesis that the one element classic arcade games were missing was bears in speedboats, SPEEDBEAR was created for the Tigsource B-Games compo. As it turns out, I was wrong, so this game is terrible. That’s mostly due to pacing: early levels are too easy and it ramps up too slowly, and the upgrade system takes forever to pay off, although once the Sinistar-type entity finally starts appearing it can get fun. The problem is, because of the dull ramp-up, there’s no reason to play more than once which is death for a score-oriented arcade game.

[DOWNLOAD (windows, 1mb)]

Way back in 2007, some unknown named cactus invited me to participate in the “Options” competition over at www.shmup-dev.com. I planned to put together 3elacsy, which was to feature a mixture of procedural and designed levels and piloting multiple craft (parts of 3elacsy would make it into flash elacsy a few years later). School got in the way, and I had to quit the compo, but before I left I posted a few levels of the unfinished Voidlights as a consolation.

It’s a fairly straightforward horizontal shooter. Levels are linked by wormholes and if you die you are thrown back to the previous level, which is interesting but not really any fun which is probably why it was never finished.

[DOWNLOAD (windows, 1mb)]

Made for a “make an Atari game” challenge. Twensix is an Adventure tribute with the goal of collecting three items from a large labyrinth: the Hyperdrive, the Nav Computer, and the Energy Reactor; and bringing them back to your crashed starship. There are a few helper items along the way too. Note that it’s possible to sequence break and get stuck at one point, but you’ll know right away if that’s happened.

[DOWNLOAD (windows, 2mb)]