I came across a couple of mentions of my game 100 Free Assets the other day. The first is a video of someone playing it on Youtube, which led me to do a bit of proper Googling. That turned up the linked French website which says some nice things (Google Translate handles it pretty well, as best I can tell). Before these two it was featured on freeindiegam.es. It’s strange hearing a stranger say your full name on Youtube.
And a while back I was directed to this German video of another game of mine, Castlevania 10. They seem to quite like it, though got stuck after the first boss (of three). Both this videos gave me big smiles, which I’ve never got from people looking at my work in galleries.
I made two Christmas-related games. Click on their titles to play them in your browser.
IO SATVRNALIA! is a big mess where nothing went right. You play as the paintings of Saturn by Goya and Rubens running around an incorrectly rendered recreation of the Roman Forum, and miming baby eating. After the initial loading it will take a while for the game to start, but it will! Downloadable versions for PC, OSX, and Linux are here.
Merry Catemitesmas is definitely the most time I’ve spent on one game. It was made for a Kris Kringle event at Glorious Trainwrecks, where I drew thecatamites, whose games I really like, so I put a lot of work into it. We made lists of elements we might like to see/play, though I wasn’t able to include as many as I wish. A lot went wrong, but I learnt a lot about Unity 3D too. There are four areas to find, but three are apparently well hidden, which is satisfying.
I’ve been making more of these types of things over the last couple of days, and these are the two I’m happiest with. I’m looking forward to playing more of Worlds: a near-abandoned mid-90s virtual chat room thing with a lot of now-broken corporate advertising embedded.
Here’s a preview of the main work (Play Space) I have in the RMIT Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) grad. show, opening tomorrow evening (November 27th). I have two spaces, and will be showing Coober Pedy in the other. My spaces are in Building 4, Level 3; one in each room.
100 Free Assets was made for last weekend’s Klik of the Month Klub, as a response to this list of 100 Free Assets for Unity 3D. I downloaded as many as I could, and used them to construct somewhere interesting to explore. Some of them have built-in behaviours: for example that monster thing moves with the player.
I’ll also mention that the website I was working on is up and running (while still being expanded upon) at blueberrysoft.ryliejamesthomas.net. Simple websites are not as much fun to make as they used to be.
Which seems as-good-a-place-as-any to start catching the Internet up to what I’ve been making. In this last half, of my final semester I’ve been experimenting with ‘play spaces’, and currently and more specifically digital play spaces. This has come out of something I was doing as a break from art making during the holiday—recording myself playing about in other peoples’ games—and has evolved through thinking about performance in virtual space, to now trying to make open, kinda dumb, play spaces, where the player is asked to make something of / complete the work. I’m putting together a little web page to keep them all which I’ll link to when I’m done.
Today I recorded myself playing Juliette Porée’s Destroy Your Home — a ‘Let’s Play’, they’re typically called. It’s a simple game built around Unity‘s built-in physics, the goal being to destroy your home, which is built of uncertainly stacked discrete objects. It’s the kind of game I like, more toy than game, a space for making your own games. These videos are me playing with this approach; playing, sculpting, performing—.
I would like to write more about these types of games/toys, and I have had an empty Tumblr blog reserved for the purpose. I would also like to make more, and make more videos like this.
