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’d been intended to write a post to summarise 2012, but I think that idea’s time has passed. I do still want to highlight the games I’ve made since the last time I mentioned them—which was all the way back in July 2011—though, so here goes:
Made for the 50th Klik of the Month Klub, the game is a 50 screen stupid pun. Probably way too long, and way to hard! It plays like a few other games I’ve made, where each separate screen has a different win condition.
A breakanoid game where you control the ball instead of the paddle. You influence how much you turn the ball by hitting the correlating button more frequently, which is a fun mechanic.
A clunky adventure game, racing game, and breakanoid that doesn’t really work. It probably could, but I would probably need to use something that wasn’t Klik and Play to do that.
This one is pretty good! An action game where you can only fire a few shots before your gun has to regenerate. The early levels are a bit tedious, but it gets nice and tricky by the end. The level design is all based round the game’s logo, which actually worked, and I had a lot of fun making the graphics, and experimenting with enemy placement. It’s probably the most resolved game I’ve done. It was featured as a ‘Freeware Game Pick’ on indiegames.com, which was a nice surprise. I should make a Flash version of this, too.
The most recent thing I’ve done, made for Glorious Trainwrecks’ sixth birthday. It’s pretty simple: the aim is to crash trains, but it’s fun to try and complete as fast as you can.
You can play it online, but you may have to have a Newgrounds account. Don’t make a Newgrounds account just to play it.
A monkey named Gavin has to ride a horse or a unicorn into a castle. Gavin lives on Mars and wears a crown. He is playing games and stuff in the castle. The name of the game is “Gavin on Mars.”
(Courtesy Eric, age 4)
Pirate Kart V was made to show at the Game Developers Conference, and the funding to get it there was raised mostly through Kickstarter. One of the rewards for donating a certain amount was to have a game made based on a title and description suggested by the donator. I chose to make a few games based on suggested titles, this being the first one that caught my attention. Eric turned out to be the son of the founder of Glorious Trainwrecks, Jeremy Penner, and they both worked on an expansion of the game you can download here.
Another game suggested by a Kickstarter person, this time only a title was provided. It’s an obtuse adventure game, where the goal is to make a bed. I doubt anyone’s finished it. I’m not sure I remember how to finish it.
In this game you control a helicopter with a big, muscley, arm. The helicopter is vulnerable, but the arm can be used to destroy harm causing things. Problem is it’s kind of awkward to position the arm where you want it to be. But that’s not actually a problem. This is pretty good, and I will make a Flash version soon.
A 2-player racing game where the way the car is controlled is changed each lap—sometimes. The control methods are dictated by what is built into Klik and Play; so sometimes it’s like a racing game, sometimes like an overhead game, sometimes like a platformer, etc. It doesn’t work very well! I’ve made a few games exploring ‘wrong controls‘, which I’ve maybe mentioned before?
A Breakout!-like game where the paddle is controlled like it’s a race car—if that makes sense. So you press ‘up’ to go forward, and use ‘left’ and ‘right’ to turn, instead of being able to only move left and right.
I think this is a really fun 2-player competitive game. Or, I assume so, because I think I’ve only played it against myself. Each player controls a paddle, Breakout!-style, and use that to deflect the bouncing ball into the other player’s goal. I intend to do a Flash version of this, too.
KK Slider is a character from the videogame series Animal Crossing. In those games he appears every Saturday night to play his guitar, and give the player a new song to listen to in their house. In this game you find yourself inside his head, able to, with great will power, control him to a small degree. I mostly just made this because I wanted to make the cover image.
I also worked for a while on a 3-D game, using Unity. Not so much a game, I guess, more of a toy. The environments were made out of bad 3-D models generated from video content I recorded. I may get back to it next Summer holidays.
Much earlier in the year I took part in a 48 hour game making event over at Glorious Trainwrecks. The aim was to make as many videogames as possible, the result being 529 games created by 102 people. That’s sort of amazing.
Every month Glorious Trainwrecks hosts a ‘Klik of the Month Klub‘, where, in the space of 2 hours, participants try make a game. Generally people use very simple tools—most commonly Klik and Play—and work from simple ideas. It’s very accessible to people, like myself, who have no idea, or want, to learn how to program. The results are often messy, goofy, and not always so good; but it’s a lot of fun!
This was an experiment in making a horizontal shooting game; particularly the part that seemed the most daunting to me: designing the enemy patterns. I think it turned out quite nicely. The player’s avatar is based on a shiv I found in a bin in a hostel. The title is a riff on a Dirty Three song.
A game for two people, based on a game I used to be quite good at: British Bulldog. Players alternate between trying to get from one side to the other, and trying to stop the other doing so. It’s a bit too fast, so relies on chance too much. I hadn’t played it with another person till recently.
It’s an idea I had a long time ago, but never had the drive to put the whole thing together. That’s one of the interesting things about these events; you have so little time you just have to cobble the thing together, somehow.
Inspired by the videogame series Castlevania, somewhat loosely. It’s the game most like a real videogame: players must complete screens of enemies, and boss enemies. The trick to the game is that you can ‘shoot’ a hell of a lot of swords at once. This is an accidental feature, because I couldn’t figure out how to make a character swing a sword, so I made them shoot, then I accidentally made them not disappear. Being an artist is about knowing which mistakes to keep, and which to discard; right?
It’s the most popular game of mine on the website.
This one’s a joke/comment on videogames that are more about collecting baubles than being enjoyable in and of themselves. People don’t seem to like the end, but I do. And I think think the title screen is quite clever!
Colour2 is my favourite. It makes images by generating shapes in a somewhat randomised manner. I wanted to recreate another, similar, thing I made many years ago. It would ‘shoot’ coloured squares in the direction of the mouse cursor. That was made in The Games Factory (a later program by the makers of Klik & Play), which allowed the shot squares to mark the screen with their colour. So the player could draw, in a way. Klick & Play doesn’t allow for this, so the game changed a bit. It also has sometimes-troublesome mouse support, that I wanted to avoid.
You can use the number keys to change levels. Number three’s my favourite.
