Another arbitrary span of time, another game. I can’t really explain much about this one.

Play Intervalo… (Flash)

(It was about time I posted this.)

Perhaps you remember a Ludum Dare entry I called Climbrunner—well, this game is an evolution of that idea. Here, you run around a tricky series of screens, up the walls and ceilings, only with the ability to jump to avoid the obstacles that get in your way. There’s no dying, just lots of cursing over missed jumps and having to do it all over again. It’s a short game, but if you think it was fun once you first finish it, there’s still a second path you can try.

All you need to know to play it is that you jump with the spacebar.

Play Runnerby (Flash)

It’s a single player game, but is intended (not to a very interesting result) to be played together with other people, passing the controller around. This is why the level design has lots of ‘sticky’ places: parts that keep you in a loop until you decide to jump out, so you can safely hand over the controls. It is also how I rationalized the frustration aspect, reminding of a time in which, as a kid, I played video games with friends or my cousins, and we would take turns playing/wincing at the ‘obvious’ mistakes the others were making as they played.

I didn’t really take it where I wanted it to go, as my ambition clashed with my lazy attitude about creating the content. I submitted it to Gamma IV (despite it not fitting into the 5-minutes-per-session rule) with no positive result, and then tried Indiecade just because I really wanted it to find its way to a large event, again to no success. What it was supposed to be was a much larger world, with each screen offering challenges to reach each of the exits (at least two per screen). The reward for the challenges would not be a destination (a goal), but exploration itself: discovering what lies further into the game world. Since this was intended for an event with a massive attendance, I wanted the world to feel different depending on your whereabouts; then, whenever you glanced at the screen where the game was being played continuously for the duration of the event, you’d see someplace new. The actual finished game is really just an imperfect compromise, an abortion of these ambitions, so I’m not surprised it didn’t do well.

Credits

• Uses Adam Saltsman’s Flixel.
• Sounds by ltibbits, RealRhodesSounds, and teleport8.
• Some implemented ideas as suggested by Noyb.
• Testers: Sigal, Javi, Javy, Ilan, Mariposa, Stephen Lavelle, Terry Cavanagh, Bennett Foddy, Zaphos, Greg Wohlwend, Jasper Byrne.
• Texts quoted from Miss Mulock’s Tom Thumb.

In the second hour of yesterday’s KOTM I made this Flash drawing thing.

Give it a try

This month I made a kind of klik that took advantage of the foundations laid out in Wirewalk, Prosopamnesia, and other unreleased experiments also dealing with image searches. This made it so easy to make, that I achieved my initial concept within the first hour. This first idea involved no interactions, so I used the following hour (of two that the monthly event lasts) to add that layer of interactivity.

Deconstructivism (Flash)

You may leave it untouched and it will ‘play itself’. Or you may click and flick on the image displayed to alter it manually. If it takes too long to load, or if you want a new picture, refresh the page.

After Wirewalk, I felt inspired to do more work using images acquired through web searches. Yes, I failed to mention it when I released that one, but the images are obtained at run-time through Google Images. I’m rather proud of this particular result:

Prosopamnesia (Flash)

It was made for The Games Collective negative capability pageant. For sound, I used the port of DrPetter’s sfxr to AS3, by Thomas Vian. Also used the Google API AS3 library by Joris Timmerman, as for Wirewalk.

I’ve made a thing for an event that Stephen Lavelle describes as a ‘pageant’ —a competition sans the competitive aspect—, with the theme ‘bricolage’. (I made a promotional picture for the event, too.)

The thing I made is called Wirewalk. It’s something that, I feel, is best not to describe. Just try it and see if you like it—shouldn’t take you over a couple of minutes.

Wirewalk (Flash)

I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to participate in this weekend’s Ludum Dare, as it had been too long since I last made (and released) a game. This time I didn’t make a fancy timelapse video or anything like, but I did spend some time on Friday learning to use the beautiful Flixel, and then the weekend bending it to my nonstandard needs. The result is a game, unlike last time, though not exactly what I set out to do. Still, it’s playable. And it fits the ‘exploration’ theme.

I made this animated GIF over a year ago, thinking of an idea for a game I envisioned for the Game Boy Advance. This game was to be a bichrome, Knytt–inspired platformer. I decided to reuse the core of this idea: that is, the running on walls and ceilings, and a tad more. It was simplified to the essence, though: the little guy won’t stop running, so all you can do is jump in order to steer him where you want to go. It feels a bit like controlling a jumping, sticky train.

Play Climbrunner (Flash)

This time around I didn’t neglect to provide the source code.

Play Cave Trip (Flash)

This one was made using FlashDevelop and Flex SDK 4, coded in actionscript 3. Below you can see all those hours of work, squashed into just a few seconds.

This latest TIGSource video game competition has a double theme: adult/educational. I have to say, it’s a fantastic combination. The idea was that entrants could create a game under one or both themes. I wish more entered games had used both simultaneously, but, well, not even I did that in the end.

During most of the duration of the competition, I didn’t find the time to make my game. Also, I was finding it hard to come up with an idea. Educational games are tough to make; they require familiarity with the taught subject, therefore they involve plenty of research, usually. I wanted to make an educational game foremost, but the adult theme also intrigued me, so I was thinking of incorporating it somehow. When I finally came up with an idea, it was already too late to really consider trying it; a week wasn’t going to be enough. That idea was a puzzle game about additive and substractive color theory, which I still think is good enough to archive for a future opportunity. But since it would take me too long to make that, and educational games in general were already out of the question, I decided to just go for the other theme.

Next came the question of how to make any game in a short enough amount of time. I’ve had the idea, for some time, of creating a small engine for text-based games in Flash, which I would use to make a series of games, and which I would also release independently. Trying to plan that proved to be too difficult with my limited knowledge of programming best practices, design patterns, and whatnot. But I figured I could use the occasion of the competition to just hard code a game in that fashion, which would be an easy thing to program, and in the process figure out what kind of structure my code would need to turn it into an engine. So, by making this game, I fulfilled two goals: I entered the competition, and I learned a bit more about programming.

The game is text-only, but it does deal with subjects such as sex and rape, so it is meant for mature players.

Play Sheets (Flash)

Heart is finished. It is a short, bleak game that questions one particular human ideal/cliché.

Play Heart (Flash)

The game was created originally for the Ludum Dare competition, and polished during the following week. Coded in Actionscript 3, using FlashDevelop as IDE and compiled using the Flex SDK. For the graphics I used Photoshop and Illustrator, and for the audio I used LMMS and Audacity.

I was originally going to take advantage of the circumstances to force me to learn Python, but that didn’t go anywhere, and I ended up relying on the more familiar Actionscript 3, for better or worse. The theme, ‘advancing wall of doom’, wasn’t very inspiring, but I was still able to cook an idea pretty fast (the first night). I believe I had the Superbrothers in mind when I came up with the visual style, and it is still pretty apparent from the final product. I like making very low-resolution pixel art, because of the forced geometrization and simplification that it entails, and also because it’s quick to make in a computer, saving me time to devote to the coding, my main hurdle. I’m not a very fast or experienced coder, so I ended up using up most of the time on that part of the process (as it is apparent in the video). I still enjoy coding, and particularly randomizing (procedurally generating) things as part of the process, so instead of hard-scripting everything, I left most to chance. This allowed me to concentrate on the general aesthetic rather than on the strict sequence of events, the latter of which I burdened the player with stitching together in his head.

As opposed to my previous flash game, Viewpoints, this game’s different playthroughs are cumulative; that means that there is no or little contradiction between one playthrough’s events and the next’s. The more the game is played, the more a player can piece together a story out of it. At one point I thought of letting the story unfold procedurally, by me creating much more random lines of text, thus allowing more varied and incoherent interpretations; traces of this idea can still be found in the competition version, but I’ve removed those lines since then. The idea of glitching up the graphics came from this, but I liked the effect enough that I left it in, as it also contributes to the pathetic and distraught aesthetic that I tried to convey.

At first, the game was going to have a ‘proper’ ending; the character was going to face another character. At some point I even thought of having him meet a mirror of himself, but I didn’t know where to take that. The ending that I left in was chosen both due to the time constraints and to my wishing to make the message more subtle. So, it’s a non-explicit resolution that the player can interpret according to his own experience in the game.

I’m pretty happy with the audio. When thinking of what the most appropriate kind of music for this game would be, my friend Matt suggested something like Laura Palmer’s theme from Twin Peaks. I love it, but it was too sweet, too melancholy for my game. I still kept it in my head, subconsciously, when I composed the song, but I made it a bit dissonant, and a bit disjointed. Part of the original plan was to also have two other songs and switch between them at random intervals, but I didn’t have the time to make the other two. In the final game I did go through with this idea, sort of, but much more subtly, and thus, I think, it proves to be more effectively unsettling.

The resulting game is something that I’m happy about. It’s also probably the most ‘designery’ game I’ve made thus far, by which I mean the attention to style that I put into it (I really devoted a lot of time to that title screen). It’s still too early to say whether I was able to communicate what I wanted to with it, but at least with the compo version I got the kinds of responses I expected, of which I’m glad. I hope that this new version was not made in vain.