A Brazilian fellow who calls himself Douglas Mitsujii has a website in which he collects Flash games he finds particularly philosophical or emotive. He contacted me about translating my game Viewpoints a month ago, and guess what, it’s done already. The one upgrade I couldn’t resist was the audio quality (lower and more efficient compression), so now the Portuguese version has one slight advantage over the original.

Play the Portuguese Viewpoints

Una cosa poética epistolar, creo. En español esta vez, para variar un poco.

(Sin asunto) (web)

En verdad tiene su origen hace mucho, de cuando primero jugué hush de Increpare y me puse a desarrollar un par de ideas con esa base, de las cuales ninguna dio fruto. Esta en particular no funcionó porque no hallé la narrativa adecuada para el formato. Me pasa a menudo que tengo una idea formal que no sé solucionar en cuanto a su contenido. En fin, la retomé después de leer un tweet de Terry Cavanagh sobre Catherine (el juego) y su mecánica de escribir mensajes de texto que coincidía más o menos con mi idea.

The surrealistic title for this game has two reasons: one, all three words are words you may encounter in-game; and, two, the game features frogs drinking faces.

This was a lax collaboration that involved me doing the game design and coding and three girls from my family (including my 5-year-old sister) preparing the art assets and coming up with English words of five-non-repeating-letters. Worked on at odd intervals throughout the 2012-in-One Glorious Developers Konference Kollection Pirake Kart weekend, for submission into it.

Play Frogs Drink Faces (Flash)

If you’re having trouble figuring out what to do, here’s how you play it. The letters on the frogs’ backs correspond to keys on your keyboard. Press a key and the frog will lash its tongue upward to meet any face in its way. Drink the angry, evil faces and spare the smiling, innocent ones (that’s how you deal with my sister). Every few seconds, faces will start falling a bit faster, frog letter labels will be removed, and a pair of frogs may get swapped (but their associated letters remain). In short, what started out as a CREAM arrangement of frogs will turn to CAERM, to CMERA, to EMCRA, and so on, making it harder to keep track of what the effect of pressing a key will do. Until you lose and get laughed at by my sister. Enjoy.

I’ve refreshed the front page. The new design sports a rather subtle effect that nonetheless took me a fair number of hours to pull off, in part because I’m still not that familiar with javascript, but also because it was far more complicated than I originally estimated. It may not work as it’s supposed to in browsers other than Firefox and Safari’s latest versions, since it hasn’t been tested beyond those.

The previous design‘s been archived.

Español

This post should have been written in September, but laziness kept me. The video you see above I only got around to finishing last night. Depicted in the video is an art installation for Centro Cultural Palacio La Moneda‘s freshly opened art and technology space. I undertook programming duties in the project which I was invited to by Sebastián Skoknic and Francisco Fuentes.

The work uses an ordinary webcam to detect user movement, which causes stuff to happen on the screen under five distinct modes that the user can switch between via a menu that’s also motion-activated, located on the far right side of the physical space. This menu was poorly conceived, and causes plenty of user confusion due to how easy it is to obstruct with the body, which would cause random buttons being constantly activated. There are plans to scrap it in favor of a physical interface located on the ground.

An interesting feature is that it silently captures images as seen by the camera every thirty minutes. These might get collated later on and used for a video depicting users interacting with the installation over the months in sped-up form.

If you’d like to give this a try but can’t attend the actual physical space, there’s also a web version that can be used with your computer’s webcam. Go to the site of the exhibit and click the last button in that horizontal bar, the one that says ‘¡Muévete!’ Then, click on ‘Juega!’

[…]

I usually don’t update my games, but since I decided to put Runnerby in my portfolio, some of its issues had been bugging me. So, I updated it. Now, the music pauses when the Flash applet loses focus, and there is a title screen that forces you to click and press space before starting the game, which should resolve any confusion over keys not doing anything (caused by Flash first lacking focus), and not knowing what key to use to play, for the beginners. I actually copied this last technique from Mode, the example game that Adam Saltsman made for Flixel. My game still retains its other problems.

Or, Idea for Twee game. This is something I was compelled to make.

so is there one specific person (her) who is most sensitive to the problem? if so, would avoid any specifics on her solve that? would it make it just too vague, the work? is there merit in a work so vague it says nothing about anything in the end?

Play While telling with the eyes in your browser

The game I posted last about, Ascension, was made by talented game author Jonathan Whiting.

I will ramble. Please forgive.

One day, on a whim, I contacted a few fellow game makers to see if they would be interested in taking part in a little experiment. Following up on my whims has been my modus operandi since I started making games, so this just seemed appropriate. A few caught on, and what we set out to do was make a game each, and then switch around the credits, so each of us would release a game that was not of our respective creation. […]

A game of logic exploring gesture-based input. Saying more would probably mean to spoil it.

Play Ascension (Flash)

Also read: an important note.

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

Play Intervalo… (Flash)