But here’s a short update on what I’ve been doing with games lately, mostly my most recent, and I think the best thing I’ve done since Caverns of Khron:

This is the most recent game I’ve made, called Super Stone Ball, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.  It’s the product of my continued interest in exploring what I can do with fairly traditional platformer mechanics, thoughts on how the player can build things in the game world, and, like many things I’ve made, my continued obsession with Lemmings.  It also cannibalizes a lot of the sound effects I made for the never-finished sound-enabled About a Ball game.

It’s small, musicless, and I made it in about 4 hours.  Eight stages that scale up in difficulty.  Like everything I make, it’s for Windows. Download it at Glorious Trainwrecks!

Other games I’ve made in the last few months:

• 
  Shellmar’s Shellulous Journey, a short monochrome mascot platformer with a shield mechanic
• 
  Village Vampire Feast, a survival/resource management game
• 
  Turtle Lord, a riff on the end of Super Mario Bros. 3
• 
  Gavle Goat Guard, a Christmas game made as a gift for SpindleyQ of Glorious Trainwrecks

Seconds Left by Elektron

Elektron’s single-screen platformer is brutally difficult.  It’s perhaps a little too ungenerous when it comes to hit detection and so on, but for pixel-perfect, fast-paced platforming, it’s pretty darn good (when I played it x months ago, I got a lot farther than I did before playing it again this evening).  Where it really excels is its interesting punishment for failing to clear a level.  Rather than giving you finite lives or making you simply repeat the level from the beginning, the game boots you back to the beginning of the previous level.  It’s a pretty ingenious approach to progression, as advancing farther really feels earned.

Tower Defense by Bento Smile

You may know Bento Smile’s name from any of a number of excellently designed games with supremely charming visuals (and a modicum of fame with Air Pressure from a few years back).  I’ve played a lot of tower defense games in my time and this is by far the funniest.

Skeletons in the Closet by JF Roco

I never had a Spectrum ZX-82, and have never even seen one (though I recently saw a shelf full of games at a game store in Akihabara).  I think I missed out, because people who played that machine a lot went on to make things like La Mulana and a trilogy of games made by JF Roco for Pirate Kart V.  This was my favorite of them, a simple but slick, stylish platformer.  Obviously, games like this have a special place in my heart, but really, this game’s biggest flaw is (as EffBee notes on the comments section for the game) that it just ends to soon.  I could happily play through 50 levels of this.

Proximity Mime by Chris Chung

Are mime jokes old hat?  Yes.  Did I enjoy this game that involves dodging mimes?  Yes.  In part, because you yourself play a mime.  And further, the  mimes have pantomime apples that make you lose.  It’s a simple, fun joke played well.  Its core dodging and moving feel pretty good too!

Die Hero by Petri Purho

In this game, your avatar carries a sword, but more importantly he–like the monsters he fights–is equipped with a set of multi-sided dice (that he gets more of as he levels up, defeating monsters).

The game occasionally rolls entire game boards that are effectively impossible (giving you nothing but enemies with more dice with more sides than your own).  But throwing the dice down after entering battle is just quite a bit of fun.  It’s something I wouldn’t mind seeing further developed.

Wasps vs. Demons: A Love Story by atuun

A surprisingly long and lush visual novel about the forbidden love between Wasp and Demon royalty.  It’s played at just the right tone to be engrossing and ridiculous.  The game came about as a result of one of the donor’s request rewards: “Wasps VS Demons! A love story!” It’s basically wonderful.

Also see the game’s Launch Day DLC.

Dammit Snake by Guilherme Töws

At its heart, Snake is a game about managing your own space as you crawl and grow around the screen collecting pellets.  In this one, your body splits and becomes part of a permanent obstacle course, making you design your own level as you go.  Pretty clever.

Zaratustra also made another clever thing called “Flip” for the event.

Penguin Lost by Max Weinberg

It may be unfortunately marred by that Game Maker Lite logo in the upper left corner, but this game is just lovely.

That’s all for now!  I’ll try to post another handful of games in the next few weeks.  I’m going to go searching again through the entire 1,005 games of the Pirate Kart V soon, and I recommend you do as well (download them all free!) to find the gems I’ll miss.

It’s a project that began back in January, and I’m pleased to finally release it to the public today.  Caverns of Khron features more than 50 total (40 in the main game) levels, most of which should provide some degree of challenge.  I’m honored that the game features an amazing soundtrack by my good friend and frequent collaborator WiL Whitlark (who recently did the soundtrack for Retro Affect’s Snapshot, which you should buy) and that I was able to work with Michael Santiago, who did the background and environmental object graphics as well as the logo design.  

I encourage all my visitors to download and play it at the game’s website.

PS: If you’re wondering why some website’s like GameJolt and Indievania have a slightly smaller download size, it’s because I didn’t include a bonus “demo” folder in those releases.

Some box art I whipped up myself that isn’t all that good.

Enter Shellmar’s Shellulous Journey, a new mascot platformer for the PC!

I didn’t implement all of my ideas in this version, but the core idea is there.  Initially, Shellmar was going to have a cannon on his back he could use to thwart enemies who targeted him, but for a quickie implementation of the concept, I think this worked more or less well.  The collission detection with the bullets and platforms mayb e a little unkind, and I may offer an update soon.  But I’m fairly satisfied with this.

Download at the game’s page at Glorious Trainwrecks

My cousin Steven introduced me to QBASIC in the mid-nineties, and it was simple enough that I thought I could write a couple small programs.  I never actually spent much time with text adventures like Zork (I loved Return to Zork, but couldn’t get my hands on an actual copy of the Zork trilogy until like 1998), but I was in love with the idea, and had played around with a couple MOOs and MUDs, more interested in the promise than any execution of the idea I’d actually seen.  Before long, I’d programmed a virtual room-by-room tour of my house–called “My House”–which forever cemented in my mind the cardinal directional layout of Pocatello, Idaho.  This and other games would be “published” under a “label” called “Moore-Tech 2000,” and I’d hang this sign on my door:

Please note that this sign only ever hung on my bedroom door.  The prices listed were the fees I wanted to charge my two younger sisters to give them copies of these games on their own floppy disks.  It was an evolution of when I tried to sell my sisters and cousins the Nintendo fanfiction I’d write and illustrate, bound in construction paper when I was about nine-years-old.  I also offered customized games for the low price of only 75 cents to $1.75.  I don’t believe I ever made a cent from any of my games, and rightly so.  Eventually, I just tried to get my sisters to play them.

Of the games listed, very few without the checkboxes ever were finished.  ”Text Color” simply changed the color of the MS-DOS text interface.  ”Pilgrim Hunter” was a text game where the player searched a square field square by square for a turkey to shoot, like a festive, unchallenging “Hunt the Wumpus.” I also apparently finished something called “J.C.,” but I have no idea what that might have been.  I seem to have been planning something called “Aquaria,” and considering my then-interests, it surely involved mermaids.

Sadly, I finally disposed of my 486 PC last year, which had what I’m sure were the only remaining copies of all the games I worked on, including the first game I ever published, “UFO Invasion,” a QBASIC text adventure uploaded to AOL and co-written with my friend Caleb.  I also once had extensive pages of planning for the sequel, which I intended to be a Wolfenstein-like FPS.  Also there was another collaboration with Caleb, a Christmas-themed game called “The Reindeer Riots,” though I can’t remember for the life of me what actually happened in it.

“Magic Learner” is the one for which I have the most documents still and was the first game I intended to be released in the world of “Khron,” a text adventure with a magic casting system and a fair amount of open exploration, to be later paired with a game called “Power Quest” which would be a text adventure with an action and strength orientation.  I’d written some amount of lore for the games’ story world, and even drew maps.  Below is a map of the game world and a modified one broken up into a navigable grid for use in the game.

Of course, these papers are what inspired me to name my current game “Caverns of Khron” (before that, it was called “Ruins of Bufannei,” a contraction of “Bullshit Fantasy Name”).  If you’re worried about Khron canon, understand that the game actually takes place in Greschden Caverns, but the game doesn’t bear that name because it sounds stupid.

Note the copyright date on the map.  The world of Khron existed contemporarily with our own, but with a 1,960 year date offset.  P.D., I assume, once meant something.

I’d begun a Halloween-themed horror adventure game called “Mansion,” where the player explores a large mansion during a Halloween party to discover dark secrets.

This game eventually evolved into “Jack O’Lantern,” which began life as a text adventure, and I distinctly remember drawing this map for it in my ninth grade speech class:

In 1997, I learned about ZZT, and found it a more attractive design platform.  I actually adapted this design pretty faithfully into a ZZT game that I published.

In those days, all my ZZT designs happened on paper before they happened onscreen. I have pages and pages of ZZT-OOP code for games like the unfinished “Bob 3: The Amazon Adventure” and “Zem! X” which I began work on in 1998 and didn’t finish until 2002.

With my early ZZT games, I employed a “star” system like Tezuka Osamu’s, featuring recurring characters playing different parts in each story.  It was silly, but I was in love with the idea.  In the “Zem! X” paper, I love where I drew a picture explaining to myself what I saw in my mind and how I had to express it with ASCII characters.

My ambition was not limited to what I could conceivably produce at the time, of course.  What I wanted to make followed my interests, which in the mid-nineties became largely focused on real-time strategy games.  I have about a dozen pages of notes for “Medieval” and its expansion “Medieval Quests,” featuring a total of five factions, with unique units and campaigns.

I also possessed a strange, obsessed fascination with LCD games, and went as far as to plan the screens for half a dozen games on paper. One of these, “Mythical Commander” (left) was an intended LCD real-time strategy game. “Blif the Blot” (right) was a mascot platformer that had a secret versus mode.

Beginning in my later teenage years, I fell in love with the link cable racing game included in Super Mario Bros. DX for the Game Boy Color, and plotted an intricate expansion of the game called Super Mario Arena, featuring a character roster with different abilities, power-ups, and a greater focus on competitive combat. I possessed some vain hope that Nintendo would somehow find out about my plans and accept my pencil drawings as the design document for a million-seller Game Boy Color game and a long career in making video games.

I continued to make ZZT games and began playing around with Megazeux.  Eventually, I became more interested in filmmaking than my once-intended career of glamorous, professional video game development and programming.  I kept my toes wet, working on a graphic adventure game and an online RPG fighter with my cousin, though neither project came to full fruition, and I only advised design and worked on graphics.  I wonder what would’ve happened if instead of ZZT, someone had handed me a copy of Klik N’ Play (I saw it in software catalogs, and after it I lusted), or if Game Maker had come into my life a decade before it did.

I’m going up to my mother’s house in a couple weekends.  I’m hoping to dig up some more of these kinds of papers.  I have a vague dream about picking up one of the other game concepts I know I had once upon a time and seeing if I can’t bring it to life with what I know now, just to fulfill my 13-year-old self’s dreams on some level.  It’s been somewhat inspiring to examine what I used to think about games, see where I’m similar, and see where I’m the same.

And at the very least, the 16-years-in-the-making Khron world of games will finally see the light.

Caverns of Khron (2012)

These games are presented in a more or less arbitrary order.  I mean no insult to anyone whose games I don’t feature.  Every game in the Kart is valuable because, and everyone should have their game played.  But I wanted to share some of my favorites.

Dark Scorcerer by Ryleigh Kostash

There are a lot of things I like about Ryleigh Kostash‘s Dark Scorcerer.  The player character is a dark sorcerer (or, I suppose, scorcerer) whose magic bullets grow and gain in power as they travel across the screen.  You have to dodge the knights as you attempt to kill them.  The knights give you points, but also drop multiplier mods you have to pick up to stack onto your existing modifier, which quickly balloons into a gigantic number.  And if that number hits you, you also die.  It’s a game about navigating space and manipulating numbers with a natural, somewhat comical difficulty curve.  It also just feels really good to play.

Win Condition by Hugs

This game borrows heavily from the last screens of The Legend of Zelda for an enjoyable exploration of how video games can end.  There are, I believe, five different endings, though I’ve only reached four.  Find as many as you can.  The game’s cheeky as hell, and has a splendid sense of humor, and feels like a pretty good approximation of Zelda‘s core mechanics to boot.

I won’t give you any more than that, because it’s largely about the joy of discovery.  I’ve perhaps already revealed too much.

Action Figure Fighter by Kirkjerk

A brilliantly simple and utterly adorable idea.  A mashup of arcade fighting games and that box full of action figures from your childhood.  Its aesthetic is simple, and totally pitch perfect.

Also strongly recommended is another Kirkjerk entry into Pirate Kart V, DinoBeeBoxer.

Absolute Chaos Dog by Yuliy

Balance your physical need of food, obtainable by obediently performing the tricks your human overlords request of you, against your desire to achieve chaos and anarchy, accomplished by rebelling against those same demands, in your desire to become the Absolute Chaos Dog.  The game’s input is smart and unique, and the tone of the presentation is really fun.  The game has three endings, but only one allows you to achieve the status of Absolute Chaos Dog.

Rapid Fire Your Hookshot to Glory and Death by Damian Sommer

An alteration of Sommer’s own Context Insensitive, this works very well as its own, standalone, fast-pace single screen platformer.  The hookshot mechanic is used to navigate very narrow spiky passages and impossibly long jumps.  It feels tight and its aesthetic is great.  A lot of fun.

Famous Author Series by Chris Whitman

Chris Whitman made two games in his “Famous Authors” series and a making-of in the same style featuring himself making the game.  He uses them as a good platform for some good comedy both about his subjects and game inputs.

Franz Kafka
Marcel Proust
Making of

Realistic Female First-Person Shooter by Anna Anthropy

Adapted from a gallingly sexist post by some men’s right forum poster named XTC, Anthropy executes a ridiculous concept brilliantly in the best kind of mockery.

I also gotta say, too, I’m kind of in love with how this game looks.  Anthropy is really excellent with her video game visuals.

Super Thwomp Bros. by Dock

I’ve got a serious soft spot for games that put you in the shoes of the enemy.  I’ve also got a particular fondness for doing that with enemies from the Mario series (and I’ve done it myself in my game Hammer Bro.!, though you didn’t have to kill Mario in that game).  Playing with how a different character in a familiar world plays is a fun experiment.  This game is, of course, much like the excellent Spike: A Love Story, albeit much cuter and shorter.

PepsiMan Generations by Topher Florence

With such a relentlessly, garishly hip aesthetic (everyone and their Coke can in sunglasses, wild Spring Break cam), a feverish confusion of the same things (the game is called PepsiMan Generations, stars a Coke Can, and the executable is called drpepper.exe) and some seriously wacky but precise controls, this is some modern pop art masterpiece.

But could we expect any less from DocFuture?

I’ve drawn heavy inspiration from quite a few games, but most especially Monuments of Mars and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.  Though the game has pretty simple basic elements (the player character can jump, swing a sword, and toss throwing stars), my goal has been to execute a relatively simple set of actions with sharp and polished level design.  I’m hoping that’s what I’ve accomplished.

The image above shows off unfinished background graphics.  Adding that coat of paint is to be my last phase of working on the game, as knowing where my platforms, doors, and switches are located has been my primary focus.  There will be over 40 stages in all.

I’m pleased to report that my friend WiL Whitlark is providing the game’s soundtrack.  WiL has worked with me in scoring my feature film, Legends of Minigolf: The Flamingo’s Challenge, as well as numerous short films, including The Mustache and The Importance of Tolerance.

Watch this space in the next few days as I announce where a few other, larger game projects are in development, and in the near future where I recommend a host of other people’s Pirate Kart games.

17. My Pet Thing

This is the game I probably spent the least or second least amount of time on.  This was another request from the Kickstarter funders, and the request was this:

a game about taking care of a virtual pet and dressing it up and decorating its home

A virtual pet game!  I haven’t thought much about virtual pets since I had a little dog in a watch I kept on my nightstand in junior high.  My original ambitions were a bit lofty, but once I had the drawing of the thing (drawn directly into Game Maker’s sprite editor by mouse), I knew the tone this thing would take.  There aren’t that many things to click on, and your pet can never die (though it can sit in its own filth for a while), but I had fun putting this senseless, silly thing together.

18. Andrew W.K.’s Passage

Parodies of Jason Rohrer’s Passage are a Glorious Trainwrecks and Pirate Kart tradition by now, with numerous “sequels” and retoolings populating the fifth Pirate Kart alone.  Some have you playing 8 Passages at the same time, turn the slow aging mechanic of the game into a race to death, or make the player character into a literal piece of shit.  Sergio Cornaga put out one of the best Pirate Kart games in Passagebalt, injecting Passage into Canabalt.

Mine amounts to a pretty simple joke in the titular lyric from Andrew W.K.’s “We’re Not Gunna Get Old.”  It was fun rendering Andrew W.K. (whose music I listened to constantly throughout the Kart) in Rohrerized pixel form.

19. 101-in-1 Amaze-o-Kart!

Stemming from an IRC chatroom conversation with Effbee and others, I wanted to make a multi-kart to stuff into the multi-kart, upping the total number of Pirate Kart games by 100.  Effbee had done something similar for the second Pirate Kart with his 999,998-in-1 cart, the product of actual randomization, I believe.  For this one, I built a handful of quick, basic levels and made all the objects reskin by certain variables set in the multicart menu.  I recycled most of the game graphics and mechanics from elsewhere (getting enemies from games like Holiday Penguin Mania X, bringing in the player characters of Ghost Witch and Bulb Boy, and borrowing the levers from the in development Caverns of Khron), but this took forever.  Most of what took forever was coming up with 101 unique names for the games in the cart, and then setting the 4 variables that differentiated them.

All for a little joke.  But in making the joke, I made the closest thing to a Donkey Kong ’94-style platformer, which was something I’d been aiming for all throughout.

20. ChickenFall: ChickenCatch: Friend’s Edition

If only I’d come up with another game in the ChickenFall franchise, we could’ve had titles four layers deep!

Basically, this was a quickly put together game to up the total game count.  I didn’t change much from the way the first game worked, save for inputs.  I think I even left the phase progression alone.

That said, turning this into a two-player game (like Koi Puncher before it) may actually make this a more interesting game.  It’s always fun to play with your friends!

21. Witch Sisters in Lava Dungeon Rescue

For the last few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about multiplayer games where the players have different abilities.  I knew I wanted to make a game like that in the weeks following the Pirate Kart V weekend.  My initial concept was a Space Invaders-inspired game where players had to keep each other alive, one controlling a gun turret shooting airborne threats with the mouse, and the other protecting the turret from earthbound enemies with melee attacks.  But then I had the two witch sprites from the 101-in-1 Amaze-o-Kart, and, with Solomon’s Key 2: Fire ‘n’ Ice in mind, thought I had what could be a real interesting game, one where one player can shoot missiles, and the other can create blocks.

I’d also been wanting to make another splitscreen co-op platformer, after my Vector the Crocodile fangame, Vector Bros. the Crocodiles Escape the Warehouse.  I used a lot of what I learned from that game in this.

It’s not a bad idea, but it’s one that deserves more attention and better level design than I gave it here.  This is something of an awkward failure, I’m afraid.  But it’s one I’m often thinking about how to retool and make better.

22. Tales of Whales

Some time during the Pirate Kart festivities, I went crazy over Nintendo’s Game & Watch Gallery series, which had been the primary occupants of my Game Boy Color back in high school.  I became interested in doing more survival score attack games, and wanted to try my hand at a simple platformer.  I took my aesthetic cues from one of my favorite visual designs for an NES stage, world 4-2 of Super Mario Bros. 2 (USA).  The game may get too difficult too quickly, and I wonder if having the seagulls running into the player being instant death was really the correct choice, but I think I balanced the whale motions pretty well, and succeeded in creating a game that’s fairly charming to look at.

23. Boulder Defender

I really enjoyed the visual style I employed for Tales of Whales, and the next day, I played a fair bit of Tim Rogers and company’s Ziggurat.  This was the result.  It plays like a simplified Zigguart mashed up with a tower defense game.  The game originally had an old West theme, but a medieval setting just made that much more sense.  One of my favorite things about doing it was that as the game progresses and the player makes mistakes, the tower’s shape changes and the player has to adjust his or her perspective.  Which is surprisingly intuitive.

This is on my list of games to return to to polish up, retool, and possibly try to get some attention for.  If I could get this onto mobile platforms and tweak some things like enemy types, I think it might not be a half bad diversion.

24. Duel in Concert: Piano Man X Tambourine Man

Some days you walk into your apartment, find yourself singing Billy Joel’s “Piano Man,” and then 90 minutes later, this appears.  I actually built this on top of Boulder Defender and Tales of Whales in ways other than the visuals, but that’s probably basically invisible.  I don’t do a lot of games with mouse control, so that was fun to play with.

This game.  It’s really silly.

I was racing to make this the thousandth game in the Pirate Kart, but at 50 megs, it just took too long to upload.  Alas.

25. Bulb Boy Infinity

I was watching the live stream of people playing the Pirate Kart on the floor at GDC with only a few minutes left before GDC Play closed.  I realized I had just enough time to slap together one final game.  I did a quick edit of my The Adventures of Bulb Boy platformer to make it a survival score attack game.  It’s not a terrible idea, but the hasty schedule resulted in a level that’s far from ideal for what this game is.

Still, I got to watch Glorious Trainwrecks founder Jeremy “SpindleyQ” Penner play it as the last Kart game finished during GDC.  That was a pretty satisfying end to a wonderful journey into creative experimentation and, as it turned out, relative exhaustion.

Thanks for reading these!  If you have any feedback, please be sure to share.

Just made this game for Glorious Trainwrecks’s Timezone Lottery Klik Jam yesterday!  This is an idea I had while working on my Pirate Kart games, but never got around to, partly because I thought building it would be just too hard.  The core mechanic actually ended up being pretty simple to implement, and I had it working in about ninety minutes.

The idea grew out of wondering what sort of game I might make for the Nintendo DS/3DS’s two screens if given the opportunity.  Something where the player has to manage things on both the top and bottom screens without being so manic that they lose their mind.  I imagined a “pipe game”–those kinds of games where you have to pour something into a series of pipes and deduce from all of its twists and turns which one will get you to the goal or the best item.  Except on top, you’d have to fight enemies to get the stuff you needed to deliver to the bottom and to survive to keep the game going.

The basic concept is really quite silly, and I knew that.  My original idea was to play up the silliness of it all with a very darkandmature fantasy metal theme.  You’d be a badass barbarian warrior hacking and slashing dragons to overblown music, while playing a very silly pipe minigame like you might find in Mario Party.  But I started with borrowing the witch avatar from Ghost Witch and a couple of previously made enemies and placeholder pipe graphics in blue, and after four hours of work, I didn’t feel like retooling the entire feel.  I think the effect isn’t quite as strong as my original aesthetic choices, but that’s what I went for.  On a late playtest, I looked at what I was doing and said to myself “This is utter nonsense” and there I had my title.  This game is ridiculous.  I slapped the word “factory” on it to refer to the fact that it has the player delivering goods down pipes and gave it a MIDI called “Russian Ragtime” for its soundtrack.

It’s funny the plateaus that happen during (quickie) game development.  After about two hours, I’d had the game working almost as finished.  But then I had to iron out bugs with the random bucket placement, alter enemy speeds, design the text interface, and a bunch of tiny little things that bugged me (more than were bugs) and added another two hours to the game’s time.

Anyway, you can either DOWNLOAD (2.5 MB) the game directly or visit its page at Glorious Trainwrecks.

10. Owl Forest

What is an “endurance” challenge in a video game? Often it’s something that you can’t endure anymore because you’ve somehow triggered the fail state–death, failing to x enough ys.  But real endurance challenges mean you just can’t bear to go on anymore–physically, mentally, emotionally, whatever.  This game was conceived as the same thing, but with the player’s ability to put up with something obnoxious.  That thing soon revealed itself to be owls.  If you play this game, it is imperative that you turn your volume up pretty loud.

Originally, I was going to voice all the owl hoots, but I ultimately realized I can’t make very good owl sounds.  So I stole a bunch of sounds off The Owl Pages.  There are over 12 owl sound effects in the game, and they come from owls all over the world!

Like a handful of other ideas for the Kart, I thought this would be a nice easy one to breeze through and move onto something else, but I got bogged down in the presentation and it took over 3 hours.  Does the moon need to have parallax scrolling?  No, but when I realized I could, I couldn’t resist blowing another 10 minutes on it.  It’s my very first parallax!

11. Fuck the Sun

I finally finished watching Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) in February with my roommates.  I’m pretty much in love with it.  I also really liked using this photographic GIF of the Sun I found in my Vector the Crocodile Pirate Kart game, Vector the Crocodile is Chased by the Sun back in September.  So as soon as the phrase “fuck the Sun” crossed my mind (which it did for some reason that Sunday morning), I instantly knew what my next game was.  A game where you get revenge on the motherfucking Sun by killing it and preserving Earth as a testament that the rest of the human race once lived.  Sometimes you have to kill God.  My thoughts are in this neighborhood none too infrequently.

12. Fuck the Sun II: Sun Lover

And here’s the other place my thoughts go when “fuck the Sun” is in my head.  This is essentially another exercise in using the video game form as narrative, this time for a little joke about playing a “character” with his or her own motivations that might be distinct from the player’s.  The controls are broken.  I think I know why now, but I wasn’t too stressed about fixing them in the moment, because once I’d had my joke, I was ready to move on.  It might be slightly improved by making the player feel less like he or she is stranded on this course (though you still wouldn’t be able to fly back to Earth; you’d continue to move forward).

I had the good fortune of tuning in to the Pirate Kart’s GDC live feed and watching some beautiful guy freaking out and screaming, both about the Sun’s betrayal, and my choice of music.

If there were a Fuck the Sun III, I’m sure it’d be about a distant star hooking up with the Sun.  Maybe a dating sim eroge?

13. Watch Ducks HD Remix

I mentioned before that I’d intended to make a whole slew of “sequels” to Watch Ducks.  It was always my intention to make versions that looked like they belonged to later generations of consoles (as the first one rocked kind of an Atari 2600 or Intellivision aesthetic).  I thought I’d progress them through early NES style, with a Duck Hunt flavor, Super NES, and then eventually other maybe even 3D renderings, if I ever could accomplish that.  But the title of Street Fighter II: HD Remix was really just too appealing, so I borrowed that.  I almost had to scrap this one because I couldn’t find a decent picture of someone sitting at a bench to steal.  But then I found this one and it clicked!

This game taught me a lot about sprite/object scaling in Game Maker, by the way, something I may very well find good use for in the future.   Each of those ducks is one of the same two sprites, but they scale according to their y-coordinates.  That may seem obvious to some, but it was pretty exciting to me!

Within about five minutes of finishing this game, a friend arrived for my Oscar party.  My participation in the Pirate Kart weekend was over with thirteen total games, eleven of which were made over the weekend.  I’d aimed for twenty games, but that was a bit over-ambitious.  I could’ve easily pumped my numbers higher, but at this point, I’d realized I was really interested in taking each of these little quickie games and exploring some idea or other with them, and wanted to keep doing things that were interesting to myself, spinning out some games that I’d come to actually be quite fond of, rather than just pushing up the stats.

14. ChickenFall: ChickenCatch

I think this came to me after playing a round or two of  Nintendo’s Yoshi for the NES on my 3DS, where Mario enemies fall into a well and the player has to stack them up to eliminate them Dr. Mario style.  This idea became fused with the ridiculousness of the falling chicken in ChickenFall, and before long, I’d thought of chickens falling through a well, and then squawking when you poked them with giant, gloved cartoony machine hands.

It’s hard for me to tell how hard this one actually is, because at some point I either fixed the difficulty or just learned to play.  Having put this together in just three hours, it’s really hard to know!  There’s a silly rainbow-disco chicken feathers celebration reward at the end of the game that I personally enjoy looking at too much myself.

FUN FACT: Until the last second, this game was called ChickenPoke.

15. Watch Ducks CGA

A hilarious “demake” of Watch Ducks, put together in under half an hour, almost all of which was sourcing the RGB values of brown-green-red CGA color.  As a quickie and the last (or is it??) Watch Ducks sequel, it grew out of a hilarious idea I had about trying to create a version of some game renowned for its visual splendor, like Flower or Journey.  This, however, was easier, and a quick, cheap laugh.

The Pirate Kart has passed, Journey has actually come out, I’ve played it, and CGA Journey actually kinda seems like it might work tremendously well, especially with a functioning (14.4 dial-up?) multiplayer (and with switching CGA modes at some key moments).

16. Ghost Witch

First off, I think this is one of the best things I’ve ever made.

The note that this game came from is still scrawled on the white board I keep next to my desk.  In barely legible print-cursive hybrid smeared in blue marker before I went to bed the previous night, I wrote “SSP [single-screen platformer] where you make yourself a ghost.”  This idea was terribly interesting to me for a couple of reasons.

First, I’ve kind of been obsessed with single-screen platformers lately.  The major project I’m working on at present, Caverns of Khron (targeted for release in June or July–my biggest, fullest release to date! more details on that later) is a single-screen puzzle/action platformer very much inspired by Todd Replogle’s Monuments of Mars, something I rediscovered late last year.  I’ve also been playing Fire ‘n’ Ice and Donkey Kong 1994 a lot and thinking about Jetpack.  Previous results from my ponderance on single-screen platformers have been Holiday Penguin Mania X (mashed up with some basic Lemmings 2 ideas) and Bulb Boy (actually cannabalized and built off an early version of Caverns of Khron–a sequel to that one’s coming before too long!).  Doing another SSP was, I felt, a chance to possibly make a really good game in this game-making frenzy.

Two-player games where players have different abilities is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, too (and resulted in a less successful Pirate Kart game a few days after this).  This isn’t quite that, but it’s the player exploring the level in two different ways with two different sets of abilities.  It took me a while to figure out which abilities the ghost would have and which the player would have.  Initially, the ghost was going to spit ghost fire, but that didn’t seem to lend itself too well to puzzle-solving, making it more action-focused, which wasn’t my aim.  One of the intended uses of the ghost fire was to destroy platforms, and that quickly became the central idea.  The ghost witch’s body is fairly weak as far as platformer heroes, only really being able to jump. However, she can’t be harmed by the ghost enemies that litter the levels, which will only pursue and kill the ghost when it’s free. Neither form can damage enemies, and I really liked that that ended up happening.  I wish I had figured out a way to put the body’s statue form (what the body turns into when the ghost is free from it) in more jeopardy so the player has to manage the time spent in ghost form more diligently.

I know it’s frustrating that two different buttons are required to transfer the ghost into and out of the witch’s body, but it’s a problem I couldn’t figure out how to fix quickly in the short time I was allowing myself to finish the game.  I’m kind of impressed that I churned out eight reasonably solid (in my estimation) levels in under two hours, when I usually spend at least two or three hours designing the levels for Caverns of Khron.

This is an idea I hope to be returning to once a couple other projects are squared away.  I think I’ll be able to devise some expansions of the core ideas by adding new types of environmental obstacles.  So expect a fuller Ghost Witch  game in the not-too-distant future.

That’s it for part 2!  Part 3 will be about the last nine games I made.  Following that, I’ll be writing up some of my favorite to-date discoveries in the Pirate Kart.  As a reminder, you can download the Pirate Kart launcher (which then, itself, downloads the games) at www.piratekart.com.