Not the name of my new band but rather a matter of fact description of this post, having finally shoved the timelapse for my work on Pyramid up the YouTube.
The game is over here.
Belated Timelapse
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Minimalism
…Was the theme for the 26th and latest Ludum Dare, which came and went last weekend and which once again I participated in. Minimalism is certainly a very useful theme for a game jam in that it encourages you to drop the baggage of detailed artwork or superfluous features, but I could see it being dangerous in enabling excuses too…
I’ve threatened to make a roguelike a couple of times before. In fact one previous effort got quite far before I abandoned it. So what better time to finally get one out of my system than a game jam about minimalism? Roguelikes have always gone for a minimalist graphical approach anyway, right?
My fourth game of the year, then, is Pyramid: a minimalistic roguelike. Things went quite well on balance: I actually went with my first idea, which is often a bad move but it allowed me to get good and focused early on. The pyramid motif comes from the level progression: level 1 is merely 2×2 squares, and indeed looks very minimalistic! Each subsequent level expands the size of the layout by 1 in both directions. Gradually a vision fog comes into play more and wandering spirits (the coloured blocks) appear and will attack you without a second though.
I’m quite pleased with the clean visual style. It certainly helped having the simple graphics (although getting that highlight on the top and right edges of the squares took far more investigating than it ever should have… there’s always something).
So now we’re into May already! Four games in four months achieved, but my day job is going into overdrive this month leaving me with concerns over what I can do. I have this fishing thing in the works, hopefully I can find enough time to make it a game. We shall see.
And I almost forgot – I’ll stick a timelapse of development up soon but I just haven’t got around to compiling it yet. Busy busy…
One Game A Month: March
And now for something a little different! After mentally exhausting myself in February I took it a bit easier this time around – at least on the code/art side of things – and took some time to learn Twine and write myself a little story.
The convention in a lot of text adventures is to address the player in the second-person as “you” – “you are faced with a choice”, “you walk North towards the badger sett” and such. So my little twist on this is a sort of role-switch: the story mainly consists of a dialogue between two characters; your character is the one addressing the other in this manner. You suggest to him which choice to make, and you hear his response to these instructions.
This is structured within the setting of a hypothetical hypnotherapy session, where you are able to heavily influence your patient’s dream-like thoughts. There are three endings, although they don’t differ hugely. Three months in, three games out: going to plan so far!
One Game A Month: February
It would be fair to say I over-reached a little with my February concept… For the shortest month of the year I started late due to my January effort overrunning and then chose to make an art-heavy game. I’ve never produced this much art for a little game before and I had planned to do more! I only just about had time for the absolute basic story scenes with no animation beyond the player walking and a couple other frames.
The concept is one I came up with some time ago – really enjoying the way I can revisit concepts with these monthly games – where you find a guy waking up hungover in a house and by searching around you recover his memories of the night before. I would have put a lot more fluff items in, and more secondary characters, but yeah: time.
The art style is something specific I’ve tried out: I imagined the game looking like a picture from one of those school textbooks we used to have, which creatively seemed to only use one ink colour per page. So I’ve got solid outlined, filled vector art with those gradient backgrounds. I think it’s quite consistent if not beautiful (art remains my weakness as a developer).
Needless to say I will be mindful of the time-consuming nature of such art in March, and as such I fully intend to make some interactive fiction with Twine. One extreme to the other!
One Game A Month: January
Okay so technically I missed January, but as the entry system over at onegameamonth.com was relaxed for the month I’m definitely still claiming it! As you may or may not know I have pledged to release one game every month of this, the year 2013. So without further ado my first game is here, and it is yet another hybrid curiosity – I’ve had a few efforts at mashing RPG mechanics into other styles of games, and this one takes most of its cues from Minesweeper of all places!
Warden of the Planes
This is “Warden of the Planes” and is a sort of stripped-back dungeon-crawling RPG, but as if played on a minesweeper board. Not mines, monsters! There is some clunkiness and imbalance to it, but feedback has been quietly encouraging. I certainly haven’t ruled out further work on this to get in some much needed accessibility and prettiness. One for another month perhaps.
Now I need to get onto something for February already, which could become my first look at making a graphical adventure game in Unity, something I’ve been planning to try for a while.
I’d be delighted if you’d try my little game out: the title screen comes loaded with a block of text hints to hopefully help a little (e.g. start by exploring around blank tiles to not die immediately). Any feedback is welcome!
Harold won the mood category!
I’m a few days late mentioning this here but look at that!! My previous best category rating, I believe, was about 49th in humour for Jack. So imagine my shock upon seeing this result on Tuesday! It was enough to get Harold is an Executioner a spot on Indie Statik’s round-up too! As a long time would-be contender (see: this entire blog) I am absolutely delighted to break into the top end of the voting. The game also placed 8th for my use of the theme “You are the villain” (and optionally, goats).
The weird thing is I don’t even feel like this is the best thing I’ve done, but I suppose as an experience it is more focused in its intent and delivery. It actually gets a message across to people (even if it is pretty straight-forward). I have upset people greatly with my miserable interactive tale, and have reaped my reward.
It feels like the perfect start to 2013: a year that I am promising myself will be a very important year for me and my work. So without pause for breath the next thing to note is my participation in the surprisingly popular One Game A Month movement, which I fully intend to keep up with. I’m off to India for a little jolly shortly, so my January game will be simple and finished right at the end of the month. In which case, I better go get some work done!
Role Reversal
Not long ago I was quite determined I would not be able to make a game this past weekend but somehow I worked around two pub visits and a meal outing to finish up something I’ve descriptively called Harold is an Executioner.
The theme this time around was “You Are the Villain”, which pretty much sealed the deal on me entering. I am sometimes guilty of whinging about uninspired Ludum Dare themes but this is a great one! So I crafted this game telling the tale of an unlikely executioner doing his job to put food on the table as the horror of what he does every day washes over him.
It’s got to be the darkest thing I’ve ever produced and was almost at times a little uncomfortable to put together. But none of this is supposed to be gratuitous and I’m hopeful that shows. Sometimes life sucks. Harold’s life sucks. This game is not “fun”. Here’s hoping the “mood” category helps me in the voting!
Play Harold is an Executioner here
And as per tradition, a time-lapse appears!
And if I’ve not spoiled your mood too much, do have a good Christmas and New Year! I will return soon, possibly with something relating to this phrase: “One Game A Month”…
Charity Game Jam
Hey there! Last weekend the international game jammin’ community came together once again to make games over one weekend, but this time with a nice little extra twist: raising money for charity! I think the Funkytron (back to that shortly) is still open as I write and has recorded $1550 raised for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Which is great!
I donated myself as I worked away on a game that I eventually wasn’t up to completing. Why? Well I only started it on the Saturday night and it just didn’t quite come together. It was inspired by a delightfully insane story concept I heard from an office colleague wherein the Earth is a prison for an alien race, and other aliens are bombarding the prison to release them. Or something. Hmm maybe this one is best left unfinished…
The theme of the jam was to fit the limitations of the NES (I love restrictions like that) and the submissions can be played over on the Funkytron here: http://www.charitygamejam.com/
Oh, and see you in December for Ludum Dare 25!
A new (not-)game
Hello again! I’m afraid I haven’t touched Project Prophecy since the last Ludum Dare compo but I have continued to tinker around with Flash things. This weekend was Mini-Ludum Dare #37: I hadn’t especially planned to enter but the theme called out to me. Not making a game; or more accurately, making a not-game. A chance to forget reward mechanics and arbitrary challenges in favour of crafting a specific and personal experience for the player (if we still call him or her that) to take in.
It is literally full of stars
As you may not be aware I have always held something of a fascination with space and the universe: I actually studied a masters degree in Physics with Astrophysics while I still decided what to do with my life. And while I’ve long forgotten most of the hard maths I tried to absorb those years ago, this vague fascination formed the basis of the game I made this weekend. In it you are presented a fairly accurately mapped section of the Northern Hemisphere sky (thanks to this neat site) where you can pick out constellations amongst the stars. There is a little incidental dialogue from the out-of-shot stargazing couple to accompany your little exploration. I’m quite pleased with it really, I hope it can prove a pleasant distraction!
Evolution!
Evolution! The theme seemed destined to forever look on from the ranks of Ludum Dare’s final voting round only to see another take the honour; but this time somehow Evolution pushed past “Parallel Worlds” by the smallest of margins to finally get its weekend in the Sun. Surely after noticing this theme time and time again I would be full of ideas to crack on with. Well… not quite. I couldn’t really get past the whole “evolve your character to be gradually better” idea that I ended up rolling with. Turns out this was actually a really difficult theme to properly dig into.
So, my entry then is an arcadey little top-down shooter. I figured something really managed and mechanically straightforward was a good idea, and in a sense it probably was. I think the 2 main reasons I ended up a bit disappointed with this are as follows:
- I struggled on Saturday. I had a few drinks Friday night but it wasn’t that, I just got distracted easier than usual, for which I could blame a number of things not least the fact I’m moving into a new flat imminently and have a lot of stuff to arrange. But yeah, excuses excuses.
- I didn’t love the idea. I don’t think it’s enough to just have a small, focused idea. Not if you want to make something of real value. Everything was a bit mechanical with this and my motivation suffered for it. Next time I’ll try to take this on board and go for something I can imbue with a little more passion.
So there it is – mixed feelings but as ever with these things, I reckon I’m better for it. Back to Project Prophecy! (I really need a better name for that at some point…) Oh and here’s the timelapse from my time doing LD 24: