Category: One Game A Month

Woah! I hear cries of astonishment at a “One Game A Month” post actually appearing well within the intended month. Well, yes, my new-found independence allows me the time to perform such feats. As it happens this particular game was mostly developed a while ago for a previous month (the Unity project name is in fact “July”) but I never got around to finishing it (loose definition of finish) until now.

This, then, is “Night Fishing”. I’m struggling to properly describe some of the things I make lately but this is more along the lines of the thoughtful, short, barely-a-game pieces. Almost an interactive picture really with a gentle narrative voiced by the only person in the scene. A lot of attention has gone into the aesthetics here and indeed the mechanical “gameplay” is only very slight. I hope it still proves meaningful.

I’d be particularly interested in what people think of this. Could it be expanded and if so how? Feel free to let me know below (or Twitter etc)!

Play “Night Fishing” here

June… what happened in June. I went to Rezzed! I think it’s the first games show like that I’ve attended and I enjoyed it. How I would surely like to have something to show at such an event in future!

Getting back to my self-imposed challenge of releasing a game every month: I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but this was another very time-limited month. I made a go of trying to finish the little match-3 puzzle thing I started the month before. It’s incredibly simple and by the time I uploaded it on here I was just happy to say I’m done for now on it. It was an interesting exercise but I don’t even particularly recommend playing it, but you are welcome to if you wish.

No idea what to get onto for July!

Presently I hold down a job in the actual salary/desk job games industry and as such am prone to sudden bouts of overtime requirement. This has really held back my efforts over the last month (and this month isn’t likely to be much better…) But enough of that, onto what I actually have achieved!

My initial plan was to knock up a little puzzle game. However, between fighting nasty little rare logic bugs and building up the mechanics it became clear in my few spare hours it wasn’t going to come together. Hopefully I’ll get back on that for this, the month of June, but what I have managed is an ultra-quick little game for May!

The self-explanatory “Catch the Light” sees the player in a standard first-person perspective chasing a hovering little ball of light around a stark monochrome environment. How many times can you catch it in a minute? A game of reflexes, orientation and observation. It would have suited the last Ludum Dare really, in its minimalist ways!

Play “Catch the Light” here

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!

Play “Mr. Eck”

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!

Play “(The Morning After) The Night Before”

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!

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!

Play “Warden of the Planes”