Monday, 31 January 2011

1000 plays

Yay, Walk with Jack has got a thousand plays/downloads at Game Jolt, which is cheerful news. Given that GM games don't work in a browser (whatever the plug ins pretend) but have to be downloaded, that is quite a milestone for me. Peanuts to what your average Flash game can get at Kongregate or Newgrounds, mind, but still quite good. For context, Shush has a grand total of 989 plays/downloads and has been online since May 2007. May 2007? I have been doing this publicly since May 2007? Sheesh.

Have another picture:

Monday, 24 January 2011

Experimental Gameplay

I keep telling myself that one day I will write a proper commentary on the little games I make, so that they make a little more sense than they currently do.

Three things occur to me, however:

I make games to relax.
I make games as experiments.
I make games that are more doodles than art.

I have had a fair amount of staring into space time lately, where I have found it hard to grind the day job into the weekends and the evenings so I turned to making a couple of (very quick) games according to someone else's theme, in this case that of the Experimental Gameplay Project.

I therefore offer these only as relaxing doodle experiments, largely about mouse control. The theme for January was 'inanimate', and both took four or five hours to complete (the brief for EGP is that dev time be under a week, so they are comfortably inside that).

The links take you to Game Jolt downloads of PC only exe files.



The first is called Danse Macabre and features the music by Camille Saint-Saƫns and has the unquiet bones of a skeleton drifting away from its burial. The player is supposed to use left mouse to drag the bones back to rest. More experience than game, but there are some things I like here.





The second is All My Base, a space invader-a-like with a completely different control mechanic. There are blue and green invaders firing blue and green missiles at your bases, which cannot move. You need to manoeuvre the green on blue and the blue on green to destroy them before they hit your bases. The trick is that you can only drag the alien ships on screen as a single formation (they behave like a layer). It is slower than a true arcade game, and a bit puzzlish, but again there are things I am pleased with.