Hubris

Funny week last week. The children were away with grandma, and I had a bitty week of having to drop into work most days despite being technically off on leave. So I spent time playing with an idea until I could get it playable.

I guess I had been thinking about Lost in Static a little and I have always had a desire to make a flea circus game. I have a memory from childhood of Michael Bentine's Potty Time featuring dioramas with invisible protagonists moving (with footprints) across a sand table, but YouTube seems to imply I dreamed it all. And I have always had an interest in making games about games -- as the Pinball Panda games (and particularly Ultimate Toybox) make obvious, and an academic observation or two to make about the figure of the avatar and its visibility. So all this came together in making a game in which the avatar/protagonist is more or less invisible and which there is always a balance between movement and stillness. Bad guys and coins fade in and out depending on whether you are moving and, as with Lost in Static, it is hard to represent this with screenshots. I will try, however, with a level or two with more going on than most:






It has certainly gone beyond proof of concept, and I think does something new, but I can't seem to get anyone to play it, beyond colleagues forced at gunpoint. Another idea that fascinates me more than others, perhaps? It is available (for PC) at YoYo Games (where I entered it into a competition hoping that that would generate plays) and at GameJolt, and for intel Macs here. And there is a low quality YouTube video in the post below.

Audio isn't its strong point, but apart from that I think this is interesting.

Very low quality video, but this is a gameplay video of a little experiment in making a flea circus inspired game while I had a week mostly off work and the rest of the family was away.



It looks a hell of a lot better in reality, but I have never turned out an AVI or registered with YouTube before, so this is a learning experiment all around.

Pinball Panda: Ultimate Toy Box

So, I made a game at 480x272 (PSP screen size) for a competition. Possibly the only thing that has kept me sane over the last few months. UK Higher Education feels a little fraught at the moment, and I am now on the Dark Side and of management and can't just keep my head down and on my academic work. Anyway, this has been fun to make, for all its flaws, and I still fantasise (as the makers of Game Maker imply) that they might have a runner up so that I could see this running on a PSP. It is either that or get my head around Unity or Flixel. In all my spare time.

You can access it here, should you be so inclined. PC only, and you have to play at 480x272. Controls are Space and Arrow Keys. Esc quits to Windows.

Ninjas

I am really quite pleased with this.

Brunel Talk 2008

Yay -- what is a year between giving a presentation and letting anyone have access to it? Anyway, this is the Brunel Conference Keynote I gave from September 2008. It lacks the video and still clocks in at a 4.5 Mb Pdf, but it does cover some of the ground I am now working on related to videogames as essentially excessive. I was reminded of this when Ian Bogost gave an excellent keynote at DiGRA 2009 about videogames as 'a mess'. I am not sure how much sense it makes as slides alone. Stumbled across as I tried to finish up a presentation I am due to give next Saturday in Dublin. Busy busy busy.

[Oh, and I forgot to mention that this was an attempt at an analysis of where Spore fits in relation to Game Studies -- I am always intrigued about the process of allowing oneself to held to ransom by a quick response to games shortly after release, but so far this seems to have held up well enough.)

Nasty Bugs

I wonder if there is any relationship between the fact that the corridors are now full of returning students and I feel utterly ill? Laptop out and feverish I stumble across a developer page (!?) at a site have never heard of Softpedia.com that has a stack of my little games on it. Strange -- there is even one there that I have never taken out of WIP because it doesn't really work (a garbage sorting game titled Junk). I am well aware of the complete and total lack of control you have when you put things online, and that I have never bothered putting a licence or anything more than a vague copyright sign on my games, but it still feels odd to see things travel without being told. I guess that is what Freeware is.

Meanwhile I have been tinkering with the layout and vocabulary of Pinball Panda. hence the screenshot:



And now to bed with a fever.

Panda Postscript

So I have two more working days before I can switch on my out of office autoreply. And on Friday I taught for the last time for a while, as I have been asked to shift role away from front line teaching at least for a time. I probably won't have responsibility for a whole course again until next September/October, and that makes me a little nervous -- I like teaching, and I like students. On Friday, for example, I took a group of students from never having made a functional bit of interactive software before to having built a basic SHMUP. In about three and a half hours. What's not to like about that job?

Shooters have been a little on my mind lately. I am not a big fan (my reflexes are appropriate for my age, as I might politely say to my own parents), but I have seen Pinball Panda confront three in a row in the GMC Cage Match (a Game Maker Community bit of nonsense where members vote on two games in an online poll, with the winner going on to face a new opponent the next week) and I have a feeling that the poor little thing will lose this time (to I Have the Gun, having survived voting against Ever Scrolling Hue and Shoot 2008). A shame, but it has done well for such a casual game, whose core audience is unlikely to be the same demographic as that of the GMC.

Some random numbers: Plays (from all places) 322+8+27=357. Not bad, I feel, although minute by internet standards. Ratings: 2.7/5 (YoYo :(), 8.2/10 (64 Digits :)). Entries in Online Highscore Table: 42. Entries in Online Highscore deleted because of offensive tags: 2. Times Table Hacked: 1.

Ho ho ho, and happy holidays.