2013 is over and, thanks to OneGameAMonth, I managed to finish 12 games over the course of the year. I wanted to talk about each one a little bit.
January — Must’ve been rats!
January’s game was the result of my participation in the Global Game Jam, working with Chris Logsdon and Paul Ouellette (with voice work by Mike Elser). It was a lot of fun to make despite not entirely fitting the jam theme, and its a lot of fun to play thanks to its overall silliness. I’m really happy with how well it turned out given the limited amount of time and relative complexity of the systems we were working with.
Here’s my full post on this game.
February — Humphrey’s Tiny Adventure: Remastered
I’m still very happy with Humphrey. For the small amount of time I put into it, it’s one of the more polished games I’ve finished and I enjoyed figuring out ways to convey the story without any words. Despite my love for open-ended systems-driven gameplay, point-and-click adventures will always have a special place in my heart due to their role in my childhood, and I’m glad I was able to make one even as minimal as this.
Here’s my full post on this game.
March — No Other Home
Chris and I made No Other Home for NASA’s “Dark side of the jam” event that we attended at NHTI. It was pretty ambitious and we ended up taking a bit longer than the initial 48 hours to finish it.
Looking back on it there are a bunch of things I would change to make the gameplay feel better, but overall it’s pretty solid and I love the way the solar system looks.
April — Vanguard Charge
Vanguard Charge was born from a combination of my frustration with the limitations of Mass Effect’s Vanguard abilities and inspiration from the results of TIGSource’s “Bootleg demake” game jam. The goal was to capture one specific element from a well-known game and present it in a way that feels like a cheap knockoff product. I only spent a few days making this and there’s admittedly not a lot going on, but it’s fun to play and that’s what matters.
May — Bit Cave
Another game jam entry with Chris, this time to celebrate the revival of the Flashpunk forums. I love the atmosphere in this game. The tension between exploring further and staying alive can actually get pretty high, and the caves are unpredictable enough that even I still get lost despite having designed the system that creates them.
June — Gunbuilding
Gunbuilding’s caption on my 1GAM profile reads “The worst misnomer of all time”, and that’s no exaggeration. As a game it’s an abject failure. The gameplay is simplistic, the visuals are terrible, and there’s no way to win or indeed any reason to keep playing. The only redeeming quality this game has is that it allowed me to put my C# port of Flashpunk through its paces and fix a ton of bugs.
Here’s my full post on this game.
July — Slide
I’ve written a lot about Slide elsewhere, so I won’t go into depth about it here. This was a fun game to make because I had to think backwards in order to create puzzles, which gave me a newfound respect for mystery authors and other puzzle game designers. It was received very positively in its initial state and I’m currently expanding it for a commercial release on mobile and desktop platforms.
August — MicroRL
MicroRL is another experiment without much in the way of gameplay. I wanted to take the ASCII aesthetic of classic roguelikes and try to make a minimalist game that felt good to play. Since the systems involved were so limited, I had to use some sneaky tricks to create situations that weren’t explicitly allowed, like having friendly monsters that healed you by dealing negative damage. Overall it’s not especially worth playing, but I’m pleased with the way it turned out.
September — SlangVN
My final pure experiment of the year (yes, that is a screenshot on the left). SlangVN was a testbed for my experimental scripting language Slang, in the form of a minimalist Visual Novel engine. Technically I guess I would call this a success since the purpose was only ever to test the expressiveness of the language, but the result isn’t a game by any stretch of the imagination. The script is pretty nice though.
October/November — Color/Shift demo
Part of my strategy for hitting as many platforms as possible with Iridescence (formerly Color/Shift, formerly Slide) was porting it to the Haxe programming language. This release marked the point where the port contained all the features from the original game and could make use of all the same content. I spent part of the second month porting the game to Linux, which (thanks to Haxe’s cross-platform magic) was almost entirely painless.
December — The Heroes’ Tourney (beta)
The Heroes’ Tourney started in yet another game jam and has gone on to become a serious project that I’m still working on along with the other guys on my team, as well as some new talent. So far everyone we’ve shown it to has had a blast playing and we think we might be on to something good. The official website is under construction here.
Wrapping up…
It’s been fun participating in 1GAM, and I’m really happy with some of the games that came out of it. Looking back on it, though, I wish I hadn’t followed along so rigidly. Some of the months would have been better spent concentrating on more serious projects instead of stressing about meeting the deadline, and I felt more pressure to polish up my experimental projects to submit them where I probably would have abandoned them earlier otherwise.
In 2014 I’m going to participate more casually, following the revised rules which encourage working on fewer projects for extended periods of time. I’ve got a promising solo project and a great team project to occupy my time for the next few months. We’ll see where it goes from there.
