I just released my latest game, “I Fell in Love With the Majesty of Colors.” It’s a pixel-horror game that puts the player behind the tentacles of a titanic, writhing sea creature. “Majesty” is a tale of love, loss, and balloons with five different endings.
Over at GameSetWatch they just put up my latest column. It’s called “Puzzle Quest and the Best of Both Worlds,” and it’s about genre fusion in the world’s first match-3 RPG.
My latest column is up at GameSetWatch. It’s entitled “Integrated Character Creation in Spore“, and it discusses the technique of integrating gameplay with character creation instead of making it a totally separate mode.
I’ve been a bit lax in posting lately, for a variety of reasons. To make up for it, I thought I’d give an update on my game development progress. Necropolis has been played over 58,000 times, according to my statistics on MochiAds. It has a rating of 3.04 out of 5 on Kongregate, which I think is quite fair considering its simplicity and apparent instability on some systems.
I’ve got another game, Sugarcore, up for bidding at FlashGameLicense.com. I’ve gotten no sponsorship bids or feedback on it there, which is a bit disappointing, as I think it’s a much better game than Necropolis. Still, it’s only been up two weeks, and the sources I’ve consulted suggest that it can take a month or more to get a bid. I’ve got my fingers crossed. If you happen to run a Flash portal interested in sponsoring a game, or if you’re an eccentric millionaire with a penchant for candy, let me know.
My next game, (I Fell In Love With) The Majesty of Colors, is in development. It’s coming along slowly, but I should hopefully finish it by the end of the week. You can see a mockup of the graphics here; it already looks a bit different from that, but the general look and feel is very close to the original concept in that image.
My latest column is up at GameSetWatch. It’s entitled “The Goo Variations” and it describes a game design pattern that I’ve dubbed “Variations on a Theme,” as demonstrated by the incredibly stellar World of Goo.
Additionally, Anna Anthropy released an expanded version of her cruel-in-a-nice-way Mighty Jill Off last week, and it’s now clear that she has a spike fetish. Highlights of the even harder Second Tower: when the level decays as if the cartridge has been loosened in the slot, the (Jesse-Venbrux-inspired?) segment where the player must die and trust the game to take care of her, and the absolutely adorable alternate ending cutscene.
I’ve updated Necropolis with some tweaks and bug fixes.
Changes:
My latest column is up at GameSetWatch. It’s about the “no-quit-without-saving” option on Mount&Blade and why it’s a great way to solve the saving dilemma in game design.
My second column for GameSetWatch has been posted at their site. It’s called “Three Kinds of Replay,” and it uses the recently-released game Iji as an example of a game that has each of the main categories of replay value.
The Independent Gaming Source recently finished the submission period for their Bootleg Demakes Competition. Contestants had to “demake” a well-known game as if it were illegally ported to a more primitive system by shady bootleg developers. There were a lot of great or promising games turned into less graphically great games – Mirror’s Edge, Homeworld, Team Fortress 2, and Shadow of the Colossus all got treatments, for example. A few of the submissions, however, stood out to my own personal tastes as notable, like a Lovecraftian Katamari Damacy and a Tetris RPG. Click through for the list.
My first column for GameSetWatch was just posted at their site. It’s called “Love Transcending Death: Challenge Versus Story in Calamity Annie,” and it’s about how that game does something very interesting to help bridge the gap between players who play for challenge, and those who play for story.
The plan is for me to write every two weeks on GameSetWatch. I’m quite excited about being able to contribute to their great site.
