Tag Archives: game maker

Lost in “La La Land”

Blogs, Digital Games,

A screen shot from La La Land, showing chaos

Anna Anthropy, creator of the creatively structured Calamity Annie, just posted about a series by TheAnemic (I think) called “La La Land:”

the la la land games, of which there are (to my knowledge) five, are haunting and surreal short tales. in the way that static might draw attention to the pauses in a phone conversation, la la land emphasizes those vast between-spaces in the dialogue between player and game. it is here that the games take place.

A warning up front: on first glance, these games come across as some guy screwing around with Game Maker and being deliberately weird. And that’s what they might be. But it all feels so deliberate. The special effects must have taken long enough to code, and there’s such a unifying bizarreness to the games, that I might as well assume that the creator knows what he or she’s doing, and try to make some sort of sense of it.

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The YoYo Games Slush Pile

Blogs, Digital Games, News,

And another Ludus Novus hiatus comes to an end. I left my previous job, and just a few days before my final work day, my computer was stolen. Everything’s straightened out now, and I’m working on some personal projects and living on savings while I figure out where to go next. I just need to figure out how to make my first million making and discussing video games.

Over at the YoYo Games “glog”, the creators of Game Maker put out a call to rate all unrated games. I’ve spent a few hours this afternoon combing through the chaff. A natural consequence of a system like Game Maker — where it’s so easy to make a video game with minimal programming experience — is that most of the games seem to be made by nine-year-olds. I’ve played games that were distributed as uncompiled .gmk files, games that crash on startup, games that do nothing on startup, racist games, and about 712 versions of Pong, Breakout, and Pac-Man.

When sifting through trash, you do sometimes find a treasure or two. I didn’t find any hidden masterpieces, but I did come across a handful of very solid games. You can check out my list after the fold.

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