new game: "Shapes Hit!" for Ludum Dare 35 (theme: "shapeshift")

It's April and I still haven't finished and released anything all year, so I thought I'd push something out pretty fast -- it's a quick little game for the 48 hour game jam "Ludum Dare" -- called "Shapes Hit!" (content warning: there is poop in this game.)

I think it's a pretty short straightforward arcade game: just hold down the left mouse button, move your mouse to aim, and try to hit all four targets. You can play an in-browser WebGL version on the Ludum Dare entry page, or over on the itch.io page... and that's pretty much all there is to it.

This isn't a very deep or intellectually complex game. Some of my friends tell me I'm the Robert Mapplethorpe of games, but sometimes I think I'd rather aspire to be the John Waters of games?

Things I still have to do: add some audio and sound, and maybe push out some Windows / OSX / Linux desktop standalone builds. I'll probably wait until after the jam for that.

new game: "Barback" for Ludum Dare #25

"Barback" is a 1-2 player cooperative / competitive Tapper-ish variant about 2 brothers and a bar. It should take you about 15-20 minutes to play through. It's a Ludum Dare "jam" game, which means I spent 72 hours instead of 48, and used remixed assets from outside sources. The extra day was worth it though.

Theme-wise, perhaps it doesn't really fit with the "You are the villain" theme, now that I'm done with it and looking back. I didn't want to make a game with obvious villains, but I think about my mental concept of a "villain" and by definition it seems to involve blatant villainy and a twirlable moustache. In this narrative, the villains are mundane: your own crushing feeling of failure, or people who care about you but are very pushy, etc.

Triple Jam Pile-up this weekend!

This weekend is the classic monolith of game jams, Ludum Dare #25! Theme is still pending for a few more hours...

Also, this weekend in New York City is a special game jam hosted at Parsons called "Game On", co-sponsored by Github and Mozilla. The main requirement is to make an HTML5 game. Prizes include a trip to GDC 2013 (wow!) and I think there's free food to jam with, at least. (And as long as you're here this weekend, also check out Spacewar! at the Museum of the Moving Image, charting the long lineage of shooters from ur-game "Spacewar!" on a PDP-1 replica through Metroid II and ending with Halo 4.)

ALSO, this month in Chicago, there's the Six Pack Jam. Jake Elliott and friends are putting an arcade cabinet in some bar in Wicker Park and they want cool games to put on the cabinet! Here, the implied constraints are 2 player compatible modes with short arcade-scope play sessions, but maybe that's just my interpretation.

You could, potentially, make a 2 player HTML5 game with [LD theme] and submit everywhere. Whoaa.

0 Hour Game Jam: "Apollo 2"

Because daylight savings time ended and was rolling back an hour, a bunch of people decided to make a game in "zero hours." The full results are here. As for my entry, I clicked the "get theme" button and got "moon." So I made Apollo 2. Take a few minutes to play it in your browser over here. Missed out on the fun? There's always next year...

UPDATE, 8 May 2017: due to this game's only super-fan's special request, this has been ported to WebGL. You can now play it here on Itch.io.

Ludum Dare #21: FuhFuhFire!

For Ludum Dare #21 ("Escape"), I made "FuhFuhFire," a short Unity-powered web FPS where you set fire to a building and then rescue people from it. Do you try to rescue everyone but leave others behind?... or do you just escape alone? Dynamic fire propagation / level destruction, physics thingies and 8 different endings. Wow!

WASD to walk, SPACE to jump, MOUSE to look, LEFT-CLICK to do stuff.

C'mon, just give it five (5!) minutes of your time and play it in your browser here. Project source in all its hacky glory is here too.

Ludum Dare 20: Condom Corps, or "It's dangerous to go alone... take this condom, bro."

My first Ludum Dare, and I actually finished it! (Kinda.) Maybe I'll polish it some more and sell it to NYC Public Health?...

 PLAY NOW: Unity Web (compo) | Unity Web (jam)

*** If you are judging, please play the COMPO version. [Link to entry on ludumdare.com]
*** If you are NOT judging, play the JAM version in its (legally) photosourced splendor. The two builds are identical except for the enhanced background graphics in the JAM version.

>>> BASICALLY
It’s a Match3 First Person Sniper for sex education.
“It’s dangerous to go alone… take this condom, bro.”

>>> HOW TO PLAY

• Mouse1 = fire
• Mouse2 = zoom in
• Mousewheel = change ammotype

1) Stare at a dude’s package. Decide what size of condom he needs.
2) Shoot the condom into his hand.
3) Match adjacent colors to create chain-climaxes for mega points.
4) Shoot well-fitting condoms to maintain a “fit streak” multiplier for your score.
5) GET HIGH SCORE!!!

Source code is here. (.unitypackage)

Ludum Dare 20: Dev Log 1

I'm making a game for the "make a video game in 48 hours" challenge, Ludum Dare, even though I have a final project to do for school. (They never said I was the smartest.) Cross-posted from http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2011/04/30/condom-sniper-update-2/

Unity3D Webplayer test build:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/19887116/Condom1/index.html

Skybox art is kinda done, mostly photosourced from Unity standard assets / NASA / CGtextures / Creative Commons on Flickr. Still need to turn off fog for the moon, hmm. All full bright textures for performance reasons; I’m going to be using a lot of point lights in the actual game area, so I want to save my GPU stuff for where it counts.

Mouselook is clamped because you’re mostly just going to be sniping within that rectangle in front of you, delivering condoms to the city’s horniest / most desperate.

Looking to implement the actual mechanics and building generation tomorrow night. I don’t foresee many problems, but we’ll see…