Creating games is like poetry, nobody gives a poop about it unless it's your friends or kindred spirits!
Kewlsnake
Introduction
I love creating stuff. I lack the skillset to create beautiful drawings or music or tell elaborate stories and that's ok. The act of bringing stuff together into a coherent (or incoherent) thing is a reward in itself. I tried my hand at game creation a couple of times over the years. It mostly didn't pan out but oh boy was it fun!
Space Explorer (TI-84) ~2011
Even after my high school years I messed around quite a bit with TI-84 calculator! Remember this kids? Oh who am I kidding, people have been using the same calculator for 10 years!
This was one of the cooler projects I created.
It's a space universe generated on your calculator! You can move around with your spaceship X in this universe that's about 10^8 calc screens big! (Around 3000 football fields!)
Pretty cool, but slow as balls! =) If you want to play it on your calculator, go nuts!
Tony Hawk's Unity Skater (Unity) ~2013
Frustrated as I was with the lack of Tony Hawk games after 2005-2007, I did the only thing I could, make my own skating game!
I followed the excellent "Cooking With Unity" video tutorials made by PushyPixels (which you can find here).
I started creating my awesome skating game...
... and quickly found out I was in way over my head and never touched Unity again! But hey, atleast I made a dude grind a rail!
Dirty Cops 2: A Giant Bomb Murder Mystery (Twine) ~2014
After my project with Tony Hawk, I lost interest in creating stuff for a quite a while. If other people can do it better, why make it yourself, right? (Still waiting for that killer Tony Hawk game though!)
I got around to messing around in Twine after playing Depression Quest (by Zoey Quinn) and Sacrilege (by Cara Ellison) that was on Zoey Quin's GOTY list 2013.
I think Twine is cool, albit a bit basic. (People have made some awesome games with it though!) The demographic for people that play Twine games are usually Twine creators themselves or or people who just enjoy text adventures in general.
(let me reiterate my fabulous quote from the beginning of my blog here!)
Creating games is like poetry, nobody gives a poop about it unless it's your friends or kindred spirits!
Kewlsnake
And that's ok. The first Twine game I made was called Dirty Cops 2: A Giant Bomb Murder mystery. You are a cop, trying to solve a murder. You can just walk away, you can solve the murder legitimately or you can do videogamey stuff and kill everyone, all leading to its own unique ending. In this game all the NPCs were Giant Bomb crew members. I sent it to Patrick the day before he officially left Giant Bomb. In hindsight it's probably quite tone deaf to send a game to someone where he is one of the potential victims? (Sorry Patrick!)
As to why the game is called Dirty Cops 2? Well the reasoning was that the first game in a franchise sucks and that the second improves on the concept, right? So if you skip directly to the second game, it must be great right?! Makes sense to me!
Vinny's Head (Twine) ~March 2015
On March 28th there was a Giant Bomb Game Jam. I wanted to enter because I liked to mess around with Twine. I had a couple of ideas in my head on what I wanted to make. I first started with a murder mystery game where you would need to visit locations and read loads of text that was ripped from Wikipedia to find the answer. (Interesting idea but not very fun!)
The second idea I had revolved around Vinny's head. I wasn't sure about the details but I wanted to create something about his head. Eventually I decided that the goal of the game was not to stress Vinny out or he would go bald. It was an extremely short choose your own adventure type of game. If atleast someone got a chuckle out of it, then my goal has succeeded! I think I finished it in around an hour or so and uploaded it on the first day of the jam before the game entry page was even ready!
I tweeted it to Vinny, he retweeted it which lead to a lot of people checking it out, which was pretty cool!
@VinnyCaravella I made a game about your head http://t.co/2udUBm0ygT
— kewlsnake (@kewlsnake) March 28, 2015
It was also played on the Big Live Live Show 2015 and judged by starjudges such as Adam Boyes, John Drake and Dave Lang!
Here's a link to Vinny's Head if you're interested.
Ghost Master 2D (RPG Maker) ~April 2015
I like love Ghost Master. I think the creator is great. I even tracked down a +10 year old lost review of Ghost Master for the hell of it! If you're not familiar with Ghost Master, it can be described as an anti-Sims type game where you scare sims with ghosts.
Because my needs for scaring sims weren't met with modern games, I golly do what I do best, create it myself!
I used RPG Maker to create what I wanted out of it.
You are a powerful demon that's imprisoned and every inane move you do, adds more years to your sentence (Freedom Wars style!). You can reduce your punishment by infiltrating in people's houses (in the gif on the left as the family's dog!) and scaring them to death. The map design isn't great but the mechanics are there. You use your powers to activate crystals that are located in the house. When the inhabitants come near, they get scared, your power increases which allows you to activate more crystals.
For the moment Ghost Master 2D is just a one level prototype but I had a lot of fun playing (and creating) it. =)
Kissing Foes (RPG Maker) ~April 2015
The fever to create stuff is on me now! Almost directly after creating my Ghost Master prototype, I started working on my next project. This is the type of experimental indie hipster bullshit that you'll either hate or enjoy. It's a short game about kissing people. It's inspired by Chulip (even though I never played it). It's what I imagine Chulip to be, hah!
The town of Frownville has been hit by a terrible curse!
Everybody has been turned into monsters. It's up to you to turn everyone's frown upside down! Use your special smooch powers to turn everyone back to normal. Give all the foes a big kiss to convert them back to happy villagers!
Includes over a hundred Love Quotes by various people including Bob Marley, Marylin Monroe and Nicolas Sparks!
Game description( Kissing Foes)
Someone at indiegames.com wrote a lovely review for it which I quite enjoyed. If you want to play Kissing Foes, you can find it here.
Gunslinger Osdeon (RPG Maker) ~May 2015
If Kissing Foes was inspired by Chulip, then Gunslinger Osdeon was inspired by Hideo Kojima's 90's graphic adventure Snatcher! Not the story nor the setting, but the combat. It had a very interesting 3x3 grid Rail Shooter component that was excellently suited for a controller. It gave you precision and allowed you to shoot where you wanted to shoot.
I've recreated that railshooter component on PC and it allows you to do the same but with the keyboard. This was the project where I spent the most work on and that inspired me to write a blog about creating games as my hobby and how far I've come.
It's been a long road since creating Space Explorer on the TI-84 calculator. Hopefully there are many more games to come!
You can find Gunslinger Osdeon here.
Thank you for reading!
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