Noggins!

Noggins! is a Flash game by Chevy Ray Johnston, friend and author of FlashPunk. It's a chaotic little reflex-based, timed minigame where you try to match a colored box, controlled with the mouse cursor, to the quadrilateral heads of panicked characters. I wrote the music for the game!

Hold Off Brownish-Yellow

GameJolt is holding an Indie Game Demake Contest, and there's a lot of interesting entries. Game Maker user rotten_tater has submitted a cool little Hold Off demake, titled Hold Off Brownish-Yellow. It's an interesting re-imagining of Hold Off gameplay, in a GameBoy style.

Wake Up Summer

I just finished up a new EP, titled Wake Up Summer.  It's all electronic/chiptune music and you can download the EP for free here.

1. Slow Morning (3:02)
2. A Bike Ride to a Man-Made Lake (4:07)
3. Red Boots, White Dress (3:33)

Never Give Up!

Adult Swim is running a television commercial for Give Up, Robot! It's airing nightly all week on the Cartoon Network, but only in the USA. I'm Canadian, so I'll have to settle for watching it on YouTube.

There's also a fan-made speed-run video on YouTube by Strivinity. The video shows a run that gets him 2nd place on the world-wide leaderboards. In 1st place is... Strivinity, with a previous, slightly faster run.

Give Up, Robot

Give Up, Robot is my newest game, and it's just been released today! It's a game about a robot with a grappling hook, and the disembodied computer voice that wants him to fail.

Building levels for this game felt a lot like working on the original Jumper game. The entire game is focused around a single mechanic, a grappling hook, and the level design possibilities it creates. It is linear and there are no power-ups or enemies. In fact, the game only has a couple different gameplay objects in it and they all interact with the grappling hook in some way. It was a lot of fun to work on a design so focused again.

My friend Coriander Dickinson contributed with some additional graphics, design and testing. My girlfriend Rachel Williamson did all the hilarious voice work. 

The game was built on top of Chevy Ray Johnston's brilliant FlashPunk library, and I used my own Ogmo Editor for all the level design. I made the music in PXTone and the sounds in SFXR. Paint.NET was used for graphics, Audacity for recording voices and Flash Develop for programming. Only free tools/resources were used to make this game.

The game was published by Adult Swim Games. You can play it on their site.

Ogmo Editor News

The initial reaction to Ogmo Editor has been awesome and I'm really glad so many people are already finding it useful. I've tried to take some feedback into account in the recent updates. If your suggestions weren't implemented, chances are it's on my list of things to add at some point. There's a lot I can do with the program but I have to prioritize based on what I think will be most useful.

A couple days ago I posted a tutorial on using values. Values are a way to edit variables for individual instances of objects. 

Earlier tonight, I uploaded the second update since the initial release. The main addition is improved object node support. I also got around to posting a tutorial covering object nodes, one of the editor's more advanced features. Object nodes are designed to help you visually plan the paths of moving objects.

I'm also working on setting up a forum for the editor so users can help each other out and I can get feedback more directly.

Ceramic Shooter - Electronic Poem

Something about the combination of elements in Ceramic Shooter - Electronic Poem (by Theta Games) just strikes a chord with me. The basic premise of the game is that you can't stop shooting but also aren't supposed destroy anything. So you spend your time dutifully avoiding contact with any part of the levels, including the text of the story as it unfolds. "Like a minotaur in a ceramic labyrinth." 

(You should probably play the game before reading on - the game is freeware and has a criminally low amount of plays)

At the climax of the game, the objective is reversed and you are encouraged to destroy everything and paint the world in vibrant color. The mechanic of anything you touch breaking makes everything feel sterile and lifeless, an excellent build-up to the moment when you're let loose. The background music is synced with the gameplay, and the visuals do a great job of making you feel dull and duty-bound followed by free and alive. 

I love the contrast between following the general's orders, not being allowed to destroy his words as he speaks, and disobeying him and being free to obliterate his text, in effect ignoring him. It's such a concrete, tangible way to make the player feel like they're finally free. It's one of those moments of expression that wouldn't work nearly as well in any other medium.