Artners
I haven't written here much since Sophie and I started Matheson Marcault in June - we have an ACTUAL COMPANY now, so when I do physical games or commissions or curate events, it's with Sophie as part of Matheson Marcault. (Which is AMAZING, by the way, I definitely recommend starting a company with Sophie).
But I'm still very, very slowly working away at this "learning to make entirely digital games on my own" lark. Last year I tried Twine and Puzzlescript. This year I was planning to work my way through some of the other game-making tools for non-programmers - but then Terry started writing a tutorial and a beginners' programming library for Haxe, so I figured I'd just try those. (The tutorial's not out yet but it's pretty great.)
Which brings us to: Artners! Artners is a collaborative art-making game for one or two players. It springs from a few different motivations:
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New Small Games
A couple of silly five-minute games, made in a few hours each...
chatbot's morning after: Chatbot is sad. Chatbot is confused. Chatbot is relying on you to make everything better.
This is a little experimental chatbot game using Elizascript, Terry Cavanagh's neat new build-your-own-chatbot tool.
Popstar Adventure: due to a scheduling mixup that's totally not your fault, your band's biggest concert ever and a really important jewel heist are scheduled to take place on the same night.
This Twine game came out of an afternoon game jam at Amaze in Berlin. We made games themed around "Family" or "Popstar Adventure" (you'll never guess which one I picked). I hadn't taken part in a game jam before, so it was slightly intimidating! But it turns out "game jam" just means "make a game quickly and try not to worry about it too much". I didn't quite finish in the allotted time (had a lot of polishing to do, and some more little story branches to add), but it was fun to try.
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21 Games
1. This is game number one. To play, make up 21 games. Explain the rules to all of them in five minutes.
2. Go round a circle of maybe eight people, taking turns to come up with a moral dilemma. Each time, everyone votes on what they'd do. You want a split as close to 50:50 as you can get, and you get penalty points for missing out - like, if you suggest a dilemma that gets a 6:4 vote, you get two penalty points. Fewest penalty points when you stop playing is the winner.
3. In a carpark, every car is a sleeping monster. If a car sees you, you'll die. Their headlights are eyes.
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A Beekeeper's Guide to Game Design
i.
Bees can distinguish many different colours.
They watch for arrows drawn in violet so deep
That we would call it ultra;
They readily note the polarisation of light.
Why not take advantage of this?
Think of all the possibilities for match-three games
Opened up by such varicoloured jewels.
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Pornography for Beginners
For the last couple of days I've been playing around with Puzzlescript, a really lovely tool for making block-pushing puzzle games (and other stuff, but block-pushing puzzle games is what it's mostly intended for). I'm not really a block-pushing puzzle-game person by nature, so it's been quite weird to get to grips with, but it's also been a lot of fun.
I ended up making a game about this month's weird changes in what you can and can't include in pornography in the UK. It was one of those ideas that started as a throwaway joke, but a part of your brain goes "although ACTUALLY...", and then two days later you're saying "yeah I'll be down to dinner in a moment, I've just got to fix this ejaculating penis". The game is therefore as not-safe-for-work as any game whose only graphics are 5x5 pixels is likely to be.
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