The candles in the Twelve Chambers must be lit by a wickster. Once a wickster lights themself ablaze, they will only have five seconds to light every candle in the room. Plan carefully. Press X to jump. Press Z to ignite. Press K to restart a chamber.
When a freak accident destabilizes the stabilizer, the control cubes go missing and Liz and Laz must work together to secure them! Laz transports into a hazardous landscape and relies on directions from Liz to keep him safe.
Taking direct control of Liz, you’ll issue controls to Laz remotely. Liz uses a life-sized game controller to tell Laz to move, jump, and shoot. She jumps on buttons to guide Laz to the control cubes.
twelve control cubes across twelve stages
Colorful, dangerous world
Inventive indirect control system provides unique platforming action
Completely reconfigurable keyboard and gamepad controls
Initially designed to be a quickly dashed-off, intentionally frustrating game, I ended up really liking what this became. Inspired by ZZT Engine games (including my own Punctuation People), Lemmings, and the games Nanairo ringo and Kaerazu no mori by Kabusoft.
After the release of this game–the 90th I’ve released–I wrote up a reflection on my blog on my past two decades of game-making and some of the influences I was mindful of when I approached this game in particular.
Set up stages by fixing the positions of balance levers. When you’re ready, touch the ELECTROPOST and convert yourself into an ELECTROBALL so you can safely roll to the GOAL.
Fifteen single-screen stages.
AND IT IS ALL CYAN.
Press X to jump. Press V to restart stage. Press R to return to title screen.
I began work on this game in February 2016, intending it to be just a weekend project, and showed an unfinished version at an Indie Game Play Test Night in Eugene, Oregon at Shoryuken League. I meant to release the game very shortly thereafter, but wanted to explore the elements further with a few more levels. The game was placed on hold as I got increasingly busy with school, teaching, and then went and got married. I dusted the files off in October 2017
Explobers pushes your planning, puzzle and platforming skills to the limit for a challenging but rewarding experience. —MMOaholic
Explobers is a unique puzzle platformer that requires you to use multiple player characters to solve difficult challenges by using their powers (and lives) to destroy terrain and build blocks in order to navigate through over eighty tricky stages.
The game begins in the familiar CGA palette of classic PCs. As you progress, new graphic modes become available and you may find some secrets!
I worked on this game through most of 2017. Please purchase it at itch.io or GameJolt.
As of 2020, the game is also available for Android-based handheld game consoles (such as the Retroid Pocket 2) as Explobers GO and for Android phones as Explobers Pocket. These can be downloaded from the game’s page on itch.
Santa Claus must eat all the candy canes to open the peppermint vortex in each stage. As he eats, he gets larger, and as he gets larger his abilities change! Break through ice, avoid spikes, crawl through narrow paces, and achieve Santa’s peppermint candy cane vision!
Your shadows have split from you and you must guide them to the exit. You can move at will, but the shadows need to be given commands. Pick up command boxes and drop them where you want the shadows to act.
Ten stages of challenging puzzle platforming by proxy.
Press ‘L’ on the title screen to load the game from your previous play session. The game autosaves and starting a new game will overwrite previous progress.
There are many balls! Get one of them to reach the exit! Have other balls turn to stone and become platforms to guide other balls to advance through all eight stages. Build your way to success!
Extra points awarded for balls left over at the end of stages.
ARE YOU READY to enter the CAVERNS OF KHRON? Spikes, slugs, demons and more await you below the surface. What unknown evils will you encounter deep within? Arm yourself with sword and star and venture forth!
CAVERNS OF KHRON is an independent freeware game project by designer John D. Moore with music by WiL Whitlark (composer for Retro Affect’s Snapshot) and environment graphics by Michael Santiago. The game contains forty levels of puzzle and action platforming influenced by MS-DOS and NES games of the 1980s and 1990s. The caverns are divided into three sections with unique themes, each with its own set of environmental challenges, enemies, and bosses that reflect their environments.
In addition to the forty stages in the main game, there are two shorter campaigns (Sky Realm and Special Stages), a bonus stage, a boss rush mode, a costume select, and a level select that can be unlocked after clearing the game. The game has an extensive record-keeping system to track your best runs, optimized for speedrunning.
At the time of release, this was my largest and most polished game. Begun as a one-month “bakedown” jam game at the SelectButtonDotNet forums, the game expanded significantly, involved a musical collaboration with my longtime friend WiL Whitlark and a graphics artist, Michael Santaigo. The game is set in a fantasy world I originally created for some unfinished QBASIC games in the mid-nineties. While the basic platforming is not too gimmicky (at its core, it began as a fantasy re-working of the DOS classic Monuments of Mars with a sword), the game allowed me to work out some ideas about level design I’d been itching to try. The game file contains an NES-style manual.
While this game was in development, the engine was modified to provide the basis for The Adventures of Bulb Boy.