Tag Archives: single-screen platformer

Salt Lake Stories

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The game includes four short games that feature historical characters and locations:

  • Rocky Mountain Times Newspaper Maker, a puzzle game featuring Shiro Iida, publisher and editor of the Rakki Jiho, taking place in Salt Lake’s Nihonjin Machi (Japantown).
  • Hotel Newhouse, a single-stage, vertical-scrolling platformer in which you ascend the steel frame of the unfinished Hotel Newhouse, once a renowned Salt Lake landmark, featuring Samuel Newhouse and his Newhouse and Boston Buildings. 
  • Free Library Book Sort, a falling-book puzzle game with four stages featuring city librarian Joanna H. Sprague, taking place at the beautiful Free Public Library at 15 S. State Street in Salt Lake City.
  • Anderson’s Tower, an eight-stage puzzle platformer taking place in the Avenues neighborhood, inside Anderson’s Tower, which once presided over the Salt Lake Valley, and featuring the man who built it, Brigham Young’s former personal accountant Robert R. Anderson. 

This game was originally developed for an exhibition at the Salt Lake City Public Library, where it was on display alongside archive materials that inspired it throughout November 2021.

Flickering Chambers

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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.

Features “Snowfall” and “It’s Here” by Joseph Gilbert/Kistol.

Released during the final hour of the final day of the final year of the 2010s.

CYANiDE

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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

Ungrateful Birds

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Someone has kidnapped the birds and put them in cages in the forest! Please save them! However, these birds WILL NOT BE GRATEFUL.

  • Jump with X!
  • Pick up stones with Z!
  • Throw stones with Z!
  • Throw stones to break cages to set birds free!
  • Dodge the birds’ stones!

Contains NINE BIRD-PACKED LEVELS and THREE DIFFERENT BIRDS. Get close to the cages to find out what kind of bird is inside!

Written about by Joel Couture at IndieGames.com.

Made for Glorious Trainwrecks’s Tenth Anniversary Klik of the Month Klub #104.

Skeletons in the Closet PLUS

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Find all bottles to move onto next stage. Avoid skeletons.

Use arrows to move, X to jump.

A tribute to IBM compatible games in CGA mode and an enhanced remake of jfroco’s game Skeletons in the Closet, a tribute to Sinclair ZX Spectrum games.

This is a very late submission to this most excellent idea for hugs’s No Pressure Appreciation Nicejam!

jfroco’s game is a tribute to the style of ZX-82 games, which they grew up on. I really liked the game when I played it in Pirate Kart V. Personally, I don’t have any particular nostalgia for the Spectrum, but my equivalent would be early Apogee-type shareware platformers . So my little headcanon is that this is the MS-DOS port from the late 1980s that alters the original Spectrum game, moves things around, and expands it a bit. All three original stages are adapted for this twelve-stage version!

Santa Claus’s Candy Cane Craze

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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!

Ten stages.

Released on Christmas Day 2016.

Shadow Wrangler

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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.

Controls:
X: Jump
Z: Pick up/put down boxes
R: Restart level

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.

Made for Klik of the Month Klub #93.

Caverns of Khron

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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.

CAVERNS OF KHRON has its own website.

View the game’s trailer:

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.

101-in-1 Amaze-o-Kart!

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That’s right! 101 UNIQUELY titled and designed games for your playing pleasure! Starring five characters (including the return of Bulb Boy from The Adventures of Bulb Boy and Anetta the Witch from Ghost Witch), the possibilities are endless (or 101)!

Press X to jump. Press Z to hit switches. Arrow keys move and scroll down the MASSIVE GAME MENU. ENTER to select a game.

Enjoy! Can you beat them all?!*

*Note: there’s no reward for beating them all. Honest.

Made for Pirate Kart V, inspired by the idea of packing as many games as possible into the Kart.