Category Archives: Featured Game

Ungrateful Birds: No Good Deed

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In development for over a year, Ungrateful Birds: No Good Deed is the followup to 2017’s well-received action platformer, Ungrateful Birds. Bigger, better, and with more birds, this game invites you back to the forest to once again free the birds from their cages and dodge the rocks they so ungratefully hurl at you.

Ten types of birds in over three dozen stages await. And now you can play with up to two players in a simultaneous local cooperative mode!

No Good Deed is released as pay-what-you-want, but if you pay $5.99 USD or more, you get access to Ungrateful Birds: Call of the Desert as well.

Ungrateful Birds: Call of the Desert

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The sequel to Ungrateful Birds: No Good Deed, this game offers new types of birds and sixteen all-new, unique stages. With environments inspired by the red-rock deserts of Southern Utah and the Navajo Nation.

Ungrateful Birds: Call of the Desert is available alongside Ungrateful Birds: No Good Deed for $5.99 USD or more. Also for up to two players.

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.

Orbital Paladin Melchior Y

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It is the year 231 of the Frontier Era.

A nine-year war continues to rage between two mighty powers in the Earth sphere, conducted largely by heavily armed mechanized suits in space battles.

Eighteen-year-old Wick Palmer joins the small crew of the spaceship Nauvoo to take control of the Orbital Federated States’ most advanced mech. Guarding a remote point in the solar system, the quiet the team has enjoyed cannot hold for long.

Guide Wick as he forges relationships with his teammates, fights off enemies, and questions his place in a war that never ends in this visual novel/shooting action space opera game.

Made for the Emotional (Digital) Mecha Jam.

Music credits:

  • Traditional and classical music arranged by Mick Jones, in addition to original compositions, all released by the artist into the public domain
  • Multiple battle tracks and the title theme are by Jonathan So (CC0)
  • “Introduction Remake+” by Spring (CC-BY-4.0)
  • “Contemplation” by Joth (CC0)
  • “Fallen Hero” by Machine (CC-BY-4.0)
  • Chill lofi music by omfgdude (CC0)
  • “My Friends Will Cry” by Christovix Games, as heard in Chapter Five’s combat sequence

Temple of the Wumpus

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You have arrived at the Temple of the Wumpus, a holy shrine said to house the incorporeal body of the divinity known as the Wumpus.  Pilgrims come to this massive temple in order to pray in the presence of the Wumpus’s incorporeal body.

Explore over 100 rooms filled with hints, lore, and secrets. Kneel in prayer and see if you can find the slow-moving, divine Wumpus.

This game is a reinterpretation of Gregory Yob’s 1973 BASIC classic Hunt the Wumpus. It was made for the month-long 2018 Wumpus Jam (which I also hosted at itch).

Temple of the Wumpus was born of my desire to explore the seeking mechanics of Hunt the Wumpus, but reframed in a nonviolent way. Other than jumping, your main actions in-game consist of praying and reading scripture. It is a game in which I let my messy thoughts about religion and spirituality run wild with thousands of words of text. Rather than single-mindedly seeking the a win by finding the Wumpus, I hope players take time to explore and get to know the temple itself.

The game uses the font Magic Forest by anna anthropy. It features music by Ryan Yunck, Syncopika, and The Cynic Project(cynicmusic.com/pixelsphere.org) and contains sound effects recordings by Michael Velo, NatureNotesUK, and remaxim.

Instructions: Z: Pray, X: Jump, C: Light candle (while in prayer), Enter: Pause/select, Up arrow: Interact/talk/read, Down arrow: Advance text, Left and right arrows: Walk

Liz & Laz: The Control Cubes

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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

Features music by celestialghost8, Snabisch, Juhani Junkala, and Alex McCulloch

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.

Koi Puncher MMXVIII

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After months of EXTREME, INTENSE development, the sequel to the 2012 Pirate Kart V classic is ready for you and your friends to play! It features more than you ever could have expected you wanted from a game about punching koi.

KOI PUNCHER MMXVIII has all-new maps, eight characters, and support for up to four players, both competitive and non-competitive! Further, it has exciting new challenge game modes. Play for high scores to unlock and discover new secrets!

Additionally, KOI PUNCHER MMXVIII‘s koi have a complex system of genetics, yielding hundreds of possible variations as they spawn new generations. Use your Home Pond to maintain a permanent crop of cultivated koi for breeding and punching.

Features music by nene, Marcelo Fernandez, Oddroom, Joth, pant0don, used under creative commons licenses.

The game is fully playable in both English and Japanese.

Explobers

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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!

Explobers will be featured as a part of the upcoming 2018 Smithsonian American Art Museum Arcade in Washington DC on July 22, 2018.

Explobers has a trailer. It also has an official website.

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.

The game is fully playable in Japanese. 日本語でも遊べる！

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.

LumberJazz

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Get your axe in hand, it’s time to chop some trees. It’s time for LUMBERJAZZ!

Nature replenishes itself quickly. Chop down the trees! Clear the forest!

You win when the forest is cleared. You lose if the number of trees goes over 50!

Featuring “Washboard Wiggles” by Tiny Parham and His Band.

Controls:
Left/Right – MOVE
X – JUMP
Z – AXE

Made for Klik of the Month Klub #100.