The months pass quickly!  Having not written this yet, I feel like my hands are somewhat tied on writing other things for my blog.  This last installment isn’t as detailed as my previous installments, I’m afraid, but nevertheless, it was fun to reminisce about some of these games, some of which I’d almost forgotten I’d made.

Watch this space in the next few days as I announce where a few other, larger game projects are in development, and in the near future where I recommend a host of other people’s Pirate Kart games.

17. My Pet Thing

This is the game I probably spent the least or second least amount of time on.  This was another request from the Kickstarter funders, and the request was this:

a game about taking care of a virtual pet and dressing it up and decorating its home

A virtual pet game!  I haven’t thought much about virtual pets since I had a little dog in a watch I kept on my nightstand in junior high.  My original ambitions were a bit lofty, but once I had the drawing of the thing (drawn directly into Game Maker’s sprite editor by mouse), I knew the tone this thing would take.  There aren’t that many things to click on, and your pet can never die (though it can sit in its own filth for a while), but I had fun putting this senseless, silly thing together.

18. Andrew W.K.’s Passage

Parodies of Jason Rohrer’s Passage are a Glorious Trainwrecks and Pirate Kart tradition by now, with numerous “sequels” and retoolings populating the fifth Pirate Kart alone.  Some have you playing 8 Passages at the same time, turn the slow aging mechanic of the game into a race to death, or make the player character into a literal piece of shit.  Sergio Cornaga put out one of the best Pirate Kart games in Passagebalt, injecting Passage into Canabalt.

Mine amounts to a pretty simple joke in the titular lyric from Andrew W.K.’s “We’re Not Gunna Get Old.”  It was fun rendering Andrew W.K. (whose music I listened to constantly throughout the Kart) in Rohrerized pixel form.

19. 101-in-1 Amaze-o-Kart!

Stemming from an IRC chatroom conversation with Effbee and others, I wanted to make a multi-kart to stuff into the multi-kart, upping the total number of Pirate Kart games by 100.  Effbee had done something similar for the second Pirate Kart with his 999,998-in-1 cart, the product of actual randomization, I believe.  For this one, I built a handful of quick, basic levels and made all the objects reskin by certain variables set in the multicart menu.  I recycled most of the game graphics and mechanics from elsewhere (getting enemies from games like Holiday Penguin Mania X, bringing in the player characters of Ghost Witch and Bulb Boy, and borrowing the levers from the in development Caverns of Khron), but this took forever.  Most of what took forever was coming up with 101 unique names for the games in the cart, and then setting the 4 variables that differentiated them.

All for a little joke.  But in making the joke, I made the closest thing to a Donkey Kong ’94-style platformer, which was something I’d been aiming for all throughout.

20. ChickenFall: ChickenCatch: Friend’s Edition

If only I’d come up with another game in the ChickenFall franchise, we could’ve had titles four layers deep!

Basically, this was a quickly put together game to up the total game count.  I didn’t change much from the way the first game worked, save for inputs.  I think I even left the phase progression alone.

That said, turning this into a two-player game (like Koi Puncher before it) may actually make this a more interesting game.  It’s always fun to play with your friends!

21. Witch Sisters in Lava Dungeon Rescue

For the last few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about multiplayer games where the players have different abilities.  I knew I wanted to make a game like that in the weeks following the Pirate Kart V weekend.  My initial concept was a Space Invaders-inspired game where players had to keep each other alive, one controlling a gun turret shooting airborne threats with the mouse, and the other protecting the turret from earthbound enemies with melee attacks.  But then I had the two witch sprites from the 101-in-1 Amaze-o-Kart, and, with Solomon’s Key 2: Fire ‘n’ Ice in mind, thought I had what could be a real interesting game, one where one player can shoot missiles, and the other can create blocks.

I’d also been wanting to make another splitscreen co-op platformer, after my Vector the Crocodile fangame, Vector Bros. the Crocodiles Escape the Warehouse.  I used a lot of what I learned from that game in this.

It’s not a bad idea, but it’s one that deserves more attention and better level design than I gave it here.  This is something of an awkward failure, I’m afraid.  But it’s one I’m often thinking about how to retool and make better.

22. Tales of Whales

Some time during the Pirate Kart festivities, I went crazy over Nintendo’s Game & Watch Gallery series, which had been the primary occupants of my Game Boy Color back in high school.  I became interested in doing more survival score attack games, and wanted to try my hand at a simple platformer.  I took my aesthetic cues from one of my favorite visual designs for an NES stage, world 4-2 of Super Mario Bros. 2 (USA).  The game may get too difficult too quickly, and I wonder if having the seagulls running into the player being instant death was really the correct choice, but I think I balanced the whale motions pretty well, and succeeded in creating a game that’s fairly charming to look at.

23. Boulder Defender

I really enjoyed the visual style I employed for Tales of Whales, and the next day, I played a fair bit of Tim Rogers and company’s Ziggurat.  This was the result.  It plays like a simplified Zigguart mashed up with a tower defense game.  The game originally had an old West theme, but a medieval setting just made that much more sense.  One of my favorite things about doing it was that as the game progresses and the player makes mistakes, the tower’s shape changes and the player has to adjust his or her perspective.  Which is surprisingly intuitive.

This is on my list of games to return to to polish up, retool, and possibly try to get some attention for.  If I could get this onto mobile platforms and tweak some things like enemy types, I think it might not be a half bad diversion.

24. Duel in Concert: Piano Man X Tambourine Man

Some days you walk into your apartment, find yourself singing Billy Joel’s “Piano Man,” and then 90 minutes later, this appears.  I actually built this on top of Boulder Defender and Tales of Whales in ways other than the visuals, but that’s probably basically invisible.  I don’t do a lot of games with mouse control, so that was fun to play with.

This game.  It’s really silly.

I was racing to make this the thousandth game in the Pirate Kart, but at 50 megs, it just took too long to upload.  Alas.

25. Bulb Boy Infinity

I was watching the live stream of people playing the Pirate Kart on the floor at GDC with only a few minutes left before GDC Play closed.  I realized I had just enough time to slap together one final game.  I did a quick edit of my The Adventures of Bulb Boy platformer to make it a survival score attack game.  It’s not a terrible idea, but the hasty schedule resulted in a level that’s far from ideal for what this game is.

Still, I got to watch Glorious Trainwrecks founder Jeremy “SpindleyQ” Penner play it as the last Kart game finished during GDC.  That was a pretty satisfying end to a wonderful journey into creative experimentation and, as it turned out, relative exhaustion.

Thanks for reading these!  If you have any feedback, please be sure to share.

As I’ve mentioned a few times, I contributed 25 out of over 1,000 games to the recent Pirate Kart. These were written over the course of two weeks, about half of which were over Pirate Kart weekend. I’ll be writing some brief reflections on each of these in my next few posts, in the order in which I made them.

(Click on the images to go to the game pages at Glorious Trainwrecks and to download and play!)

1. Wizard Forest

People who pledged $60 or more to the GDC Pirate Kart fund (which allowed the collection to be demonstrated on the floor at GDC Play) were given the reward of a game made by a member of the Glorious Trainwrecks community to be included in the Kart.  For my first game in the Kart, which I attempted a few days before the start of Pirate Kart weekend when I finished my homework early one night, I wanted to attempt one of these, and this description stood out to me:

A game about betraying wizards after becoming their friend. (Note: This should make the player EXPERIENCE EMOTIONS)

Lately, I haven’t been terribly interested in experimenting with narrative and emotions in my game projects, but jamming out games in under 4 hours is about experimentation if nothing else.  Naturally, the execution was going to be somewhat sarcastic, but once I figured out the tone I wanted to take, implementing it almost entirely through the game’s system with no dialogue and no real cut-scenes was an entertaining challenge.

I wasn’t the only one who attempted this game concept.  Alan Hazelden and Terry Cavanagh also made a game called The Lonely Wizard that made the player experience a much more frenzied, wider range of EMOTIONS, which was submitted something like minutes before mine.  It’s probably more fun.

2. Grizzly Golf

Before I started working on Kart games, I solicited a bunch of my friends for ideas via email.  My good friend Eli Z. McCormick suggested “Grizzly Golf” and nothing else.  I contemplated the idea for a bit, wondering exactly where grizzlies might intersect with golf.  Do they play golf?  Do they just swat a ball around?  Do they eat your ball? Soon I’d arrived at a miniature golf with giant grizzly enemies who maul you.  There’s still a weird bug in the ball’s behavior, but I’m pretty happy with how the ball moves and slows down.  I kind of feel like maybe I should’ve opted for keyboard control of the ball trajectory, but using the mouse was pretty easy to program.

I meant to do a spin-off/sequel with eight different levels and grizzlies replaced with pandas called “Panda Golf” but that never ended up happening.  I also began toying with a stick-less pool game where you played the cue ball based on the behaviors I programmed into the golf ball here, but that began to get a bit too daunting for my then-mood.

3. Watch Ducks II

When Pirate Kart II happened in February 2010, I’d intended to make a bunch of Watch Ducks “sequels” with pallette swaps, alternate scoring methods, and minor changes in controls.  I only ever ended up producing Watch Ducks itself, which seemed pretty well-received.  So what better time to crank out a bunch of those sequels than Pirate Kart V?  On my initial list of intended games (about a third of which actually represent what ended up getting made, the other two-thirds being improvised on the spot), there were about 5 Watch Ducks sequels/remakes.  I ended up making 3.  When I initially made Watch Ducks, I was much more inexperienced with Game Maker, and editing that two-year-old code was a surprisingly time-consuming affair, because I’d done things in ways that now seem so tremendously illogical.  I added a sleeping mechanic that a friend suggested way back when I first put out  Watch Ducks as well as a new silver duck multiplier and a fourth duck.  It enabled me to list all the new features in classic back-of-the-box bullet-point format.

• Four all-new ducks (a significant improvement over WD1’s three ducks)!
• Recolored and remastered background environment!
• Challenging new sleep system. Watch your character to make sure he doesn’t go to sleep and miss ducks!
• Altered system for gold duck appearance and bonuses!
• New silver duck multiplier bonus!

4. ChickenFall

I can’t resist silly titles with the word “Chicken” in them.  My high school notebooks were full of them, especially fantasy games like “Chickenmancer.”  ChickenFall sounds far too dramatic for a word that has “Chicken” in it.  I’ve been working on a game about falling through a single vertical level for a few months now (called “Fall Free”), but that’s all about falling quickly and breaking obstacles.  A chicken should kind of fall slowly, gracelessly, and flap its wings furiously to slow itself up ever so slightly, ever so briefly, kind of futilely.  The game features my own voice acting as the horrible chicken.  Not gonna lie.  This is one of my favorite games I made for the Kart.

5. Blondie: Dagwood’s Spin-Off

How many “Blondie” fangames are there?  I don’t know of any others beside this one.  This is based on another suggestion by Eli Z. McCormick, this one a little more elaborate: “A Blondie game where Dagwood has to spin on his head to defeat Mr. Dithers.”  Apparently, at least recently, Dagwood Bumstead has been taking to spinning on his head to express his frustration and inability to deal with stressful situations.  So I did just that.

6. Koi Puncher

This one grew out of some suggestions from some friends.  Jared Allred suggested “Koi Hunter” and then in response Jane Allred suggested “Koi Puncher.  The image of some metal badass monster hunter type sitting in a pool punching some peaceful fish was extraordinarily appealing.  The fish will die after 3 hits.

Paul Allred had suggested “Koi Breeder” as an alternate/supplementary idea.  I ended up putting in a spawning system that happens when male and female fish of the same color (yes, they have hidden genders) touch each other.  It took me forever to finally make it work without creating an instant explosion of fish.  This can actually still get out of hand within a few minutes, which a friend pointed out after I released it.  I was going to fix it, but I thought, “nah.”

The player chooses to end the game when they like because as the game is called Koi Puncher, I didn’t want to give the player any objectives but to just punch koi to their heart’s content.

I’ve actually written up a really complex system of genetic inheritance for “Koi Breeder” which I had hoped to make for the Kart, but I never got around to it.  I still want to, and may do just that for another event/fun little side project one of these days.

7. Demon Forest II

This one’s another quickie sequel, after my recent Klik of the Month entry, Demon Forest.  Noyb left me a comment on that game that hitting a specific portal was perhaps too frustrating, and indeed, it was a vestigial element from when the game was going to be something a bit different.  So instead of making that first game better, I decided to throw together a second game that would contain that improvement, as well as some corrections to the sword’s behavior.  And while we’re at it, why not make the sword ON FIRE? I threw in a couple of other demons as well, one which is just a larger palette swap and another that spits projectiles at the player.  Between the two games, I think this is decidedly the better.

8. Catch the Bus

A game idea that came to me, surprisingly, while waiting for a bus one morning.  It struck me that in life I can sit around and wait for a bus at a stop, but in a game, I’d feel compelled to explore, so putting in a small, deadly platformer level away from the bus stop might be a compelling enough distraction to make the player fail to achieve the game’s goal.

Originally, I was going to make the player wait for at least a minute for the scheduled arrival time and have the bus randomly be a little early or as much as a minute late.  Then I realized that no one playing the Pirate Kart would have the patience to put up with my bullshit that long.  Time feels a lot different in a game than in real life.

9. Koi Puncher: Championship Edition

Koi Puncher is kind of a pointless, challenge-less score attack experience.  But that makes it pretty easy to turn competitive if a second player and a time limit are introduced!  This is the exact same game with a timer and a second player.  I don’t know whether it’s actually been played competitively yet, but I’m hoping  within a few weeks–now that the Kart has been officially released–to see a few streams on Twitch.TV, displacing MvC3 or whatever the kids are into these days.

That’s all for this installment!  Next time, we’ll wrap up the Pirate Kart Weekend games with Owl Forest, Fuck the Sun I and II, two Watch Ducks games, ChickenFall: ChickenCatch, a virtual pet, and my favorite of my games for the Kart, Ghost Witch.