game jams

Pigeon Racing sends Tipp topsy-turvy

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Courtesy of the mysterious Tipp and the same game jam that brought us Whale of Noise, we have this bonkers party game.

Pigeon Racing might best be described as multiplayer NiGHTS by way of Cactus. It’s an aerial racer supporting up to four players. Player one uses the arrow keys; player two claims WASD; player three, IJKL; and player four is on the keypad with 5123. For any of the players, left and right spin the entire screen; up flies; and down, well, defecates. The game supports computer rivals, and allows the player to set laps before playing. Hit the rings to propel yourself forward and get a score bonus.

The most remarkable element here is the presentation. The game looks and sounds like an assembly demo from the mid-1990s. Even if you’re prepared, it takes a few minutes to adjust to the screen’s motion. Once you have found your gyroscope the controls are responsive and fluid. It’s just a bit of a mental overload.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Illuminator a Flash of Brilliance

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Logan Ames‘ Illuminator is a side-scrolling survival horror game, which for no particular reason reminds me of Sega’s Ghost House.

You start off in an empty, darkened house, armed with nothing but a flashlight. Flick on the light, and the path before you explodes with brightness. After a few seconds, the light fades and you need to recharge the batteries. Eventually you will start to encounter ghouls. Avoid them until your light is charged, then melt them with a bright flash. As you disintegrate the ghouls, the stitches in a tear in the fabric of reality begin to unravel. Defeat enough ghouls and you can pass through a starry void to the next house.

Along the way you will find night lights, Christmas tree lights, and so on. Plug them in, flick on televisions, and keep an eye on open windows to give yourself forewarning of ghoul attacks. There’s a helpful sound effect and flashing icon to let you know when you’re near a wall outlet.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Stephen Lavelle’s Whale of Noise

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Another quirky game jam, another quirky load of games. Steven “Increpare” Lavelle has contributed the first entry to Melly’s “A Game By Its Cover” competition, an effort to design games to match fake box art found around the Internet. The result is a contemplative, somewhat lonely artsy game about a whale apparently made of sound.

As you swim around the blocky submerged caverns, your particle-based whale slips deftly around corners. The odd point of light will give you a new song, allowing your whale to pass barriers. Eventually sequences will demand several different notes in a row, creating a sort of mournful tune.

The game is a bit glitchy, in a good way. There’s a certain nervous dissonance constantly burbling under the surface. The soundtrack consists of a soothing yet ominous oceanic hum.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Rocket Jockey

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In his remake of of Rocket Jockey, The Moonkeeper author Ben Pettengill has delivered something of a gem. Both engrossing in its own right and faithful to what little there is to Active Enterprises’ original, Rocket Jockey is one of the highlights of the Action 52 Owns game jam.

The game begins as you find all your cows beamed into space by interstellar cattle rustlers. So you run out back of your barn, hop on the back of your solid-fuel rocket, and blast off in pursuit. Aside from the arrow keys, the game uses a single button. Rather than shoot, you sling out a lasso. If you rope a steer, you get to sustain another hit and your lasso begins to glow and grow in length. Snag a gunman, and you may pull him off his own rocket. You can also grab barrels, and toss them forward.

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Bits and Pieces aspires for brain food

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David R. Lorentz has reinvented the Action 52 zombie-on-a-pogo-stick game Bits and Pieces as a… well, sort of a monster hell platformer. You play as an amorphous bodiless glob of protein, described as a head but presumably more like a brain, who wobbles and bounces through patterned fields of monsters in search of glutamate.

The action switches up from level to level, as the game introduces unexpected nuances to its apparently simple mechanics. For instance, tapping “jump” again the moment you bounce on an enemy results in a super bounce that can send you about the height of the screen, allowing some interesting vertical sequences that call to mind the ice beam segments in Metroid.

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Chris Delay’s Game Jam Indoctrination

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After some apprehension, Chris Delay, the head of Darwina studio Introversion, took part in the June TigJAM UK meet-up. Apparently over the past year a large community of indie game developers has sprung up around Cambridge, which encouraged Delay to take part. Ultimately he designed three games for the jam, each based on a vague theme drawn out of a proverbial hat.

His topics were “White Holes”, “Sega Dreamcast VMU”, and “Mouse input only”. Out of those three themes Delay created the particle graphics demo White Holes; the Ed-Logg-does-Pac-Man action game Trapper; and probably the most interesting of the bunch, the plate-spinning art game Balancing Act.

In Balancing Act, you spin plates that represent personal values such as family and friends; wealth and success. As the game progresses, it becomes impossible to balance everything so you have to start picking and choosing the plates that most matter to you.

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Time Warp Tickers gets you flicking and kicking

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The Brazilian artist Melly has released a provisionally complete version of his Action 52 Owns game jam entry, Time Warp Tickers.

As with many of its game jam brethren, Melly’s game takes the basic premise of its namesake, and a few visual and audio themes, and fleshes them out with modern mechanics and design sensibilities. In this case you play as a tiny cat in a finger mech, strolling through a surreal chessboard landscape, flicking enemies into each other and into background objects with your mech’s “legs”. Charge the flicks for a stronger result. The game also includes some time warp elements: hold both buttons to slow things down and give yourself room to maneuver.

Time Warp Tickers is both visually and aurally gorgeous, filled with rather neat mechanisms and design ideas, and is a rather clever example of deconstruction. It manages both to pay tribute to the themes of the game that inspired it and to use those themes as a starting place to do its own thing entirely.

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Clear the room with Easyname’s Beeps and Blips

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Taking a different tack from the other Action 52 Owns game jam entries, Easyname’s Beeps and Blips remake goes even more retro in presentation even as it considerably ages up the design.

The game almost looks like it’s running in text mode, and yet for a top-down shooter it’s rather sophisticated. To move to the next room, you clear the screen of enemies. There are two buttons: shoot, and lock your aim. You can move and shoot in eight directions. Touch a purple orb to gain an “option” (in Gradius terms) and increase your firepower. I’m not sure if there’s a limit; you can certainly collect at least three of them. When you’re injured, you lose an “option” and your firepower decreases. When you lose all your energy, you die and start over from the last threshold you passed.

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Curt Kling’s Mash Man stomps on your heartstrings

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Now here’s an interesting one. Bravehorse designer Curt Kling’s entry into the Action 52 Owns game jam is a contemplative remake of the under-achieving side-scroller Mash Man. As Kling commented: “We tried to take the mood of the original game and expand on it, since it doesn’t really have any kind of unique gameplay elements to use.”

That’s an understatement. In the original game you pretty much walk to the right and jump on enemies with your enormous feet — provided you can get around the collision problems. And eventually you’ll get hit and you’ll die. As a game, it’s a bit depressing and futile. Which is what Kling seemed to read into it as well.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )