i’m putting in secrets right now. HMM TILESET.

little side project I’m working on at the moment for a compilation. work is still progressing on versnoof, too.

Today I finished the little blisters that appear when you harvest a spore, and I made the game remember caves you have visited. It now feels much more coherent to travel up and down.

This screenshot appears to have a lot of artifacts because it was taken mid-pulse; it looks nice in motion, trust me.

(bow and arrow)

destruction! You can now collect spores from inside the fungus and use them to blast holes in the walls / kill slimes / etc.

Next: booby-trapping each and every one of the spores with death blisters.

The title screen:

cave generation is now decently fast and does a better job scattering mushrooms around islands, so it doesn’t just look like mushroom crosshairs. really thanks to all the people who helped me optimize; I think I’m ready to move forward!

a little late. Cave generation / tiling for VERSNOOF.

I WONDER WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE BATMAN is another idea that was born in the writing of one of my then-Kindergarten students (the same one that inspired Super Chicken, actually). Original text:

“I wonder what it’s like to be Batman?

Would I fight bad guys?

Would I throw the Batarang?”

It’s basically a forced-scrolling run & gun where you run and jump along the rooftops of Gotham and collect toasted peanut butter & jelly sandwiches and bonk criminals with the Batarang. If you bonk enough criminals, Batman feels so great about being Batman that he goes surfing, and you avoid Reminders That His Parents Are Dead. I’ve done a quick prototype of the rooftop generation, and I’m still pretty excited about this because WHO DOESN’T LOVE SILLY BATMAN no one.

This is the only idea in this list that has a Next Step because I haven’t prototyped anything else.

I can’t seem to let go of my desire to do a dungeon-crawler of some kind, so here we are with “VERSNOOF”. The name is onomatopoetic and indicates the sound I wanted the main monster to have when I first had the idea. It is an astoundingly stupid name that refuses to be disassociated.

I started a prototype when I was first learning to program, but it was beyond my skills at the time. Planned:

- Procedural caves, full of squishy fungus

- One-way progression and FATE FEELINGS

- A ritually-blinded protagonist who senses monsters with a kind of psychic echolocation

- Gradual collection of a single item that is needed to defeat the main monster, who may appear at any time ALA Sinistar

So, kind of Sound Voyager meets Hunt the Wumpus meets Sinistar. The game will end when you die, before or after killing Versnoof. Arcade fun!

Cloud Cats is the first game I ever tried to make and I’ve rolled up and discarded quite a few prototypes. I still like a lot of the art I’ve made for it and I need to just Make This Game. It will basically just be a shmup with a lot of fun enemy types, and you will select the form of the final boss by shooting (WITH HEARTS) the enemies you like the most. Kind of a choose your own path one-level shmup?

Originally,  I started working on this to accompany some songs Tif and I recorded as Elephant Kiss?. I’ve also thought about doing a pseudo-3D Rez-y type of game like PUNCH THE BUTTS 3D. The first version had some story boxes and a lot of first-time-making-a-game junk tacked on (plus some awful sprite scaling).

I love old NES shooters like Lifeforce, Abadox, Air Fortress, and Xanac, and things like R-Type and Thrustburst and AHHGHGH I love them all. One of my old notebooks is totally full of drawings and planned weapons and features and ridiculously named bosses (“SENATOR GRABBYPAWS THEODORE THE ELDER”) for a game I called ROBOT GERMS and I think it could still be really cute and fun to take some of those things and make a concise spaceship game inside someone’s guts. If I ever do this one, I want to just scan drawings in and make it that way.

I was in Port Orchard for a few days with family and without the ability to write any code or work on any projects (except by knocking together the odd sprite on my phone) I found myself thinking about the decaying puddle of old ideas that I still can’t let go of. I decided to do a drawing for each one of them that I still liked and write down the next step if I wanted to go work on it THAT MINUTE. That way, when I find time, I always have a concrete Next Task to accomplish.

“Space Family” is the working title for a game where the player is a caretaker on a space station and they balance their various chores with spending time with their family. Each task is a ritual that can be performed with some DDR-style directional arrows and they use up some of the day. At the end of the day, the game keeps track of what they spent their time doing, and they can transmit a Demon Soul’s -style message composed of words made available by their actions.

So far, I have the “star-gazing” ritual in, and I want to add the rest of them before adding the other family members. All the rituals will use the same class (which I’ve already written), so adding the rest shouldn’t take long.

Super Chicken is a single-screen blasty game with some weirdo enemy design and art that is more involved than my other things (it’s maybe a notch above Together Fight). It should be done by now, but it suffered from Way Too Many Ideas For One Game, which is the natural consequence of planning a game with a first grader. Shoot the Butts had similar issues for a long time. To get back to basics, I had to do some thinking about Super Chicken’s main verb, and how I wanted to structure bonuses. At its heart, this is a Bubble Bobble / Gauntlet mashup, so Super Chicken will “pump up” enemies with a basic attack, and then burst them with a charge attack, which will release bonus letters, which will access additional bonus attacks, for POINTS POINTS POINTS and lots of sparkles and blobs.

I decided to make Super Chicken’s basic attack his “cluck”, so I need to put that into the game along with the rest of the mechanic. After that is fun, I’ll start adding bonus items et cetera.

Junibibi and Kunibibi is a user-designed time trial platformer about planting flowers and having a picnic with your friend. It is SO CLOSE TO BEING DONE; it’s in that regrettable polish phase where I have to find an elegant way to explain its weird controls and its in-game editor, I need to fix a bug in the online database that it uses, and I need to add sound. The biggest priority is the bug, and then the UI stuff after that.

I’m really excited about trying some more procedural things with the sound to make exploring all the different object interactions aurally rich, since the gameplay for this one is pretty basic.

Hungry Forest is an arcade RTS where you play as a forest god defending your home from HUMANS. I LOVE Hungry Forest but it needs a lot of work. I spent too much time messing with procedural generation for level layout and not enough time programming AI and implementing the player’s build options. I was also WAY ENAMORED of the ant colony -esque pathfinding I had made, so it takes too long before you are in conflict with the humans.

The number one thing I need to start working on this is to increase the rate at which humans spawn (and die at the hands – branches? – of the forest). Then I can start adding human types, king abilities, and forest structures / animals to begin balancing it.

Bentley Bear In The Ascent of the Soul is my take on Crystal Castles, where Bentley Bear uses his powers of meditation to cause gems to appear inside his soul castles, which he collects to open up an Inward Door.

Bentley’s verb set is basically complete (except I need to add a “WHOA” animation and a brief pause before he falls into water, to prevent UNDUE PLAYER FRUSTRATION), and there is one territory control -type enemy, but I need to add a hunting enemy to increase tension during meditation. Then it’s just a matter of adding enemy types, designing levels, and adding sounds. This one is actually pretty close.

SO. Them’s all my Irons, right there in the Fire. GOALS. Yes.