Play Salvage Crew.

The original intent of this game was to be a version of xcom with no randomness to the combat encounters. I had also been planning to make something that was as interesting as nightmare cooperative (which I did for 7drl last year). I think that while it isn’t quite as good as that, it does hit a few interesting moments. My favorite bits of this game are the storyline, which is delivered in about 10 sentences, and all the great work that netgrind and Sal Farina & Austin Redwoood.

Additional thanks to Ian Snyder and Alan Hazelden for their feedback during the development process. I made some major changes to the to the game design that I probably wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for them. My week on this game was largely down to wrestling with graphics and menus, and had about 2 days of solid game design in it even once I got all the graphic stuff sorted. I am starting to realize why ASCII art is one of the core tenants of roguelike design. Basically it means that you can add things as fast as you can think of them, and don’t have to worry much about what it looks like.

Some other games that I really enjoyed from this years 7drl: SEVEN CELL - Ian made this in about 6 hours, and it is amazing. Such a perfect random puzzler Dead Blinger - a great 1HP roguelike that has the classic elements as well. Read down for more about why ascii is great. Dumuzid - the design in this is so wobbly, but I love it. Garbage In / Garbage Out - a cross between roborally and glitch tank. Awesome.

I made a small thing called MGLed. It is a web based editor for making games with MGL.coffee, a really cool library for making tiny action games. I borrowed heavily from increpare’s puzzle script, which was an invaluable resource when figuring out how to make a web based editor.

I am releasing this in a partially finished state to see if it is something that people would like to play with further, and to potentially gain (or lose) energy from seeing if people are interested in it.

I was inspired to start working on this because Kenta Cho made 50 games last year using this library. I gave the library a shot, and while it is super super strange, it is also blazingly fast to make stuff with once you learn your way around it. Among its strange and exciting features are: RANDOM MUSIC! SINGLE LETTER FUNCTION NAMES! ONLY NON-ROTATED SQUARES FOR GRAPHICS!

You can check out the source code for Kenta Cho’s games, and dump them into the editor and hack around with them.

I have also made a few games with it that you can look at the source code for. I have used the single letter variable names that the engine encourages, so I don’t promise that it is easy to read.

cant stop

snuggle ship

If you want to dive in, the best place to start is the github documentation for the library. I will be happy to keep updating this tool if people are happy to use it!

Here is a list of the things I made/did last year.

Some Music

I did a better job of breaking out the musical equipment on a semi-regular basis, but since this playlist represents the some total of all the music I finished, it could probably be a little bit better. I did an ok job of getting rid of hangups and just calling things done though.

All Together / Candy Bomb

Two small puzzle games, I think they made a pretty big difference in my gamemaking approach for the year, and finally allowed me to finish the roguelike that I had been thinking about for a long time.

Series: Instruments

A collection of 4 instruments played with xbox controller. Made for the makegame series pagent, and a fun experimentation. One of the songs above is made with one of these instruments. Also I was able to slightly modify one of these to run in kiosk mode at an art installation, which was nice to have a thing sitting around for that purpose.

Zero Zero Projector

Probably the jammiest game I made in the past year, a collection of ideas just stuck into a single package and kinda rushed to get out the door. I think it is fun enough, but also pretty broken over all. I had actually finished the first version of nightmare cooperative before I finished this one, so I had an idea about how roguelikes were supposed to work.

Download Zero Zero Projector Here

The Nightmare Cooperative

This was the biggest thing I did all year, and it took me about 9 months from beginning to end. We have since sold it to another company, which is nice, since it means that they see longer term potential in its sales than we were able to get. I am a pretty big fan of this game and had an incredibly fun time making the first version of it.

Get Nightmare Cooperative Here

A Bunch of T-Shirts

Twitter was impossible to be on, so I switched my twitter over to a t-shirt advertising business. None of them were turned into physical products, but it was fun to make a shirt a day.

No More Lucky Frame

Was such an amazing ride, and I think that I am totally on a different path with my life now that I have had that experience. Moving on has been tough, but I am excited to see what the future holds.

2013 year in review for comparison.

Google does something good every once in a while, and recently they commisioned a set of emoji that is licensed with the liberal apache license. You can get this emoji set in the Noto Sans fontpack.

I have extracted the emoji set to a png set that you can download here. This set happens to be my favorite, because just look at these cute little squishies.

Follow me at CoolTShirts2000 until I get bored of posting tshirts.

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