I am highly interested in creating and enjoying play, and so I have taken to spending a lot of time making various games, most often digital! Many different things inspire me for each game, as I will try to get at in each one featured below. I also primarily like to make ridiculous write-ups for everything I post on Glorious Trainwrecks, which you will find on the page of the majority of these games.
Glorious Trainwreck Anniversaries
The Spiko the Hedgehog 2016 Saga
Arthur's Dream of the Dragon and the Bear
[GT link][itch.io page][soundtrack] The List is my biggest game yet, over a year in the making! You will play as Elizabeth the elephant, exploring her village, and getting to know her friends better, while trying to save the day! I feel so good to have it finished and released, because I learned a lot during the development, and I think it really shows. I'm especially proud of the klipart collages I made for each area. Also, please check out the soundtrack by my friend Chris, it's really good!
[GT link][itch.io page] I made this game after a friend shared an artists recreation of this cryptid with me, and I was immediately inspired to put them in motion. It's probably my most minimalist game ever, but I find these key elements work together to create a strong mood, which I intend to be just a little bit spooky.
Spiko Is Real is, arguably, my first successful April Fools game, as last year's was er, confusing to everybody. I'm really happy with how it turned out, since I started with a couple simple concepts, and only let myself add more to the game after completing those sections. It makes me smile every time I play through it!
My Week of Games Pack was an experiment wherein I would spend 1 hour a day, 7 days in a row, starting and finishing an entire game. If it was unfinished when time was up, I would release it regardless. It was incredibly successful, helping me understand how long it can take me to make something, and kickstarting my motivation into a higher gear. I also wrote about my experiences here.
Sam the Shovel is another tiny game, made in about 6 hours for a shovelware themed game jam. Since BINKY XXI, I haven't been able to finish any of my ongoing projects, so having the opportunity to make something silly in less than a day was great. Plus I got to try out an old idea I had, and I'm happy with the result! The trick is, by the way, that there is no real game, so hopefully nobody gets upset by that because I always want players to be in on the joke.
BINKY XXI is a combination of a Binky fangame and a halloween-themed game. I made it to explore the character of Binky, especially their sweet relationship with Ruff, and to try making a quick, simple trainwrecky game. I think I succeeded in both accounts, which is great. I had a lot of fun writing it, and not worrying about overcomplicated interactions for once. PS. After the ending, a bonus file is written to the games directory!
[GT link][itch.io page] Made for the classic Wumpus Jam, Secret of the Wumpus is nearly a record of pace for me, being made in only four days! It features art drawn by me in MS Paint, a few sound effects by me, and the most serious tone I've written in a game. I'm honestly surprised by how many people have had an emotional connection to it, but also grateful. It means a lot to me that not only can I write something with real feeling, but also that people will appreciate it!
[GT link][itch.io page] Made for the simply clever Chess Jam, IQ was made in about a week and a half, putting other things on hold, simply because the core idea I had made me laugh so much I couldn't resist leaping into it immediately. No spoilers! Anyways, despite the (for me) astoundingly quick development time, I honestly think this is one of the best games I've ever made. It does so much in such a short space, and I am so, so happy with the results! Please enjoy IQ!!
Vegetable Grower 2 is a sort of parody of a game still in progress, which is also acronymized as "VG2". Hopefully that's not too confusing! I made this food-based spin-off from a funny conversation with a friend who came up with a new meaning for "VG2", and I just had to do it. It's probably weird that I finished it months before I expect to be done the real game, but hey, it's only five minutes long so you can probably forget the whole experience soon enough, and it'll be juts as funny to revisit later!
An expansion setting out to finally realize some of the lost goals of the original version, World of Explore: PRO Edition is a reappraisal of what could have been. The main motivator for making this was to conclude a years long joke of a fellow friend and game developer who ordered the "pro edition" of the original game, to which I snappily replied that it would take 500 days to arrive. I ended up missing this critical date, but when I realized my own mistake, I sought to make up for it by making sure that, in the distant future, I would finally deliver on it. And now that future is the present!
I had two goals with PRO edition: 1) it must be 'for' Sergio Cornaga only (although, anybody can play it, really!!), and 2) it should finally add some "subzones" that I had planned from the start, but never got around to, making the prior release silently lacking. I am pleased to say that both of these were accomplished fantastically. I would not have been able to do either of these so well three years ago when I first published the game, so I am grateful to have humourous reasons to revisit it.
Also, since you've read this far, know that, because I just cannot get enough of planning trilogies that only two parts get released for, that even this version is not quite yet everything I have up my sleeve... Original description follows:
World Of Explore was an old project of mine based on some ridiculous idea, I can't even remember it now, that blossomed into a bigger project. Most of it is built from designing klipart worlds and then coming up with what the denizens inside would talk like. WoE has the most thoughtful sound design of any project of mine, featuring dozens of sound effects, some of them edited myself. It was recently, about a week before the time of release, brought up again to my forefront to be cleaned up and sent out into the world.
I celebrated GT's 9th and 10th anniversaries with a year long event, open for anybody to submit games to for both prolonged visibility, and cheer towards the longetivity of the website. I can't even, honestly, believe it's ten years old- much less comprehensible, that I have been present for almost half of that! But it is true, and I am so grateful for this community! If it hasn't become clear, the existence of GT is THE reason I make games!! Or, truthfully, most anything!
So, how to show thanks? Well, I figured it was time for another self-reflection sort of game! Although I have become variously embaressed about my previous efforts (and thus quielty delinked them over time), this one is much more personally focused to avoid that problem. (And plus, I think it's a pleasent experience that I wouldn't want to be ignored.) Thus, I made a game about making a game for GT's anniversary. The story doesn't end there, of course- it's really more of a collage of variously obscure Clickteam kliparts, with my own reactions to them in the form of both talking about my own life and non-sequentier jokes.
However, this is very "on the surface" material, so I'd like to try to say some more. I made this because I have recently become reunited with The Games Factory 1, quite possibly my favourite version of Clickteam's products. It is obscure, not nearly as featureful or user-friendly as the famous Multimedia Fusion 2. But at the same time, it's much more managable than the painfully (if hilariously) tight Klik'n'Play (for instance- there is now a shortcut to save your game, meaning much less lost progress!).
Thus, TGF1 manages to offer intense constraints (I had to use a text file to figure out the algorithm for sorting through all the text without far too much effort, because every object value in it is "A", "B", or "C") that promote 'glorious trainwrecks' (there is a glitch where the player can somehow gain gravity and fall through the bottom of the textbox), while still being advanced enough to not make me cry in trying to make a game with ~75 unique, hand-entered lines of text. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it!
Scramble The Eggnog is a remake of my fairly old game, Scramble The Eggs. I made it since I wanted both to have yet another Chistmas-themed remodel of an older game, as well as to make it more accessible to people, since Scramble The Eggs can be fiendishly hard. I had a lot of fun making it, although the development suffered considerably by my learning that HTML5 with Clickteam is very, very limited. I was hoping that this would be the start of me making games for *everyone*, but unfortunately that is not yet to be.
What's the deal with Spiko (DEMO)? It's not really meant to be a parody of Sonic- I think the existence of the Spiko clipart already does that. Rather, it's a product of a few things: my desire to finally release another game (almost a year since my last one!), no matter how small; a re-realization of how constrained creating meaningful games in Clickteam tools are (you have to design it perfectly in one scene, then copy the code for each new scene!); and I just meant to use all the Spiko tiles and present the image as a joke but decided to make something more out of it.
Learn 100 Words is the first real game I've made by myself since Aerofighter Championship, which was like, 10 months before this. That's pretty long, compared to my usual pace! It was made in a few jam-packed weeks, so I'm very glad for the creative "burst"! In a way, it represents all the skills I've picked up in my years, both as a game creator and everything else. I hope you have a good time!
Duplicate is.
You Can Only Die 80 Times is a game by WendyWildShape I was a collaborater on, along with Decky Coss. It all started coming together when I encouraged Wendy to start using more and more effects in the game, to great result. The programming, art, and quite a lot of the design was by Wendy; I ran a laundry list of suggestions for ridiculous things to do, gathered sound effects, and "wrote" the in-game music; Decky was our first playtester, remixed/composed the main menu theme, as well acted as a third point of ideas.
Aerofighter Championship 2016 has my longest development time (in pure hours) of any game of depth yet! Started 5-6 months before release, the main idea was there from the start: you control 9 quite different planes simultaneously, though at any time only one of them is your friend- namely, your chosen plane to pilot! Everything in the game is based around this, forwards and backwards and sideways, layering detail after ridiculous detail and making sure everything fits together nicely- or amusingly, when they don't work as they could have.
I earnestly think that there is some depth to playing it, as the information overload can be sorted to focus on the things only interesting to how /you/ want to play it. And different ways to play it, there are! With 10 significant controls and 9 different planes, different strategies will come up for how to deftly succeed with each of them. Maybe with the Sideways Trajectory you'll use the quick turning (in opposition to slow maximum speed) to fire bullets in every direction away from you. Or you'll coast up to your opponents in the 262 Pitiful Gains, as it has slower deceleration than most planes- letting you stop them in your tracks while you still move on! Truly, a game of trainwrecks Aero Championship is.
STOCKRUE is a quick remake (mostly a reskin) of my very first video game, SOCKRUNE. You might be able to tell where the name of the new one comes from! Namely, it being changed from being about soccer runners to being about those who are rueful of (Chistmas) stockings. A couple notes: I'm very glad I can feel like my first video game can now "be something" with this re-make- I completely forgot about it until making this, and I feel like the original was pretty dang enthusing considering my entire lack of experience! Also, I feel confident in saying the story I wrote for this one is at the least the most absurd collection of things I've put together for a game yet.
This is a Twine conversion of a poem, intentionally made to use nothing but text, links, and Twine nodes. The text is taken from a recently modern translation by Brian Stone of a very old and long alliterative poem about King Arthur. This dream sequence is, according to research, unique to this particular story in all of the often cross-informed King Arthur tales. I find it much more intriguing and rewarding of the constant alliteration than the rest of the poem, so I wanted to share it as a self-contained excerpt. There's another, and even more involved, dream sequence later in the story that I might make another Twine out of, if I can understand it!
...Bride of the Gator was my entry for 2013's Secret Santa Gift Game exchange program at Glorious Trainwrecks, and my biggest work so far! I spent two weeks working on it furiously, and then another week working on it slowly until it was done- and not a moment too soon! This is my final release for 2013, and a very accomplished one at that!
I hadn't, if you've noticed, put out much anything since my Chip's Challenge levels- working on "Bride" gave me great room to let out all of my pent up creativity and ideas in a project that was *new* and had a set deadline to make sure I actually finished it- and finish it did I ever! I'm quite proud of how much I've packed in here, including inspiration for following it up with a soundtrack release of a sorts.
I currently have three releases of custom maps for the game Chip's Challenge (CC), which I will detail here!
The first (seen on the left above) is a single level I made in a short time span, immediately after opening up a level editor for CC. Because I had no idea what I was doing with any of the mechanics, I think I've made something that will surprise even fans of the original in some points. I spent some time after designing most of it, re-arranging the level to flow better, and I think it is a suitable, enjoyable experience for anybody!
The second (seen on the right above) is a pack of four whole levels, each exploring one or more concepts in different directions. I also designed it to let players skip any level they want, should they find it too difficult, frustrating, or otherwise dull. My intention here is to let players explore what they can and want to of the levels, and provide optional challenges should they wish to experience them.
The third (seen on the middle above) was intended to be a massive (for me) collection of 20 levels, which was in development cut down to about 10 levels to save me a headache or three. To stop people from being frustrated by difficulty of any particular level, I've included a (randomly arranged) list of passwords to each of the levels, allowing players to haphazardly explore the set. I wanted people to be able to see all of it, but with no guidance, because each map is an extension of an idea: sometimes it's a compact idea spread out over a large space; sometimes it's an idea that needs to keep building on itself; and sometimes it just doesn't really work out, but it's still there. It's like a mixtape where when you press play, you get a random track.
I, a short-time but-big Doom fan have created a handful of maps, which mostly ended in frustration and not understanding how to progress any of them. Eventually, I struck a chord of imagination I greatly enjoyed and was able to execute to satisfaction. In comes The Five Zones, out comes a ridiculous on/off project that just wouldn't quit. This map is a real work of love, for me- many details were quickly thought of and extensively put down and re-worked, re-tested, re-balanced. I wouldn't call myself a perfectionist, but a prettymuchwhatIwantedist, and I hope it shows. The map features full difficulty level implementation, and I hope both inexperienced players and veterans can get a kick out of playing it!
What started as a want to create a tribute to a creator I enjoy a lot became a much bigger work, and here we have FANTASY / REALITY! This Twine story features my greatest fulfillment of the RUDE factor (Replayability, Unpredictabilty, Different for Everyone), which you will have to play to see how. Helpful contributions to this were made by several friends, most of whom didn't want any credit, but my thanks goes out to all of them for help!
GHOST MUMPS: EPISODE 1 is the first in a gripping series of adventure, daring, explosions, and, of course, ghost mumps. What is a ghost mump, you may ask? Well, first of all the game will tell you, so you clearly haven't tried to play it yet. Secondly, it is this game. Thirdly, it came from me mis-guessing what a licence plate was supposed to mean, and soon after wanting to try making a game based off of only the title (Ghost Mumps).