Tales from the Old School

Two very cool peeks into the fascinating days of the 80s and 90s games industry.

First, a half hour documentary about Ocean and Imagine games circa the early 80s. The boom and bust stuff is so over the top that it couldn't even be scripted. An absolutely amazing look into the world of the early UK development scene and gaming culture.

Secondly, listen to episode 91 of the 1up podcast Retronauts. It's a round table interview of developers from Tengen. It's a great conversation about NES development that goes into everything from unreleased games to Sega Technical Institute to how these guys are starting to find a place again in the age of Flash and iPhone development. Pretty awesome stuff.

This Cat Is Horseshit - Final-ish Build

Pretty close to done with this one. I added an extra difficulty mode, changed up the interface and graphics, and tweaked the mechanics.

YOU CAN PLAY IT HERE.

Mike the Cat's Legal Defense Fund: Demo 2

I finally made some more levels for Mike the Cat's Legal Defense Fund.

You can download the demo HERE. It's about 12 MB.

It includes three new challenge levels, an overhauled engine and some tweaks to the original levels. My microphone is broken, so I unfortunately wasn't able to record new dialogue for the CEO character. If you want to level select, you can press "d" on the title screen. I think I might whip out a couple of more CBS Storybreak remixes for special levels. Now that I have a better engine and have basically made it from the ground up, I'm going to try to push myself to work on a level or so a week. It's good to have the muse back.

This Cat Is Horseshit

A videogame I'm developing for Something Awful's Development Challenge IV. The theme is Deals with the Devil. The game is called This Cat Is Horseshit. It's the Garbage Pail to the Cabbage Patch of Petz games. You have to pet sit for Satan's unruly nightmare cat. Working now on AI for the cat and balancing the resource management. This engine test is being manually controlled to show off the early level design. Here is a demo of the theme song.

Mike The Cat's Legal Defense Fund

Mike the Cat's Legal Defense Fund is a game where you play as an bitter cat who has been financially screwed over by a greedy internet website.  He has to burst into the headquarters and face a gauntlet of challenges to get his money back.  I was inspired to make this game after playing through the arcade kusoge Trio the Punch.  I started working on this for the selectbutton Bakedown 2009 competition, but never followed up on it.  It is made in Multimedia Fusion and the levels are actually not too difficult to make.  Mike can shoot lasers from his eyes, breathe fire, play the electric guitar, and turn into a ghost.  He uses these skills to solve puzzles within the game.  From a conceptual standpoint, I still need to decide how many overall levels the game will have.  I programmed a snakes and ladders style-backend thinking I was going to build a hundred levels, but I'm not sure I can come up with that many interesting ideas within the framework of the engine.

Here is a link to the first demo build featuring three levels

The theme you hear throughout the game is a remix I made of the CBS Storybreak theme song, which was one of my absolute favorite songs as a kid.  The sound effects are from freesound.org and sfxr.  I really need to set aside some time every week to continue working on this one because it's actually very fun to build for.