Snowflake was planned as an entry for caevstroy and dave.germain’s infamous No Solid Objects competition, but extreme dissatisfaction with the level design (or lack thereof) caused me to abandon it. Prompted by Healy, I put some finishing touches on Snowflake and released it, but the level design is essentially as I left it in 2010. The best aspects of this level are the amazing music by Fearofdark and the background art (viewable here, level spoilers) which I drew with a ballpoint pen.
Juni Jones: Ace Attorney was made for Peppyhare4000’s Bad Level competition. As a result of this, playing it is likely to annoy you. The endings are especially subpar. It features music I made (or at least assume responsibility for), including a song originally created for Snowflake to fulfil caevstroy’s assessment criterion of “bizzare custom music with samples of barnyard creatures”.
You will need Knytt Stories to play these levels.
Made frantically in the 5 hours before the deadline to the Experimental Gameplay Project 5 Buttons Competition. It was made with the swimming pool / art gallery setting firmly in mind, but feel free to play it at home with the 1-5 keys on your keyboard.
Cakewalk 7000 was made for the Global Game Jam 2010 with Jonathan Zhao, Mark Hankins and Adi Potgieter. The theme of the jam was deception. I had no idea what to expect from Global Game Jam, but it turned out to be an awesome experience. I’m really proud of the game we created! It happens to be the first game created for the event to be played by keynote speaker Ste Curran (who said “it was awesome”) and it was later featured in PC World New Zealand Magazine.
At ages 18-19 I attempted to bring life to Bonsky Da Ghetto Toad, a concept first announced in 2004 by Halpenny Games. It was a game that promised to seamlessly merge the genres of 2D platformer, first-person shooter and real-time strategy, all in a gritty urban setting populated by cartoon animals. It should come as no surprise that such a game never eventuated. As a gift for the creator’s birthday, I assembled a team spanning three countries and attempted to recreate Bonksy as it had originally been envisioned, but the task proved too great and the resulting game is quite mediocre from a gameplay perspective. It’s worth checking out for the art assets and music alone, though.
A word of warning: Bonksy uses memory quite poorly, so it might not run on your computer. There might even be a chance it could crash it (I really don’t know) so exercise caution! If you try the game, please let me know if it worked or not as I don’t have a lot of data on this.
Two collaborations with Mark Gobbin. FUTURE WARS: 92 Minutes was made at age 18, in 92 minutes. It was a test of whether we could handle Klik of the Month and became the first official release of Team 3000, a group devoted to the creation of games, comics, music, art and writings. Although the Team 3000 website crashed some time ago (taking a lot of its content with it) the group lives on in our hearts and minds.
At age 19 I worked on Time Weasels, a sequel of sorts to FUTURE WARS: 92 Minutes. This time I handled art and sound, while Mark took care of design and programming; a reversal of our roles for the prequel. This was technically my first submission to Klik of the Month, although we failed to finish the game within two hours. A third game in the series called Chrono Digger was planned but never completed.
Liam 3000 was my first released platformer, made at age 15. This game was based on remarks made by my friend Liam during biology class about how cool it would be to have a gelatinous sheath, although the sheath ended up playing no role in the actual gameplay. This game became pretty popular among my friends due to so many of them being in it.
Keyboardiac was made at age 16 as an idea submission to Jonny Smeby’s Mind Menace project. The premise is that Jonny has stolen all but one of the keys on your keyboard and as your character regains the abilities tied to those keys upon retrieving them. The game is also known as Liam 1000 because I tried to convince Liam it was a prequel to Liam 3000… he wasn’t impressed.
