I almost want to make this tweet https://twitter.com/webbedspace/status/296868252326445056 into a Metroid-like jailbreak game called Bustin Jailey.
You hear frustration in your captor's voice as the huge spiked ball again fails to land in the giant roulette wheel space you're tied up in.
"It's time for the next step of evolution," she gurgled, her lab coat dissolving, organs melting into lush green jelly. "Homo slimiens!"
A platform character repeatedly hitting a barren block, begging for "one last coin", until the block, sighing, painfully extrudes a pog.
"You made two mistakes coming here! You believed you could defeat me, and you believed you could seduce me! …Oh, very well - one mistake."
I can't think of any other 8-bit games that invoke the indie trope of inscribing button commands on the background.
You pick up the alien gun, then look in the mirror to see what your palette has swapped to. Blue skin and gold hair… You could make it work.
Interesting that Wario Land had a whole secret world between worlds 2 and 3 that led nowhere and only increased your treasure completion %.
This game's instruction manual wasn't just being coy and mysterious - the final level really is a giant question mark in a black void.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#BASIC "The only error messages were WHAT? for syntax errors, HOW? for arithmetic errors, and SORRY for out of memory errors."
You shoot her dead-on. Nothing! Your opponent grins devilishly and lifts the left side of her shirt, revealing her body's write-protect tab.
In the dark, you rush to the exit. As the blinding bright rectangle grows larger in your vision, so too does it grow thinner, narrower.
You try to explain that you'd like your mouth to be magically reattached, but halfway through you drop it in your tea, causing you to choke.
"Well, we'll just start our own enchanted woods! Starting with this tree on the kerb! Hang on, let me get some mirrors to put around it."
You drift inside the eye. The vitreous humour feels pleasant on your flagellum. You watch the pupil closely, keeping out of its inner gaze.
"Good thing we saved these dozen Megaelixers for the whole game - now we can craft them into a giant Potion Mecha to fight the last boss."
Twitter Lurkers: Follow Me And You WILL Get A Backstage Pass To A Front-Row Seat On The Inside Of My Mind's Eye.
You're helpless to stop yourself being fed into WinRAR. You feel your code being squashed and compressed by dozens of tiny subroutines.
"We suspect the giant spider lured dozens of people into its web to hug and cuddle it using some kind of pheremone, or possibly hypnosis."
The snails crawl onto your feet, weighing them down. They don't want you to go. They love you, and know you'll die by the Dark Lord's hand.
"A circle of wizards has arrived at the downtown blaze, and are etching the pentagram to summon an emergency Frost Demon as we speak."
The traffic lights change to brown and teal. The lane of ducks flapping above you advances forward, as do the fish in the pipes beneath you.
"Ownership of gutter water is bitterly fought between the road companies and the sewer companies… The sewer grates run red with blood…"
"It's been a month since you reported your diamonds stolen, and we wanted to make sure that the perps weren't going to give them back."
Mario game where using P-Switches to turn blocks into coins only inflates the value of a 1UP from 100 coins upward.
"Alright, if the owner of the blood we found at the crime scene doesn't own up, we're gonna just drink it ourselves. …Mmmmm, delicious!"
The old LandscapeBots have awoken again. Though it has been centuries since the last game, the Golf Course must be maintained.
Mario 3 hack where navigating the map screen ends up consuming the whole game… Platforming is forgotten amid music box and cloud tricks…
This game's falling debris really does not want to get involved in this boss fight.
Platform boss that tries to stomp the ground to make debris fall on you, only for you to stomp the ground first to make debris fall on it.
As the GuardBots arrive, you quickly duck behind the stolen ring on your own finger. Puzzled, they pick you up and put you back in the safe.
You feel this impending deadline so viscerally, it's like it has physical form… Growing more powerful with every moment of procrastination…
"Why must you need a separate bed, cupboard, wardrobe," spruiks the salesman, "when you could have 3 of these Generic Furnishment Entities?"
Though reduced to just a head, she still had a use for you: replacing the ball in her flail! You make a fearsome, screaming weapon indeed.
Why did you key in the password when your hands were covered in chocolate?! There's no choice. You'll have to lick the touchscreen clean.
http://armorgames.com/play/12497/missilebreak-outvaders - I like how this game frames its difficulty modes as competing historical theories about the story's events.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5024 - Here's another silly little Twine macro. Don't overuse this one.
The alpha is here https://groups.google.com/d/msg/tweecode/8hYb9W9NsIo/l0jC5WLlyFQJ but it isn't guaranteed to be stable yet.
My Twine hack for passage tag based CSS has been put in the latest alpha, but with the CSS syntax slightly altered to be HTML5 compliant.
You wake up. You have transformed in the night into a tweet with a typo in it. Suddenly a giant mouse cursor creeps toward your Delete link…
This abandoned port-a-potty looks like it'd clean up nice… A real fixer-upper… Clay to mould in your own image… A man's home is his castle…
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5021 - Here are some Twine macros that let you add and remove tags from passages during the game. Useful for CSS purposes.
"People grow apart as they grow old. Just you watch, we'll all get completely sick of each other and start unfollowing in about one minute."
"Here's our investment in the 'oral phone' Twine remake." *drops ten favs and a retweet on the table* "We're thinking summer blockbuster."
The Twine bigwig leans over his desk. "We've got a promising franchise of bog-body tweets that we'd like to give the big browser treatment."
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5020 - Here's a slightly silly Twine macro that makes a link that just changes its text instead of going to a new page.
To be honest I'm not completely sure if a macro as simple as this hasn't already been made. But nevertheless, there it is.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5019 - Here's a Twine macro that lets you click a link to just make more text appear in the same passage.
The word "multimedia" wafts across the boardroom like a strange aroma. Is it the new literacy? Will CDs render all prior art forms obsolete?
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5018 - In case you wanted to simply remove the fade-in transition from your Twine game, here's something that should work.
This Twine boss doesn't seem to realise you can't destroy a mouse cursor by overlapping a hadouken GIF with it. It's kinda sad, really.
This Twine level where the link keeps teleporting around the paragraph and firing three Unicode bullets at my cursor is kinda hard.
You wake. At last, the claymation episode is over! But you notice your framerate is still low. Uh oh! Today must be live-action stop-motion!
Lascivious touch-screen game so profane that it can only be played with the device held horizontally face-down, so that God can't see.
Touch-screen game where if you cover the screen with your hand whenever the player collides with something, it officially never happened.
Vertical shmup where all the enemies that fly past you gradually form a pile of crashed wrecks an inch below the bottom of the screen.
"Salt is one of the most magic-destroying substances on Earth. Its was originally added to meat simply to stop it rising from the dead."
Game where you can steal the 'disappear' code from enemy corpses and use it to warp to the phantom zone where all de-spawned items go.
A cold-lit room, late into the night. Twelve brilliant industry leaders brainstorm marketing strategies for cosmetic nipple removal surgery.
The worlds "WELCOME TO MY WEBSITE!!" stalk the web, swollen from nine <strong> tags… But its sole <i> tag explains its slanted, wicked grin…
"Warning: do NOT nest elements in more than 3 layers of <strong> tags, lest they become so strong that they overpower your entire browser."
The delightful quirk of this game lacking a "wear clothes" verb turns sinister when the hordes of feather-wielding tickleminions show up.
Ill omens began appearing. All dogs became pixelated. The moon was replaced with the words "skyrock_copy2.jpg". Dark forces must be at work…
You've been feeling so much better about your cell after your jailers confiscated your ability to discern boundaries of physical spaces.
Your jailers confiscated your mouth after they noticed you practising kisses on your fist.
The tiny blob of sentienslime is inside your boot. It's taken to tickling your sole in time with your footsteps! The big blob closes in.
Look I'm telling you guys Faerie Google is right here: P.S. You need a browser that can turn PNGs into usable websites.
Remember: pogobobs are pinibipped by podabs, once you gobigap their fidifod. Just google those terms (use Faery Google, not the normal one).
There was a blackout at my house, so I couldn't tweet the secret for banishing the pogopob hordes. (You have to nidipit their sploubpillar.)
Your inspector disguise will go unquestioned: the Paradox Dept. forbids inspectors from inspecting inspectors that don't inspect themselves.
"Making the defendant dodge giant robotic gavels became part of the judicial process in 2450," explains your guidebook as you quickly duck.
Your urine stream bores through the sandcastle walls. Behind you, badly melted sandsoldiers wail at their undignified end.
I guess that kind of bold, overreaching exaggeration of established game rules is what the "ROM hack aesthetic" is all about.
Leon trivia: When I was a child I designed a Snakes and Ladders board in which square 5 had a ladder leading directly to the end square.
You decide to drink the black potion. Suddenly you win. There, you did it, now you can finally close this book and get on with your life.
You sneeze, and a stream of snot leaps into the teleporter core. Instantly, your mucus occupies every physical location on the ship at once.
The executioner's axe falls. You curve your temporarily gelatinous neck away from the blade. Two more misses, and you're legally free to go!
If you know someone whose time zone is 6 hrs 30 mins different to yours, you can find their time by flipping an analogue clock upside-down.
"You must revive the land!" shouts an NPC. She stomps the ground. The pained groaning noise one would expect from stomping dirt is absent.
"It's the weekend," says your pillow. "Time to switch." Sighing, you place your detached head on the bed and attach the pillow to your neck.
Someone do a Wind Waker remake where it's edited down to just the bit where you hookshot a statue while wearing the iron boots.
"In this game, there is an unintuitively strong relationship between your life meter, and the presence of spikes intersecting your body."
Apparently my browser can't animate that aforementioned GIF without mucking it up:
I'm surprised that English Country Tune lets you play it at 512 x 384 resolution. It's adorable.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/4897- Feel free to do a "Remake Wind Waker" themed trainwreck in this @Gtrwx event tomorrowoon.
You check your clockendar. It's the 9th Weekonth of the 2nd Moonigee of whatever. You're sick of multi-moon planets and their date systems.
"With my hands, I have laid the bricks for great castles," continues Dr. Breen, "while your fists can only destroy these bricks from below."
Dr. Breen sternly lectures Mario with plumbing metaphors - "How could you, a man of engineering? Your job is to connect, not to divide!"
http://animatedscreenshots.tumblr.com/post/41465085705/little-wheel-reduced-to-2-colours-with-pattern - This is sort-of a repeat from last October, but I like these occasional HyperCard style two-colour dithers.
"Passive-Aggressive IQ Test, Question 1. Complete this sequence: SMH - SMDH - SMMFGDH - _______ "
On the Challenge Sphere, people have taken to grinding for Challenge Medals by exchanging trivial challenges ("open this tin", "touch me").
Erotically denying the ability to make a looping GIF by moving one frame out of synch with the background.
"I watch you, sleeping in the Nap Chamber, and think about how much more time we could spend together if I could just control your dreams."
"Yoshi envy" led to every game character getting a steed… Q*bert's tapir, Samus's pangolin, Mappy's iguana, Dig Dug's vole, Qix's rhombus…
It was a bad year for a road trip to the dreamfume crust. They spent more time chasing faint plumes in the wind than they did having dreams.
"We're utterly outgunned, but we've still got the element of surprise!!" *all their spring-snake cans go off prematurely* "…We're doomed."
You slice deep into the blob creature's flank. Unfortunately, the slash simply opens wide into a huge mouth.
You shatter the entry-stone of the puzzlecrypt. Tiny jigsaw bats fly out. Intricate sudoku patterns are inscribed on the Rubik's cube walls.
The Killviscerator Ghost House was built to trap ghosts killed by Killviscerator products forever (there's a penny glued to the hall floor).
http://l.j-factor.com/gmhtml5/Capri_Toot/ If you missed it, I added 2 more endings linked from Zones T and U (also the source code is in the Ingredients button).
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5013 Noticed this didn't work for bookmarked/direct-linked passages, so I added some brute force code that sort-of fixes it.
Capri Toot nodemap.
http://l.j-factor.com/gmhtml5/Capri_Toot/ - Presenting a post-jam final version of Capri Toot, with a new logo and two bonus endings attached.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5014 - Twine code to make the Start passage instantly advance to another passage, as an alternative to using <<display>>.
(Frankly I'm a bit surprised I even need that JS snippet - apparently the Twine engine just jettisons all the passage tags at render-time.)
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5013 - Here's a way to give specific Twine passages custom CSS styling based on the passage's tags.
Twine cheat: if you know the name of a passage, you can start the game there by appending the plain URL with "#!", followed by the name.
"The first scene communicates the 'drink blood' verb. It features the victim, lipstick mark on her neck, asleep on a pile of bendy-straws."
You finally manage to cram your rescue message into 140 characters. But just before you click Tweet, a cyber-cutlass slashes the mouse cord.
"Rules are rules," he said as the shark woke to find itself sewn to his shoulder. "You eat the arm, you become the arm."
You ready your knife to slice through the flesh wall. Suddenly, it dilates, revealing a hallway. Oh god. She's anticipated your every move!
Every raindrop that hits the window looks surprised, stunned. Even as they slide down, they wonder when they'll resume plummeting joyously.
For the first decade of consumer portal technology, you could only fit one arm through. Half-hugs and blind gropes defined a generation.
http://www.gamebooks.org/gallery/pap08back.jpg - Pick-A-Path, "The Magic Top Mystery", a CYOA book with randomisation and a built-in three-sided die / feelie.
She stood on tiptoes so comfortably, naturally, as if she was floating just above and chose to press the ground with her toes.
Behold the brain: a vile creature, so cramped in its home that it's forced to crinkle itself, grow inward, gnarled and twisted… Disgusting…
http://theartofanimation.tumblr.com/post/41355523961/gloria-pizzilli - Hotline Miami 2???
Breasts with tiny squashed bloodied men tattooed on their undersides.
NPCs who can sense the callous personality of the game they're inside… Fearing it like God, cringing at its sheer distain for their lives…
You can tell a lot about a game's personality by how much respect and dignity it gives to its own NPCs.
Let's pity those poor NPCs that stand around loudly thinking of a solution to the puzzle while the game waits for you to do it all yourself.
Okay, you're beginning to run out of un-melted swords to parry with, but this guy's "laser blade" has to run out of power soon, right?
The Blob Cops have set up an X-ray checkpoint in front of Blob Palace. If _anything_ shows up on it, you're slurped up and vomited away.
With a gulp, the device sucks out your shape. You float in the vat, formless. You see her picking your new shape: a vase? A teapot? A chair?
The Blob Cops analyse your confiscated bones. Just as expected: they'll all snap if they stomp on them enough. You ooze away and have a cry.
The AppraisalBot declares you a mango. Oh no! Your hack of the palace systems has backfired! You're dragged to the Juicing Room immediately.
To think, the same undies so idly yanked off in a hundred heated fits are now like a pink steel wall to your egress… Such total betrayal…
This is ridiculous, you think. How can your thin pink underpants, snagged on this wall hook, be the one thing thwarting your entire escape?!
The wild bouncing spiked ball finally comes to a rest on the floor directly below you. You breathe a sigh of relief. Then your straps break.
Strapped to the inside wall of the box, you watch as your long hair dances in the air around you as you're turned this way and that.
The player spells have a lot of variance, too. Mario's Orb spells feel so much more responsive than Bowser Crush, for instance.
It's odd how strongly they contrast to the frictive sensation of the melee attacks, especially the timed hits.
One of Super Mario RPG's odd quirks is how airy and unresponsive the spell animations are - characters only respond seconds after they end.
http://animatedscreenshots.tumblr.com/post/41302543353/kirbys-adventure-kirby-super-star-kirby - Interesting that the earliest animation is so much more rough, visceral, frictive than the later sparklier versions.
"Set bone removers to 'remove'" orders Blob Cop 1. If only you'd renewed your skeleton license. You look sad as they remove your skull.
Motorcycling around the circular catwalk under this flashing crystal cyber-reactor is so much more fun than evacuating before it explodes.
Microgame game starring a punk working his way down the arcade to find the one game that will let him put "SEX" as the #1 high score name.
Being marooned on this reef would be bearable if not for those parrots yelling "What a maroon!" every noon. They think it's funny each time.
A crow grabs hold of Jim Luckless's car and flies away with it. His insurer shrugs and says "that just happens sometimes with your model."
You see your science gun thing. This turns stuff into other stuff and w/e. If you could break it open you could MAYBE electrocute something.
"Really, the boons our benefactors have provided is worth the cost of them sometimes transforming us into balls and playing soccer with us."
"It is an honour," he said, "to be conquered by an alien race whose very fecal excretions transform our animals into fearsome monsters."
It seems milk is a malevolent psychic hivemind, and the milkmen were distributing it far and wide in tiny portions to keep it under control.
In the fifth grade, one of Jim Luckless's classmates borrowed all of Jimmy's knowledge of basic arithmetic, and forgot to give it back.
The giants rotated the houses back to face the street after their midnight lamplit roll-in-the-hay. All, save the house of one Jim Luckless…
The police can't stop the officer workers jumping off the balcony onto the soft, snuggly abdomen of the twenty-foot spider in their carpark.
(Though I'm sure some people will crassly assert that her choices are all just sheer unbridled nepotism.)
Having read some of the drafts, I'm glad that @auntiepixelante has been careful to mostly cite free, publicly accessible games as examples.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/files/MacDucks.zip - Here's a Mac port of Ducks by Nick Scalzi (http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/3833) a game cited in @auntiepixelante's design textbook.
You see the Death Citadel. 96 Dr. Breen holograms prattle endlessly. Your head hurts from PSI overuse. You can't remember what game this is.
You wonder how your heroic exploits spread so far that the snails in this dark deathpit know of them. They claim they love your Twitter.
"A vine curls around your left ankle. A tentacle grips your right. Living slime engulfs your left wrist. Sentient hair ties up your right."
(I should warn you that if you type that previous tweet as a command in The Gostak, it WILL reformat your hard drive.)
"Some claim that the Grogblippet of Flipplenopnee could not have driggled the nozquoz tungs, as told in the Gospel of Nizzlenug (IV:qpw)."
"Welcome to Bone Dungeon. Criminal bones are imprisoned here. This femur gave the King's dog jaw-ache. This skull grinned during a funeral."
You idly click 'Tweet'. Suddenly, a wall bursts open and all your cool Twitter pals are there in sentai costumes! And they need your help!
There's a unique "numb" sensation of trying to find the keyboard controls of a game… bashing inert, uncooperative keys one after another.
http://l.j-factor.com/gmhtml5/ - Maybe I should make a game with no input device… A set of microgames where you helplessly barrel forward into defeat.
He's hiding in another barrel in this very street, just like you. You hope his barrel's full of water too, because your lungs are hurting.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/4997 - In case you missed it I posted this horizontal Jonah hack thing for Twine, which I made as a separate story format.
Unsightly Potion: makes you invisible. Abysmal Potion: splits the ground into an abyss. Repugnant Potion: turns you into a pug.
Afflictions of the NaNth Century: Swollen bopsplotter. Anxiety that one's own epoch is unreal, a temporal mistake. Aching grotboggle.
You are a beautiful earthworm… You flow through the soil, its textures and moistures thrilling to your senses… A blessed transformation…
A family-size pizza that recovers 100HP to your whole party, but it's so big that you HAVE to share it with the enemies as well.
A man enters GameStop and asks for Cogblippityplop 2. The clerk sternly asks the man to leave. But at the door, a brown package is waiting…
The world-famous tweeter checks his stats… High favs on bogsputter jokes, retweets on bitzotter gags… The inscrutable mind of his audience…
"And in other news, three un-reportable events occurred in the capital today, before being ended by officers from the Unnameable Ministry."
You try to see the future. You see you in the crystal ball, hitting the glass as if trapped within. …How literal this would turn out to be!
Game idea: "Super Digraph", a game where you constantly move along a directed graph, and you lose if you reach a node with no outward paths.
Game idea: "Super Perimeter" - alter the size of a circle to keep two objects moving at different speeds on the perimeter from colliding.
Game idea: "Super Sinewave", a game where you move a waveform that dies if the computer's moving waveform destructively interferes with it.
Game idea: "Super Venn", a game where you're a circle that dies if you aren't touching one of six other moving circles.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/4997 - Here's that horizontal hack of Jonah that I made while developing Capri Toot.
Your soul is placed on the left dish. Into the right dish is poured all of the C+ or lower grades you received for beating videogame levels.
I find it kind of unsettling to run System 6 in the Mini vMac emulator and see the system clock report the year as 2013.
You learn the Queen has struck a coin celebrating your last regicide attempt. On each side: your stunned face, and your retreating bottom.
She removes the concept of "wearing" from the concept space of the chamber. Your weapons and clothes fall away from your body.
You putt the golfegg into the incubator. You run to the golf cart to begin part two: making your escape from the ravenous hatched golfbeast.
"What an odd dream" you think. "Giant basketballs folded me up, dribbled and dunked me!" Then you notice this orange surface isn't your bed…
Your keycard scanning attempts are for nought. You've done both sides, both edges, downward and upward, slow and fast. Maybe try very fast??
http://web.archive.org/web/20020207205321/http://www05.u-page.so-net.ne.jp/kc4/itikawa/ - Hey, not only did their site get archived, but you can still download some of their schemes!
I dunno what became of Itikawa but their Kaleidoscope schemes were off the chain.
Recording GIFs of scenes in games that I don't have savefiles for has required more than a bit of finicky emulator cheat code wrangling.
So in Final Fantasy VI are there any cheat codes or debug rooms that can help me skip directly to the Atma battle in Kefka's Tower?
Hiding in a vase with your green-dyed hair showing seemed like a good plan, until the maid's alien fertiliser gave you ferocious split-ends.
She fills your mouth with peanut butter, cuffs your hands and feet between bread smeared with chunky, and leaves you trapped in the pantry.
They shackle your ankles to your thighs, your wrists to your shoulders, and your neck to itself. Okay, now they're just messing with you.
"Introducing a puzzle platformer that asks 'What if your weapons… were also platforms?!'" *soldier lays rifle over 1-block wide gap*
They've caught you, but they won't get the papers! You proceed to roll them into an immense cigarette and smoke it as anxiously as possible.
Stealthy to the end, you swiftly turn your throat's volume dial down to 0 just before you land in the acid.
Again the shovel goes into the hole, and again it's yanked into the ground by an unseen force. The only way to follow is to keep digging!
You're ensnared in a cluster of huge, puffy egg sacs. You gingerly squeeze between silky pillows filled with slumbering spider-babies.
I really love how these meters spin up and down during this one cutscene.
Very high experience-point enemy encounters that can only be summoned with pentagram-shaped walking pattern at specific system clock times.
The Swamp God in an RPG increases the hit point rent for walking on his swamp tiles. The heroes decide the Desert God is a cheaper bet.
Yoshi's Island is most surely the better game, but then again DKC2 and 3 only required getting 3 items to 100% a level and not 25.
Auto-scrolling Twine game where text narrating your death slowly scrolls into view unless you click the correct link in time.
You know of but one climber who could have passed this height. You taste the dust in the hand-sized crevice… nacho cheese. Of course.
"Laugh at the sky when you realise how silly it is - touting itself as symbolic of freedom and bliss, when real bliss is here on earth."
"The SI prototype for a videogame block is a gray square running on a PC-98 in Kyoto. If it is switched off, videogames will be in turmoil."
When a Pokémon game finally lets you walk diagonally I fully demand a giant fanfare and a blast of fireworks to herald this accomplishment.
http://mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=006194 - I like the idea of unlocking some utterly mundane action which the game engine had previously not enabled you to do.
The Bogswamp Sludgeduchess drenches your hands in her slime. Her aroma will be with you always, on whatever you touch, whatever you hold.
Two tips before you play chess with @auntiepixelante: she always plays black, and all of her pieces are queens.
This game later develops the "destroy every object in the entire universe" verb by giving the player multiple universes.
You hide behind the stage curtain, then frantically grab hold when it starts rising upward. You grip it like it's your mother's skirt.
How many bomb-based or Bomberman games are there that let you remote-detonate bombs, where detonation is a player verb as well as placing?
http://zelda.wikia.com/wiki/Remote_Bomb - I find the Remote Bombs interesting. How different it feels to trigger the blast with a button, instead of waiting.
While you posed as a corpse, the wizard resurrects your body. Now your own body is fighting you for control to fulfill its hedonistic whims.
I find it interesting that the wind in The Lost Levels http://l.j-factor.com/gifs/SMAS-SMBLL-5-1.gif only blows forward, extending Mario's jump instead of hindering.
I kind of want to do a Glorious Trainwrecks jam where people take other people's source code and make "lost levels" versions of their games.
She plunges the room into darkness by stealing the windowpane's transparency. And when they finally flick on the lights, they can't see her.
During your intrusion, you remembered that the door explodes if opened outwards. But you forgot which side you were on during your escape.
Covertly, nanobots carve the moon's interior into a vast labyrinth to trap the hordes of AdventureBots leaving Earth to find more dungeons.
"City alert: demon Makniev has escaped wizard custody. He is invisible but also very tall, so try throwing rocks and listening for an 'ow'."
"To think… A whole circle of people whose major cultural touchstones are things their friends made… The idea just makes my skin vomit…"
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/4986 Added extra code that makes the transition also work when you hit Back in your browser (instead of crashing the game).
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/4986 Just did a quick fix to make the transition smoother, in case you already pasted it into a story over the past 55 mins.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/4986 - Here's a Twine script that changes the passage transition animation to a dissolve instead of a sharp fade in.
Hey everyone, @imgur increased its image filename hashes from 5 chars to 7! *a few dogs stop barking but then quickly start again*
I'm trying to think of action games that have flashing "Overkill!" bonus messages, but it seems the only one I've played is @konjak's Chalk?
In the trunk, 15 pallets of non-standard Tetris carts. Behind us, Tetris Company goons in L and Z-shaped cars. A dead-end road approaches…
Unauthorised Tetris variants… Wall-kicks now shatter the walls and send chunks cascading down… T-spin now makes entire game console explode…
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/4983 - I decided to write up some of the unusual CSS I used in Capri Toot. Pardon the odd code formatting.
Some of these proposed CSS4 selectors seem a little too high-tech.
The impact of your post-battle victory dance is ruined when a bunch of squirrels run out and start doing the moves with you.
Millions of viewers watch live as the moon buggy crests a mound sideways, flips twice in midair, then lands on its end for six full seconds.
The crystal crown prepares to slide onto your inventory screen, only to find sparkly plasticine has been crudely shoved into its slot.
Just as you emerge, the pit detaches and falls, leaving behind bare floor. You think you hear it shatter on the ceiling of the level below.
The torture of reading through months-old favs and instantly thinking of witty rejoinders, and there's nothing you can do.
"Oh come on," he spat, interrupting the robed skeletal figure. "Anything sounds profound with the clacking of bare jawbones over it!"
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/4982 - I wrote some JavaScript for Twine that preloads all the images in a story, to save loading time when you play.
Everyone says 3-1 is where most people first find the beanstalk, but I've almost never gotten the spring to bounce me between those bricks.
Super Mario World. The complete animation sends out exactly 64 blocks.
The idea that these enemies are false, hollow, illegitimate - conveyed with a number. You kill them and nothing comes out of their body.
I find something meaningful about enemies that explicitly give 0 points when they die. The fake Moblins in Zelda 2; ghosts in Star Guard.
What was very weird in Zelda 2 were the two kinds of Moblins: the real ones, and the brainless ones that just walk forward and die in 1 hit.
Mario 3 hack revolving around the airship constantly escaping to distant, protected map squares… the Anchor item becomes a premium treasure…
Hammer Bros. on Mario 3 world map proceed to un-beat levels you've beaten, then spend turns upgrading them into forts and pyramids.
http://animatedscreenshots.tumblr.com/post/40786206450/orn - This fangame replaced the bombs with a simple zap attack… which is both faster and riskier to kill things with?
"Time to fix this keyboard." *relabels Caps Lock to Serioustalk Mode, Shift key to Make Numbers Weird, Insert key to Unleash Total Insanity*
Erotically stomped out of existence by a giant back-spacing text cursor, then re-created as an intentionally misspelled parody of yourself.
Popular web game has megabytes of unused JavaScript, left to be found "by our descendants, after the worst has come and the world has died."
"The gods took such a toll in their war with the water titans that they struck a deal with the devils and the cat-lords to carry the day."
He reads the headline: "Anti-Consumerist Moral In Kids' Movie Destroys Capitalism" He proffers an artery for the newsagent's Barter Syringe.
Considering an ending to Capri Toot where you fall out of the alphabet altogether and spiral through the abyss until you hit zones ☕ and ☔.
Complete knowledge of HTML awaits inside this beginner's crystal. Touch with your forehead and let web design consume all of your thoughts.
"Use the <legend> tag to denote legendary text. Legends concerning the Coming Darkness must also be nested in at least 3 boldface <b> tags."
Someone should make a fake walkthrough image like this http://i204.photobucket.com/albums/bb42/antome/instructions.png but for @mcclure111's Sun Sets.
The siren-song of suspected vowels… The tantalysing riddlers that are four-letter words… The hardcore cipher gamer knows well these aches…
A vast hidden subculture of games based solely on ciphers… the "first person decipherer" and "decode-em-up" genres differ only by viewpoint…
http://l.j-factor.com/gifs/SuperMetroid-Death.gif - As a kid I found this animation a bit too surreal to take seriously. I assumed it was purely symbolic.
You realise to your horror that you only hallucinated posting seven brilliant tweets an hour ago. You desperately struggle to remember them.
IP Bio-officers fastidiously scouring a forest with handheld sequencers, tagging trees whose genes have just been copyrighted.
http://l.j-factor.com/gmhtml5/Capri_Toot/ - I've updated the formatting on my silly space sidescrolling shmup Twine game.
"Yeah I'm cosplaying everyone's favourite Homestuck characters… the two blue equals signs and the greater-than sign. Wait, let me explain."
The inspirations for Capri Toot are Meteos and Darius Gaiden, and this one music track from the last zone of Darius II: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUjsYLSRmcY
http://l.j-factor.com/gmhtml5/Capri_Toot/ - Here's a new Leongame. "Capri Toot" is an anagram of Proco Tiat http://animatedscreenshots.tumblr.com/post/32283328152/darius-ii (also an anagram of Taito Corp).
I'm suddenly really curious about what a sequel to Qix made by @mcclure111 would look like.
https://twitter.com/webbedspace/status/262538337125023744 - Secret pro-strat for my newly released browser game.
In those cases, it seems the player isn't so much taking damage inside the world, as receiving a health penalty from the computer itself.
I suppose it follows the same logic of Link only taking half a heart's damage when he falls into a bottomless pit, though.
I feel that raises a lot of questions. Such as, why do headcrabs do damage at all if, canonically, their attacks never actually happen?
The Half-Life wiki says there's no contradiction with Gordon not wearing a helmet because canonically, he never takes damage from headcrabs.
This GIF seems to be giving me an idea…?!
Someone make a Twine adaptation of a horizontal scrolling game using a hacked Jonah template where the page grows horizontally to the right.
To add to the confusion, the next version of TiddlyWiki seem to have reversed the link syntax back, to match MediaWiki's… Agh.
Twine linking keeps throwing me because it uses TiddlyWiki's link syntax, which seems to be the exact reverse of MediaWiki's link syntax.
http://l.j-factor.com/gmhtml5/Dodge_Bouncing_Balls/ - Reminder that I released another small game yesterday.
*opens up unfinished Twine file from last night* "Hmm… Ah… Uh-huh… Really?… Tsk, tsk… Okay." *drags to trash*
"Two men so competitive that a motion to toast their continued peace and friendship soon devolved into a wineglass fencing match."
"It's become clear from our fruitless slicing that this 'advancing wall of pulsating alien flesh' is probably more like a solid cube."
So I went and made that Deadly Balls Bounce inspired videogame title generator: http://en.shindanmaker.com/309864
I actually think a good videogame idea generator can be created that just outputs random permutations of "<adjective> <noun> <verb>".
Leon trivia: this pixel art http://l.j-factor.com/thelostpanels/?c=26 was in large part inspired by Colin Thomson's "Ruby": http://books.google.com.au/books?id=6gYfOFrDeGQC&printsec=frontcover
As a catburglar, he was so concerned about stealth that he had the sound of his heartbeat replaced with innocuous TV static.
I felt kind of sad yesterday so I made a quick new Leongame: http://l.j-factor.com/gmhtml5/Dodge_Bouncing_Balls/ Based on the name "Deadly Balls Bounce".
Vines bursting into sap at the touch of your machete. Resinous slime staining your jacket. You march onward, ceaseless enemy of plants.
"Perhaps the Deadly Sphere should be renamed. Now that we've hollowed it out, its constant need to roll over us is merely uncomfortable."
You suspect this inescapable sentient space vortex is just toying with you as you enter the second hour of spinning helplessly around it.
Unable to save the entire world from destruction, the characters can only protect 3-4, 7-2, 7-♜, ★2-1 and ★3-⛺.
Character in crappy licensed platform game hears crying child through the DS mic, tries to express condolences with the "shrug" animation.
One magician on his deathbed claimed his best trick was really performed by Satan himself, and he spent the evening in Hell in his stead…
Some swear that the only way he can prestidigitate so fast is by having all his wristbones removed. Well, he does refuse all handshakes…
Some magicians boast hands fast enough to trap electricity, by powering an extension cord, then unplugging and plugging both ends together.
Swamp 2's first satellite project was aborted when they realised the hamster-wheel motor keeping it in orbit wouldn't work in microgravity.
"Ho ho, you oughta be shot, Leon!" hoots the vast laughing man. "You oughta be run down in the street like the dog you are! Ho ho, my lord!"
"Oh ho ho, Leon, you card!" laughs the huge, white-suited man, slapping you painfully hard on the back. "You DOG, Leon! You utter CUR!"
http://animatedscreenshots.tumblr.com/post/40036423746/adventures-of-lolo - I like that this game ends with the player character using in-game logic to beat the boss instantly.
"Videonauts, if you think the charm of exploring dark, oppressive caverns is starting to get old, this year's product lineup will fix that!"
"See this?" said the twitter high-roller as he began his day with 3 tweets about swamps. "I call this move 'Setting the Table'."
You wake up to discover your naked body covered in tiny flags and Roman standards bearing the face of your lover. A conquest indeed!
"For cashiers, keeping the Balance is as important as breathing. To lack a coin needed for exact change is a nightmare, a trip into Hell."
"For the highest level cashiers, making change is an all-consuming art. The dance of dollars and cents, endlessly splitting and combining."
You still don't regret your cool silver hair, even after an unnaturally large magpie absconds with your head during a picnic.
I read the title of @ABAgames's new game "Deadly Balls Bounce" http://wonderfl.net/c/umZP and immediately thought of at least two new game ideas.
You graciously accept the drink from the Emperor, then promptly place it on the coaster-like button marked "Incinerate" next to your chair.
"The loser of this round WILL be illuminated," says the host. You try to free your legs from the socket. Your glassy, bulbous rivals smirk.
Your plan to sneak into the Exchequer's office by disguising as a blank form may soon be foiled by her use of unbearably ticklish cursive.
First-person game where you're a lopsided wheeled robot that constantly veers into circles, and you're being chased by a monster.
The palace's "bug zapper" was a tad overzealous. From its thirty-foot-high vantage point, even humans crossing the gardens looked like bugs.
With a snip, you disable the security alarms. You boldly step in the now-useless tripwire lasers… only to find they were really death rays.
It was a dark and stormy night.
"Revenge is best served cold." *pushes rival into volcano* "'Cold' meaning 'a long time in the planning' rather than literal temperature."
You curl up between two teeth on the massive gear. Good thing the tooth you broke from the other gear matches this very gap! …Wait, hang on-
Strands of your snipped hair tumble down your chest. Then, oddly, they start sprouting tiny legs, and crawling back up your body…? What the-
Trying to minimise his bill for using this private road, he kept one set of wheels mounting the kerb as often as possible.
"Exposed armpits detected," trill the hovering fingerdroids in unison. The sound almost makes you lose your grip on the ledge immediately.
Next, you swig the blue potion. Yet another arm sprouts from your torso and punches you. "Do all these potions do the same thing?!" you ask.
http://www.gamefaqs.com/snes/588739-super-mario-rpg-legend-of-the-seven-stars/faqs/30431 - This is good at illustrating the oddness of the fact that, canonically, the player wins every single battle.
He consulted his classic conversation openers: Why do cars look like they have faces? Did Italy really kick Sicily? Are garden gnomes real?
Don't forget that EarthBound is a game that lets you fill half your inventory with live chickens, and the other half with live snakes.
A hunt for more letters in an RPG's character naming screen uncovers lost sigils of power that strangle the NPCs forced to utter your name.
The thump-thump of spider-tanks as they weave their webs… Rear nozzles extruding stinking synth-silk…They shall feast on biplanes tonight…
Swamp video store only has the "Grogblobbit", "Tiddle Wurp", and "Plurp Bluggum" games, and their execrable sequels… You sigh loudly.
"A magical beanstalk curls around a cloud… What is this illicit encounter? To think, a mere plant, dancing with a sky-prince… I feel faint…"
"We need an untapped field," he said. "Have we tried putting ads inside common emotional states? What about omnipresent societal norms?"
OK, Lakitu, stop showing off.
The forest senses your alien warmth, your machine-made layers, your geometric footprints in the snow. An antagonistic mood descends over it.
"What letter makes a coating concealed?" "T makes a COVER COVERT!"
"The biggest choice of a platform game character's career: picking the sound for their jump. A tap, a whoosh? Our contenders must choose."
"Warning: prolonged Death may cause death." You look up from the bestiary and see the Grim Reaper advancing on you with a baseball bat.
Being taped to a revolving door was punishment enough - did she have to also tape your cheeks back into an embarrassing toothy grin?
A gear is missing - those on its left spin uselessly, those on its right are cold and still. You are consumed with empathy for these gears.
You try and unlock the door, but the key slithers out of shape and slides down to lap at your arm's wounds. You curse your lack of bandages.
Unluckily, a series of petty feuds reflecting man's inherent foolishness meant that only a few drops of youth-water survived the trip home.
"A volcano is a conduit between Hell and Earth, a mountain medium. Break the psychic link" - she snaps her fingers - "and the pyre quells."
What is better, you wonder, than to stand on a frozen pond, ensorcelled hands tapping the ice from below, and feel their taps in your soles?
The news that the baroness's rival had fused all her servants into a twenty-foot-tall mega-servant was intended to inspire mirth, not envy.
http://catandgirl.com/?p=4090 - "Smurfstain Blue, or Smurfstain Blue weathered by machines approximating carefree exuberance?"
OK I got 2048 points in Hundreds endless mode, but that pales before the real accomplishment of tonight: getting just 30 points in Azarashi.
"Hundreds of Breasts is a high-risk puzzle game. If two nipples touch, drop the iPad immediately and get at least 20 feet away."
I like that a few treasure boxes in Mother 3 just contain a weird noise, or a miniature fireworks display, or a miniature hot spring.
"?-blocks are voids, places where the game doesn't know what entity to create. Hitting one could bring literally anything into the world."
You study her gaze and constantly reposition yourself as you walk. You don't want her to notice you're two-dimensional on the first date.
The left bread slice was finding this toast-slot unbearable. But the right slice hadn't succumbed yet, so it couldn't afford to bail now.
"Once a year the CEO converts the company assets into pennies and lets us roll around in them. Not sure why he's taking so long this year!"
Deep whales adorning themselves with imitation harpoons, first in mockery of human hunters, and later purely for fashion.
Another warm day inside the Swelterdome. It seems like no matter how careful you are, you always earn 5 degrees' worth of infractions.
Australia tweet: the temperature right now at 2:30AM is 30° Celsius, the same temperature it was at 2:30 PM.
"Some monsters have poison attacks! Bring an Antidote!" cries an NPC, overwhelmed with dread and begging you to heed their valuable advice.
"There are bears in the forest! Buy a Long Sword before you go!" cries an NPC, quaking in fear and visibly worried for the player's welfare.
English Country Tune: The Lost Lyrics
Combine IGF finalists VESPER.5 and Hotline Miami into MIAMI.5: identical to Hotline, but if you die you must wait 1 day to restart.
"Once the wonder and joy of being alive has worn off, the human's real life's work begins: depriving others of it."
She twists your torso around and around, and hands you your ankles. You'll have to keep gripping them to keep yourself from spinning wildly.
You step onto the dark theater stage. The audience is wearing glowing mouth-guards. Their hideous crescent-moon smiles shine down on you.
As you are led up the tower, the bricks become less aged and worn, and their human features - legs, torsos - become more and more visible.
"I love speaking with the PRESS," she cackles as she presses your face into the wall. You really hope she doesn't do the "red all over" pun.
The jellybeans start to sense you are not one of them. Your red sugar coating is starting to run. Your little chocolate heart is pounding.
The "smokestack wars" led to taller and taller factory chimneys, some so tall that "God himself will cough." Bold words, industrialists!
"These buzzsaws have no power source - they're on frictionless axles. So they'll just keep spinning forever, no matter how long you wait."
Before banishing them to the Bog of Despair, they sliced off their thumbs, so as to prevent them from gripping the legs of the still-living.
"Don't worry," she says, "50 years ago, I'd have been legally hunted for sport too!" She pats your shoulder while standing at arms' length.
"You should live in hope that someday your lifestyle will finally be legitimised - by the government voting to decriminalise it!"
#IPlayed Ray-Hound. http://www.hikware.com/Prod/index.html#rh So you have to HOLD the mouse button? I wish I'd tried that 5 years ago.
Making a walk-and-talk where the text had greater prominence than the images would require letting the player also interact with the text…?
In a "walk-and-talk RPG", conversely, you interact through the graphical player-character, and use them to encounter the game's text.
The text presents the world, and you interact with the world by interacting with the text. The text is the player's primary interface.
In most Twine games with images, and even in most visual novels, the images are subservient to the text - the text presents the world.
Could the "Twine of RPG Maker" even possess Twine's accessibility if the graphics had the greater burden of representation over the text?
If you interact through a game's graphics, the text then becomes subservient to it - the graphical world takes precedence over the textual.
In games where you act through the game's graphics rather than the text, the graphics are 'blessed' as the primary source of representation.
In the case of a graphical game form, your personal expression is also limited by your ability to create or appropriate the graphics.
One of Twine's biggest deals is that every author's personal expressive power within the form is limited only by written language…
I'm trying to think of how "the Twine of RPG Maker" would work, graphically. Maybe the only built-in graphics should be Unicode glyphs.
It feels different from literal leaping in a platformer. Is there a platformer where each leap through danger seizes territory away from it?
Hundreds makes me grasp for a word to describe the feel of seizing territory in it and in Qix, of leaping through moments of vulnerability.
The game is Hundreds, by the way. It simultaneously feels like all the good parts and bad parts of Osmos and Volfied put together.
#IPlayed a game I want to tweet about, but don't really feel like giving it yet more publicity by the act of tweeting about it? A dilemma.
You dial the target's number. "Cluck?" she answers. You're not sure if chicken hypnosis works over the phone, but there's always a first…
"The ocean lapped the shore like a cat lapping milk, only in reverse, obviously, and of course much bigger."
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/ - Yay, my little sorcery game got the gold gong in Humour. Thanks for liking it, everybody.
"Tell me" said the mysterious salesman, "if you don't need OmniCube, why's your new house full of cube-shaped pressure plates and recesses?"
Accursed sticky note inexplicably resists all attempts to remove or destroy it, up to and including ritually burning the attached monitor.
Little did you know that rolling your knuckles against each other would foreshadow in miniature the manner of your own crushing death…
The ApplaudBots, built solely to swell theater audiences, wander the post-human wasteland, expressing only joy at the sights around them.
Suddenly, the window shards leap back up and re-form while you're climbing through, trapping you and your limbs inside a solid, intact pane.
An impressive stake hits the poker table: the deed to Garbage Island, and a french fry. The other seagulls fail to conceal their surprise.
The heat of enemy lasers striking your shields is forcing you to strip down. Doing so with one hand on the controls is remarkably tricky.
"Every human being will need Product X! Governments will demand in vain that it should be free! Millions will die for lack of Product X!"
"Now, my competitors, before I show my newest product, I'll play this tape of some men shouting "I'M RUINED", so as to save you some time."
You watch the sword's sharpness drip off in the heat. A drop lands on a rat, which then slashes a gouging trail in the rock as it runs off.
JRPG which, upon loading a save, "accidentally" loads a corrupted file where you're trapped in the pig slapping minigame for all eternity.
The kink in the road was caused by a huge royal statue toppling onto it, and it couldn't be destroyed until after the king's reign ended.
Game where a young computer is slowly, verbally taught how to play Centipede by its elderly owner.
Game where after you beat a boss, the game sues you and gets a court to overturn your victory on a little-known technicality.
The bid to replace the mall's down escalators with springboards and landing mats has been derailed due to powerful anti-somersault forces.
The guests passive-aggressively protested the cook's delay by escalating the impatient clinking of cutlery into an impromptu jam session.
The wall sconces light themselves! The fountain of blood pours, unbidden! The tape deck with 1001 Female Screams lowers its own Play button!
"Civilisation is doomed." *bowling ball starts rolling inexorably toward first of a row of skyscrapers*
The flap of steel wings! It could only be Dr. Silverhawk. Hugo pocketed the crystal and readied his brass butterfly wings for the sky-duel.
The secret agent tailed his elephant-riding quarry from within the adjacent river, having grabbed a firm hold of the elephant's shadow.
He did not accept praise comfortably. At times plaudits made him double-over, as if winded by the impact of a giant's blown kiss.
Every street in the city had a "No smiling" sign - officially, it was to ensure visitors from other dimensions quickly got the picture.
In the center of this room is a pit filled with small, intricately arranged conical objects. You feel compelled to drop down into the pit.
No one ever proudly describes their game's world as "medium-sized".
The elusive gang of graffiti vandals known as "Use WASD To Move" has tagged seven more high-profile public buildings…
"Don't worry, I've got this," he said to his spiderweb-entangled companion as he produced a non-stick frying pan.
Your stolen gold squirms in your pockets like snakes. The Tomb-lady whistles again and they rip out and swiftly slither back onto her body.
You fall in front of the fast-growing stream and are powerless to stop it running over you in hundreds of years. Soon it's a heavy river.
"Leave me!" he shouted over the flames at the briefcase full of money. "Save yourself!" The briefcase silently, stoically refused.
"Arcanoid" for the ZX Spectrum.
Your tired eyes cascade down the page like pebbles. You know rolling stones can't gather any meaning, but at this hour you just don't care.
Trapped inside a pro-boot parade float with a secret squad of sandal separatists! Their mad mission: to cut out the boot general's tongue!
You try and convince the rapidly approaching ground that this time it should really strongly consider making a one-time exception.
Smuggled into the palace in liquid form, disguised as wine! Alas, the Queen took a swig of the part of you that knew the rest of the plan.
A rogue has been entering the royal orchard, milking the P's, biting the o's into e's, and squeezing the voweljuice from the tip of the A's.
"W-what happened?" "It seems she stole my bullet's speed, having just stolen this calculator's reaction time. She made a perfect getaway."
"This is it. We're launching a full-scale invasion." "You mean-" "Yes. Our one-tenth scale invasion forces have been sadly trampled."
You were told that having a gravity spiral instead of a bed would make for sounder sleep, but you just feel like you're constantly falling.
"A bomb," she said, cradling the bomb in her arms, "is a chrysalis. Inside this tiny vessel is a beautiful explosion, waiting to be born."
"Goodbye" said the cat to the knight. "I won't lie: if you don't come back, I will forget you. But, without knowing, I will still miss you."
http://l.j-factor.com/gmhtml5/Disc_Gunner/ - I added an offline OS X executable of Disc Gunner in case you find the web version too slovenly.
You wake up to find the sun has peeled off your wall, leaving a circle of gray brick hanging in the mid-morning sky.
You pull the rope, but the bell doesn't toll. You look up and see a huge gorilla has wedged itself inside for warmth. Suddenly it falls out…
"Felony detected" squeals your house. Your bedroom door bolts itself, and you hear your front doors slide open to admit the arriving police.
There's something heartbreakingly bittersweet about clicking "Favorite" on a tweet that has just been deleted.
Just as you're about to click "Tweet", the walls of your home slide open and a squad of uniformed men wrestles you away from the computer.
You find a 0.5-Up item, which lets you play one last life as a shambling aberration that only partially exists in the physical world.
It's become increasingly obvious that the skeleton key you swallowed before you went in has failed to escape from the prison of your bowels.
Your cell's second escape tunnel was designed to bury the dirt from your first escape tunnel. From there, things kind of got out of control.
The traditional end of the mystery play is to ask the audience if they can solve it, and project the killer's name upside down on stage.
Game where you're the coin inside a shell game and you have to guess your own position by watching the table texture move beneath you.
You commune with the door's lock. You feel the tumblers' anger, the frustration they feel when an ill-fitting key is forced beneath them.
You hear a million bloody fingers tracing the names of killers through history. The phrase 'muzzle velocity' appears in your mind, unbidden.
You enter the cave known as Titan's Bullethole… A sacred gumshoe place. You feel your forensic science ancestors' blood churn in your veins.
#IPlayed Azarashi. I like how it seems to have a rare prize for the lowest possible score (almost as difficult as getting the highest).
Keylugger is a game I am slightly proud of - it's the most effort I've put in a single finished game, in terms of graphics and level design.
http://l.j-factor.com/gmhtml5/Keylugger/ - I'm pleased to present a HTML5 port of my 2011 puzzle-platformer, "Keylugger".
"Five-foot-long giant novelty checks tend to lose their whimsy when you have this many giants on your payroll."
Every time I see this tweet in my favourites list I feel like the Twitter website has suddenly become self-aware https://twitter.com/auntiepixelante/status/279857866943385600
http://l.j-factor.com/gmhtml5/Disc_Gunner/ - A HTML5 port of my IGF Pirate Kart platform game "Disc Gunner". Starring the Disc Gun from @Vlambeer's crate game.
Open question: which of my old Trainwrecks games http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/games/*/L do you think I should port to the browser next?
"Do exactly what I say," squeaks the fairy bandit, "or I fire." She grips your credit card and jabs her pistol into it. You start to sweat.
The fly will only free you from the cobweb if you join its quest to find God's Turd. "With my brains and your brawn, we'll go places, baby!"
"Let's begin class, shall we?" says the teacher. Suddenly everyone except you metamorphoses into a ten-foot-tall ticklecrusher.
Burning trees and playing the whistle become vital to searching the overworld. Bombing and pushing walls become vital to scouring dungeons.
I like how Zelda's 2nd quest takes single key scenes from the 1st quest (blow whistle, dry pool) and abstracts them into a 'vocabulary'.
You can play Third Quest by naming your save file "ALPHA". You can play Fourth Quest by naming your save file "GANON".
Fourth Quest is closer to the Second Quest's difficulty, but has entrances hidden in even trickier places in the overworld.
Third Quest was made in an older, more limited version and is, dare I say it, a weensy bit "ROM hack difficult".
In addition to the two quests from the NES game, Zelda Classic also comes with two fanmade variations, "Third Quest" and "Fourth Quest."
http://zeldaclassic.com/downloads.php - Oh, the new version of Zelda Classic that I'd been working on for literally 6 years has finally left public beta.
You nervously compliment the middle finger on its impeccable cuticle… It responds by arching back, sharp and deadly as a scorpion-tail…
Made into a tiny finger-puppet and forced to have a tea party with the other fingers… A fate worse than all deaths in this book combined…
You can feel your internal organs being squashed and pushed aside as the arm rises ever upward inside you, long fingers wriggling playfully.
Corrypt.
I like that in Corrypt, "magic" is a discrete thing, an object with specific yet unintuitive powers, much like it is in Cap'n Magneto.
Mega Man Battle Network.
She carefully painted tiny bloody handprints around her mouth, along with smears suggesting a struggle.
http://l.j-factor.com/gmhtml5/ - Still trying to think of a symbol that means "either keyboard or mouse, whichever you prefer".
This Birdo looks uncharacteristically strange and beautiful. (From http://archive.org/stream/nintendo_gamepack_mario_2)
"Matthew Prichard was 'dismayed' to learn that the ending to The Mousetrap was revealed online in the play's Wikipedia article." - Wikipedia
So I just saw a performance of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap. Pretty good, though I thought it was a bit easy to tell that the murderer wa
"What? You call that an ampersand? You goof, gimme that pen! Now watch." *accidentally draws a treble clef*
"AND ALWAYS REMEMBER TO BELIEVE IN YOURSELF!" screams the Self-Esteem Wall of your cell at maximum volume, just as it does every 5:56PM.
A gang of off-model Marios chases the official Mario over hill and dale, their swollen noses jiggling as they pump their too-short legs.
http://l.j-factor.com/gmhtml5/ - You might wonder why I've specified which of my games requires a colour monitor. I guess anachronistic politeness?
I liked how the mirror mode of Toad's Turnpike also made you drive against the high-speed traffic instead of with it, for no reason at all.
The "mirror mode" I added to my web games has got me thinking of them as objects to be manipulated and toyed with in and of themselves.
"We can't advance social networking until we can gamify the mere act of someone thinking about your post," types a frowning young man.
"This game will fire a catapult of innovation at the Great Wall of China of your expectations, letting in the Mongols of mental exertion."
A peculiar clock where both hands are fixed in place and the numbers constantly, gradually adjust positions and spacing to spell the time.
You wonder about the wood of your lifeboat. Whether the tree had dreamed of being a coffin, and may now have a second chance at that dream.
A green, scaly finger has been plugging the hole in your lifeboat for the past 10 days. You daren't wonder about your benefactor's motive.
You launch the signal flare. It soars up over your boat and splashes into the sky twenty feet above you, sending ripples out to the horizon.
#OneYearAgo, I released Prizeturret: http://l.j-factor.com/gmhtml5/Prizeturret
"I can determine the pretentiousness of an indie game just by seeing if the game's official website uses .org instead of .com."
"Important page text should be inside an <important> tag. Extra importance can be indicated by nesting it inside one or more <very> tags."
"All of the gold on the island is in Creaky Pete's possession. He only offers gold to people whose joints can out-creak his. (No one can.)"
Is there any source indicating that EarthBound's Starmen can move their limbs? I always interpreted them as purely psychokinetic statues.
#2012InFourWords Porpentine favorited your Tweet
One @AlexJaffe has challenged me to make a game, specifying only that it be called "Violence Island". I don't know if I can do it justice…
The definite article chases you down this very sentence towards a rapidly approaching pit.
Yes, I realise there's also this guy http://www.mariowiki.com/Sumo_Bro. but I choose to interpret him as a less interesting Hammer Bro variation.
How many platformers outside of SMB even have a 'hit-block-from-below' attack? Such a level of environmental offensiveness is quite rare.
Thinking about the Hammer Bros., the one enemy in the SMB series designed to be especially vulnerable to the 'hit-block-from-below' attack.
I've been thinking about Mastaba Snoopy, how the simple-minded omni-melancholy of Peanuts complements its remixing into an alien dreamscape.
My biggest compliment about the Twine game The Message is that it's clued me in on a prime source of dark ambience: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAPNfKADA7Y
VERY IMPORTANT REMINDER.
A graveyard for authors' unfinished, abandoned works… Instead of RIP, the headstones read WIP… A solemn place…
Game where the main quest is locked and can only be unlocked by beating the extra levels, boss rush and viewing all the concept art.