"The smoke wasn't actually the genie finally coming out. It was probably a ninja tricking us. You know it. I know it. The lamp is gone."
Some kind of high-energy physics hardware…
Frost-studded TV tower endlessly broadcasting edutainment over a dead globe, in the hope of someday teaching nutrition to its future owners…
You somehow realise there's a mischievous imp inside your skull, stepping across your brain in heels.
Human criminal sentenced to live on planet Earth for the rest of their days… "A post-modern verdict" says justice critics… "…Existential…"
When you forget a cool tweet just before you go to type it, imagine a tiny ghost curling up out of your cerebral folds and weeping forever.
"The Chance of a Lifetime… If these 9 contestants can beat the 50-Year Challenge by working full-time for 50 years, a life of bliss awaits!"
"OK" thinks the adventure game puzzlemaker, "people love clowns, so if you paint your nose red the Blue Key Guy will give you the Blue Key."
After failing to beat Gigglelord, who turns people into pigs and balloons by giggling, the party decides the world just isn't worth saving.
A gang of ghost heroes strive to stop a mad scientist spook from unleashing a machine that will bring everyone on the planet back to life.
"When a Shellcreeper finally flips its shell back up and turns red… that's when a shiver runs its way up Mario's spine."
Number cruncher initially dismayed by being fed 'soft numbers', slowly enraptured by their thick nougaty texture, questions entire identity.
"A bath faucet bent to flow upward, sending its lifegiving fluid into the showerhead in sheer onanistic display: instant eviction on sight."
http://25.media.tumblr.com/3a5dadefeeab0765a022f01a41678488/tumblr_mnka36lbo21qhttpto2_1280.jpg - That's one long pirate. (source: http://blackbanshee80.deviantart.com/)
"CSS reset? I've got a CSS reset for ya! html { display: none; }" *dances off stage before the crowd realises they should be throwing stuff*
"And this is your treasure line…" The palm reader puts a chisel on it, swings a mallet, and shatters your palm. "Look! Buried pirate gold!"
"In these times we must tighten our belts, cut corners, rip up frills… unpeel silver linings… pull off each bit of the rose BUT the thorns…"
The Department of Roads has decided that the "Maybe try going a little faster, please?" signs before the jumps on freeways should be larger.
"I'm done." *throws down cards* "I'm bust." *empties cards from sleeves* "Ya got me." *unstraps earpiece* "It's over." *removes X-ray specs*
"How very lonely your tongue must be," she said, leaning in, "to have never met one of its own kind!"
"Many have died to secure the rights to supermarkets' expired pies… A young punk with wet facepaint like you ain't a chance of muscling in…"
(Source for the previous tweet was http://themushroomkingdom.net/smb_breakdown.shtml)
What? Not only are there only 8 invisible 1UP mushrooms, but there's exactly one in each x-1 level?!
Before you go to sleep, remember to re-watch the first video you saw today while imagining the credits for today slowly scrolling upward.
I wonder if the sense of discovery in games like Corrypt is diminished by 100s of people telling you "Dude ya gotta solve it, it's AMAZING!"
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5401 - Very small update to visited() - you can now write "visited()" to get visits to the current passage.
She says, "I love legs than can run 100 miles, and still have kick in 'em when I catch them." Wait… that's the box quote for your SynthLegs!
"No, neither EXIT, LEAVE, ESCAPE or RELEASE have over 3 consonants in alphabetical order!" laughs the warden as you beg in your riddlecell.
"What am I going to land on?" you timidly ask. "Why, your bottom, of course!" laughs the spruiker as he shoves you into the Adventure Pit.
A frog growing annoyed that not only is the "frog" Twitter name taken, so is "froggy", "frogster", "frogsta", "frogstar" and "frogmeister".
"Employees: return to your desks and stop playing with the balloon in the parking lot. It'll still be there after work. We'll keep it safe."
"Ahaha! I re-counted and I DO have one bullet left, so I take it back! I'm NOT an innocent old man and I WILL keep causing global mayhem!"
You've finally earned a day at the Tropical Vacation Desk! The saucer of water looks so inviting next to the palm tree clipart printout.
The Department of Roads and Water Slides is petitioning the mayor to change their name back this instant.
Fireball physics hack.
OK, I guess it's neat my followers hit an arbitrary number, but the REAL news is today was my Haiku Number post.
I was playtesting 868-HACK on the bus ride home during a particularly rough road, and I thought to myself "This sure is a… hard drive."
This hug-based RPG has you seeking longer arm extensions and chest widening potions to embrace the biggest, spikiest beasts on the planet.
"We encased the criminal text in parentheses, square brackets, curly braces, chevrons AND both sets of apostrophes, but it still broke out!"
"The first videogames with polygonal graphics were refused sale unless a warning message reading "NOT REAL LIFE" was onscreen at all times."
Leon's tweets quite often break character (that 'character' being one J. Wilson Wizzlethrope, Master Storymancer of Pink Piddlypoop IV), but
Your friends try to pay your bail using the only currency the Educatia Police Force recognises - raps about nutrition! They fail witlessly.
Being stuck in this laundry chute is one thing, but having all these gorgeous, sumptuous dresses land on your head is torture beyond words!
You switch off the 90 Degree Gravity device they stuck on you! Unfortunately, you'd placed yourself near the vast hall's carpeted ceiling.
"In the 1997 expansion, "Knyttwits!! Yet More Knytt Mania", more items were added, including the Kayak, Pogo Stick, and 90 Degree Gravity."
One overlooked necessity of car ownership is finding five other people to help hug your car and keep its physical intimacy levels topped up.
"Employees: stop smashing the '#1 Most Unbreakable Mug' mugs - they're expensive, and I refuse to drink from a mug with a less manly label."
I want to make an indie game mixtape with both http://heylookatmygames.com/alpacarun and http://www.redpotiongames.com/games-2/camel-tetris/ on it.
(Changing it to <<maybe not>> would only display it 40% of the time.)
Writing this Twine game makes me want to add a super-short macro called <<maybe>> that displays the contained text 60% of the time.
"Don't worry," she cries, as she unscrews her raygun's muzzle and shoves it in backwards, "we'll have that boo-boo healed up in no time."
"Son, I built this whimsical animatronic funhouse with my own two lottery tickets, and I want you to have it when my creditors come knockin"
"As you've just found out, that machine of mine devours nosy cute snoops and renders them down to a single drop of rejuvenating skin cream."
"No!" cries the toolbar's Print icon as it's forcibly dragged away by a beefy pair of Save icons. "There's still people who need me!"
"Do you recall any missile tanks that this new weapon could help us obtain?" "I do not, milord." "Then let us continue our quest posthaste."
Sleep-deprived dragon employee trying very hard not to yawn fire all over its desk.
If you're stuck in traffic, chant "Cars, cars, go away / Come again another day" and the road will clear. (Step out of your own car first.)
"They say the monster's 50 feet tall, but right now it's just curled up in the fetal position and letting us surround it with police tape."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Koala_skeleton1.jpg - It's easy to forget that iconic or exotic animals have skeletons too.
"You start the game with 3HP, where "HP" equals "times you can hear an enemy's song before it becomes a hideous incurable earworm.""
Very magical splash screen.
StoryMaker wasn't anywhere near as prolific as its unaffiliated predecessor World Builder, but it had an easier authoring interface.
http://l.j-factor.com/misc/StoryMaker.zip - Here's a copy of StoryMaker by James Burton, a 1997 game-making application for Mac OS 7-9.
http://l.j-factor.com/gamemaker/Mac000000052573743.zip - Here's a quick unofficial Mac port of Big Octal Number by @normalenBaren. Better than Half-Life 2, in my opinion.
with all {
draw_set_color(make_color_hsv(object_index,255,255));
draw_rectangle(bbox_left,bbox_top,bbox_right,bbox_bottom,0);
}
Given that 86856527's game title is often shortened to "big number", I shall refer to 000000052573743 as "big octal number".
Due to a text parser glitch, you fall into your own armpit. You try to escape while holding your arms up to keep from crushing yourself.
Mario has no idea how this is happening.
Little did you know that falling in the 3rd pit in 1-2 was the best ending… Its rodent community brings you more joy than you knew up above.
"Heh… you may think that tiny little bullethole isn't a problem… but give it time… soon your blood will be smeared on everything you love…"
The milk in your cereal stands up - a woman's shape in a muesli dress. You don't really have time to strip her with your spoon this morning.
You forgot slimegirlism is contagious - in your lover's embrace your sweat drops turn to tiny sweatgirls, squealing as they slide down you.
"You have to admit there's basically no point to having two eyes if you can't read two books at once with them… Talk about a letdown."
I went back to the jam version of 86856527 after a dozen hours of 868-HACK, and it feels like an adorably low-fi Atari or MSX port now.
Our nation's top scientists have predicted the next few boss characters in Cucumber Quest: Greasemaster. Mustachemaster. Yoyomaster.
Isolated showers.
"We must remind you that just because the station's oxygen is marketed as 'death suppressant', it does NOT suppress most causes of death."
Your brain, on noticing the predicament you're in, slithers down your spine to safety and hastily promotes your tongue to the driver's seat.
Coating the flagpole in superglue was a keen prank: now there's a nude man on the loose, and red and blue flags alongside Bowser's pennant.
"There's three kinds of supervillains: the big punchy kind, the deathtrap kind, and the sadistic-game-show-broadcast-on-all-channels kind."
This rusty ShindanBot is a decent travel companion, even if you have to slightly alter your name every time you want to talk to it.
Instructions:
*Push east arrow to reduce westness
*Open boxes at ends of corridors
*If blood outside body > blood inside, you must forfeit
Adrift in the steppe on a horse without a paddle! You bellow for help toward the nearest town a mile away, but you're not quite loud enough.
As you trudge through the desert, you notice a gang of shrews are freeloading in your shadow. To be valued only for your solid opaqueness…!
"How ironic - you're gonna die in a morgue," she sneers. You swear to god she says those crappy lines on purpose just to rile you up! Arrgh!
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mddbsmmYK51qhttpto3_1280.jpg - Skeletons with assault rifles… an unbeatable combination. (source: http://www.pixiv.net/member.php?id=33333)
http://harmonyzone.org/ - Just to be clear: I asked him to make the port, he complied, but I had to do "chmod +x" on it to get it to run.
"Legend says whoever jumps into this moist, mouth-shaped pit will never return… But maybe you'll be the first, Mr. Swordy! Ho ho ho hoooo…"
"Oh, that," he says as you gesture to the diamond-studded hard drive, "that's for my trophies - from the most arduous of torrent hunts."
You sit in your lab, brewing your arachnid growth formula, dreaming of the day a spider-themed supervillain breaks in and spirits you away…
You flick on the living room lights to find a VampireBot pressing its lips against your wall socket and getting literally drunk on power.
The pit of slime tries to look more inviting by forming the shapes of furniture, though it's only ever known racks, stocks and iron maidens.
http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/17nmmnac24b4qjpg/ku-xlarge.jpg - Secret @smestorp promotional materials revealed…
"You've heard of the Power Glove… 30 years later, here's the rest of the arm." *metal hatch grinds open, fog and strobe lights everywhere*
They feel like the game is bashfully forced to acknowledge the vital importance of these items, even at the expense of the fourth wall.
In Phantom Hourglass, if you abandon the Ghost Ship's heart container after the boss, it gets sent to you in a letter from the developers.
When Paula is kidnapped in EarthBound, if she's holding a vital item, you get a phone call saying that the item somehow ended up back home.
I like those occasions in games where you get in a rare situation that could make it unwinnable, but a quiet deus ex machina saves you.
You say you won't splurge THIS paycheck on cyberpunk gear, and the next moment you're holding an entire KILOMETRE of Ethernet cable.
"Bodies suck!" spits the cyberpunk newbie, hoping to earn the respect of his contemptible peers. They laugh, mocking all things physical.
"Everyone knows there's nothing more cyberpunk than having non-functional USB ports surgically implanted in random points of the body."
Something about these priestesses gives you the creeps. You glance up at the 'Church of Harmony' sign. The last 3 letters are suddenly missi
"She's programmed to hit the ball with perfect accuracy" rings in your head as the golf ball balanced on your nose rolls off into your mouth
You wake. Oh no! This hospital bed is a coffin! The nurses are mummies! Your IV is full of tiny ghosts! Curse your pitiful health insurance!
Having a "0.016 ton weight" placed on you isn't so bad, until your torturer peels off the decimal point. You wake up… in pancake heaven!
Unfortunately, just before you nab the goblet, you momentarily forget to not disintegrate. You blow away in the wind. Next time, try harder.
Game where after you unlock something, you can reuse the padlock icon to lock a feature you don't like.
Was researching Stardust http://animatedscreenshots.tumblr.com/tagged/Stardust and I totally forgot its author had this amazing all-Flash homepage: http://web.archive.org/web/20040612023540/http://strangegames.com/
Lollipop Duel: one challenger licks it as sloppily as possible, then throws it on the ground. The opponent must then eat it without dying.
This is like a glowing coral reef.
"Heavywait Champ": used .WAIT over twenty times in a game. #868HACKchievements
You raise the wand to send down the meteors. You rain <<cyclinglink "rocky" "icy" "fiery" "glittery" "chocolate">> death on this sick world.
"No, you don't understand, it isn't the camera, this cat really does have hideous bright glowing eyes in real life… you have to believe me…"
When you chose your death to be "trampled by kitten", you didn't count on the Jumbo Tabbies of Ironica X! HAHAHAHA*laughs for next 10 pages*
The marching ants in your selection boundary suddenly realise they've been blindly following each other the whole time, and rapidly scatter.
It's a tricky question, but you're pretty sure it doesn't matter whether you take the $1,000 in feathers or the $1,000 in gold.
"The government is terrified by EarthMeltCorp's plans to melt the Earth, and we have been begging and pleading for its CEO to reconsider."
"French horns may look really bizarre," smiled the musician, "but that's nothing compared to the rest of the animal we harvest them from."
When no humans are around, arcade cabinets seduce potential mates by flashing their secret attract modes: monitor maintenance test screens.
You step on a button on the floor shaped like a close box. The room vanishes, trapping you in limbo until someone knocks on the front door.
(I've run out of time tonight to write some more relevant uses for that script, but it's sorta interesting as is.)
Still need to get whatever-this-is working with the links.
""Meerkats: cats or dogs?" Had it not been for the Great Gene Sequencing Stuff-Up of '09, humanity would have answered this age-old riddle."
"No one admits to dropping a scanner on their kids unawares and emailing them to their grandma's, but the sitcoms joke about it anyway."
You admit a smartphone that whispers "consume electronics" to you while you make calls is a little creepy, but it was the only one with 4G.
"Fight with your life, and you may earn the greatest reward of all: future generations casually dismissing your struggle as inevitable."
"Look," says your PR, tossing a newspaper onto the table - then another, and another, and another… "I learned how to rob newspaper boxes!"
"Weeks? Years!? You humans have so many wacky time units! Just give me a good ol' fashioned epoch longint and I'll be happy, yessiree!"
"This indestructible phylactery may be the answer American liches have been waiting for… but some barbarian experts are a little skeptical."
You get your first weapon, a Lv.1 Pain-Producing Pummeler for Pounding Pests, Proudly Purloining Points and Preventing Premature Perishing!
I vaguely remember the first time I successfully counted to 100. It felt like what I imagined climbing a mountain to be like.
As a kid, having division introduced through the use case of equally sharing an asset made it seem irrelevant outside of social situations.
"Oh, you'll arrive in a different body, but you'll have the same taste in film or w/e" mumbles the teleporter operator as you try to escape.
You lost the fight, but they can regrow your body from just your eyeball. They give you a TV looping footage of your defeat to motivate you.
The sky demons can sprout leathery wings at will. The demonqueens and devilkings can make an entire sumptuous throne erupt from their butts.
The heroes burst in. You spin your chair around to face them, expressionless, as you pour the last beaker of Monsteriser-X into your lap.
If you use web Javascript and privately enjoy punning the word "DOM", here's a freebie from CSS:
You come in and all the rose petals and thorns are mingling with each other. They sheepishly shuffle back to their places under your glare.
His gun has "Justice comes outta here" on it, with arrows pointing at a weird pink spout in the middle. "It's badass AND helps me remember!"
"We have temporarily inhibited the taste of blood in your mouth, so as to suppress one of the side effects of the next test."
"Yeah, we can unfreeze this vault of 21st century billionaires to fill our infantry ranks, why not, they're just sitting in the ground."
"Please stop trying to dig through the Escape Inhibitor. The only valuable minerals inside are those designed to maximally inhibit escape."
As a prank, you leg's nerves send the feeling of a $100 note brushing against your foot. "Oh leg nerves, you jokers!" you laugh bitterly.
You ask your right pinky why it's bleeding. It says it feels too ashamed to send pain signals for a tiny cut. You softly kiss and stroke it.
"You ride between each town on a runaway roller-coaster - the only explanation being "roller-coaster tickets are cheaper than the bus.""
You thought anesthetising yourself would protect you from the tickleminions' cruelty, but you didn't count on a psychosomatic reaction!
"While our ads did encourage swinging your tiny robot in the air to make it scream, reports say they MIGHT be trying to get their own back."
"We're trying to revert the tiny robot patch which gave it veto powers on all future patches, and, due to a bug, made it quintuple in size."
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5163 - Please don't actually use this latest, gravest Twine stylesheet.
I've suddenly started wondering if http://rot13.com logs all of the text that gets put in it. What an obscene collection that'd be.
"This 'Fire Temple' is just a roped-off tourist path through some bare rooms with framed inspirational quotes about fire in them. Boring."
Wow, you've looked it over, and she genetically designed this beast to be unbeatable in only this specific situation. She does miss you.
I checked how many Twitter usernames of the form "QueenOf"+ name of a planet were taken, and all of them are nabbed except Mercury.
This is designed as a counterpart to this other script http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5094 that removes the back-forward functionality entirely.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5425 - Reminder that I made a Twine fix for the browser's Back and Forward buttons in Sugarcane recently.
This sentence's protagonist tried hard to escape into the next sentence after this one ended. Unfortunately, gray clouds drift overhead.
"We dived into the textbook and got trapped in a diagram of the water cycle - my men have been raining on this mountain river for 9 hours."
Tutorial fairy that tries to keep you inside her training zone forever by constantly inventing useless irrelevant "techniques" to teach you.
"Q: Each time I die to Boffo, the words 'Boffo's Eternal Servant' become more and more visible on the back of my hand.
A: This is not a bug"
A re-enactment of Of Mice and Men but with phantasmal visions of flexbox and block-scoped Javascript instead of rabbits.
"V-vertical centering?" cackles the wisened old crone, "In CSS? HuuuuuUUUUUAHHHHhahahahah HAHAHAHaha hohohohohohohHOOOOOH huahuahuahuahuaha"
A laptop in a store feeling excited and nervous about the prospects implied by its name.
That slime girl isn't blushing because she's shy… It's because she's just finished a large blood meal… Heed my warning, traveller…
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5163 - Did another of these Twine stylesheet things.
Darius.
"The Case of the Stolen Money: $10,000 has been stolen, and as the victim's insurer, you must pay them as passive-aggressively as possible."
"Every time that gun has fired, it has changed owners… They realised that each shot was lowering its resale value… A history of shrewdness…"
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5425 - Here's a Twine script that makes the browser's Back and Forward buttons work more effectively in Sugarcane.
The tale of an obscure font buried ten deep in a stylesheet's font stack… Waiting patiently, day after day, until its hour of need…
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/files/MakeATwineGameIn40Minutes.html - I didn't make a game for this KotM, and here's a retelling of what happened, which is paradoxically in game form.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5360 - If you forgot about Klik of the Month this month, you've still got like 40 minutes to make something.
You aim your Melody Gun and launch a volley of notes into the lake's surface. A vortex forms and the FairyBot rises out, Wishbeam equipped.
Fortunately, extra lives are real, and you have one more life. Unfortunately, the last time you touched a checkpoint was when you were 7.
"It's funny how politicians say "a hit to the hip pocket" as a euphemism for "a missile blast to the consumer's chest-mounted cashvessel.""
"You're attacked by a giant dust mite! It's the size of a cricket! …Look, not all of these monster insects can be ants or centipedes, OK?"
Four beat-up preteens stroll into a pharmacy, buy 99 bandages and 99 headache pills, and stroll out in single file. You worry about them.
I like how in NetHack the stronger bipeds have higher ranks, so by the end you're fighting like 20 Gnome Kings and committing mass regicide.
Thanks to the demise of Flash, businesses will now build their websites entirely in Unity.
As you try to leave your room, you break the doorknob off your door. The words "GAME OVER" slowly fade onto the screen over the next 3 mins.
You've been walking onto gems and potion icons for so long, the feel of them beneath your bare barbarian soles is comforting and reassuring.
"Forget about the treasure! Save yourself!!" *grabs your bus fare out of your hands and flings it into the roiling abyss*
There's one byte in the Super Mario Bros. ROM that can be altered to make the title card screens look like this.
[#GAMING] [#WEIRD] If you're looking for an "8-bit-on-acid" twitter twist, Leon Arnott's tweets will make you go "LOL" and then go "Wait, WH
"Ramblin' Rick has one attack… talking your head off! But do listen, since his 3 hour voiced monologue takes up 90% of the game's filesize."
"You are not allowed to view this image," reads the shy image file. "No, please stop," it adds, watching in terror as its hit counter rises.
"3rd St. is closed due to not actually being a real street, but a huge worm thing that was seemingly using the cars for self-gratification."
As she drove she remembered more and more things she'd left at her friend's house, but the cost of going back kept barely outpacing them.
Your sword skills are abysmal - the goblins grimace at your amateur, superficial wounds. "These won't even make cool scars," they mutter.
She's so obsessed with cleanliness that she will only swordfight in a spa, so she will be constantly washed - of her sweat, and your blood.
He climbs up the princess's long hair to ascend the slightly steep hill on which she's held. She asks if this is necessary, but he insists.
"To explain the fact that the last area wasn't textured or detailed, the narrator intones "The mind creates its own reality" over and over."
Everyone jokes about Under Construction GIFs and <blink> tags, but what I really miss are the old Javascript status bar marquees.
I think Under Construction GIFs were popular because the idea of computer documents that changed weekly or daily was so new to many people.
#IPlayed Too Tall. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/149689777/too%20tall.html I like how the changing page title basically serves as alt text for each moment.
The ultimate indignity awaits as you're led in cuffs to the car: the cops stay back and order you to drive yourself to jail! Oh, what shame!
You're so surprised that your face briefly forgets which parts do what. Your eyes shriek, your nose boggles and spittle flies out your ears.
Your lack of omniscience forces you to physically open the box in order to discover its contents. This sheer injustice brings you to tears.
Since the author of this tweet neglected to give your fictional self a name that can be devoured, the Dark Nomenphage sighs and shoots you.
"One who blunders into spikes, not seeing until too late, will live long and grow wise." If only that were a real saying, you sadly think!
You find an enigmatic lever. You may employ your hands to inspect it, or appoint a more expendable appendage to the task, like an earlobe.
You crash through the window, run out of the house, loop around and crash through it again. More and more shards gather under the sill.
"This bread is a thin layer of wrapper functions above flour," quipped the programmer, pretending his expertise has any real-life relevance.
Now that I think about it, I feel strongly about powerless things suddenly getting to turn the tables on normally-mighty things with relish.
Basketballs dribbling humans, forks gripping humans between their tines, power cords jamming humans together and tying them in knots…
I like the idea of petty revenge-fantasy role-reversal stories written by inanimate objects.
Your attempt to escape your lover's spouse by ziplining down a cable using their underpants shows your trust in their garments was misspent.
"This movie is endless bodily fluid jokes. Hours of vitreous floaters and sloshing endolymph gags. Crass pandering to the biologist crowd!"
"OK, it's true my famous sculpted calves DO contain implanted femurs - but can a leg model ever risk busting a femur without a spare handy?"
"Yeah, well MY paper is the scrappy underdog who fought her way up from the streets, and your scissors are just a glitzy soulless showman."
"Some don't like that our only news station gets its content from Swamp News, but I couldn't live without the hourly mud viscosity updates."
Sailing over the edge of the world only to splash down an endless set of tall steps to nowhere… An anticlimactic and stomach-churning fate…!
A cane nervously awaits its swordification operation… A shoe sits beside it, about to have a switch-knife implanted… It's a dangerous world…
"Since you seem to have calmed down, I've switched on the flow of time again. Be good and I might restore your causality privileges too."
Supermarket display stocked too perfectly… Shoppers unwilling to remove exquisitely placed products… Capitalism rapidly collapses worldwide…
"The team swears they got a goal at the exact moment that every single referee and spectator was distracted by an orange bird on the pitch."
You ooze out of the icebox and drag yourself to a nearby sunbeam, your lower body still frozen and chunky. Pins and needles run through you.
The guard tersely informs your newly hatched butterfly cell-mate that the time it spent in the chrysalis will be added onto its sentence.
"The pro-news bias on the news is hideous. Almost 15 minutes of 'current events are cool' stories and 'journalists are sexy' messages, ugh."
"Our final plan for saving Earth is launching as many Baroque paintings into space as possible, so any aliens can see how cultured we were."
"We put the space capsule carrying valuable artworks on a rocket engine fueled by burning valuable artworks. Two birds, one stone, eh."
They remind me a lot of the "Lands" in Homestuck - places modeled on the RPG quest, yet appear openly contrived and dessicated of sincerity.
The monochromatic geometric environs, the identical guileless citizens with weird jobs involving dubious 'elements', the identical enemies…
http://animatedscreenshots.tumblr.com/post/50445375934/off - I like the moody, minimalist zones of OFF. They feel like abstract reinterpretations of the generic RPG world.
Knytt Stories, "Let me take you to the beach".
Secret society realises it can't remember if the pins in the world map are nations it's already conquered, or nations it's going to conquer.
"At 2:21AM a virus was unleashed that changed all instances of the word 'wriggle' to 'woggle'… We aren't leaving until someone's in cuffs."
You try and explain that your thumb was covering all the zeros and you honestly didn't know the cake mix box said "Serves 200,000", really.
"I think we double-parked on like 300 ant parking spaces, and now a ton of ants are angrily circling the block on their caterpillars."
The driveway longed to be a highway. When the toy cars trundled down it, it could pretend. The family car only reminded it of its smallness.
"As soon as she turned on the air conditioner, my blood ran cold."
Since my ISP is kinda horrid, I've had to log into Twitter through a dodgy third-party proxy site. If my account gets hacked: I deserved it.
Having been used by its owner's daughter for colouring in, the highlighter vowed never to go back. For once, its colour had meant something.
You slip the key in the lock. "Okay, let's see here," it mutters from inside. You hear faint rattling, then "Hrmm… this one's a toughie."
As the surveillance camera tower was finally pulled to the ground by triumphant rebels, a tiny bug on a blade of grass became a star.
You wake up in your cell to find your body has been ROT13'd. You stumble to your yrtf instead of your srrg, and promptly fall on your yvcf.
Unused Twitter usernames: GameTitle, RatChaos, Metrolith, Cacklecreep, SludgeBabe, TrashGyre, Puffhole, Erogator, Glitchcess, DCRPT.
"You're losing grip of your IP's social media cachet!" howls your PR when he finds you left the "Fistsplosion" Twitter username unattended.
She's idly amusing herself by dunking things in the sentient acid. You can't tell whether the quiet screams are from the things or the acid.
Smoke elementals engaged in a fan dance to the death is one of the Queen's favourite martial performances.
Don't forget you can capitalise the "u_u" emoticon into "U_U" when you want to be shy with extra emphasis.
"I think having a body made of soft soap that goes splat when even a tennis ball hits it is fine for those who dare enter my dream world!"
http://l.j-factor.com/gifs/SuperMarioBros-BonusRoom3.gif - I like that this one is kind of a puzzle that you can fail by breaking the wrong blocks.
http://l.j-factor.com/gifs/SuperMarioBros-BonusRoom5.gif - The amount of effort required to actually get these 10 coins is pretty out-of-the-ordinary.
They tried to make up the missing 5 feet of their under-regulation-height watchtower by standing on their shoulders - swapping every 2 mins.
Yes, friendship is stronger than the headiest drug you've ever had (pure brown sugar, poured in your mouth during ill-advised school play).
I'm likely to extend that macro in the future to let you specify some alternative text to replace it with, but that'll have to wait a bit.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5411 - A quick extra Twine macro to round off the weekend. <<once>> shows text only the first time you visit a passage.
The Cola Craken's tentacle grabs your tongue and drags you into the can to a saccharine grave. And you thought "Die Cola" was a funny typo!
Someone on the Twine group wanted to know why <<set>> doesn't work like this. Suddenly, my interest is piqued…
http://l.j-factor.com/gmhtml5/ - Reminder to go to my games page and click the "!!" link in the "Other stuff" menu.
http://l.j-factor.com/gifs/CaveStory-FirstCave4.gif - I felt clever when I first noticed the shape of the Polar Star's muzzle flash.
Your computer wants to talk about the nightmare it had where it accidentally deleted all your files, but knows you wouldn't like to hear it.
The storm cloud glances sheepishly at you. You simply nod and smile warmly in reply. Relieved, it gently releases a huge lightning bolt.
You might notice the "hover" and "mouse" terminology is different from my old <<mouseoverlink>> macro - I guess I ought to rename it, then.
I'm trying to design these macros to be variants of <<replace>> that have different "trigger elements" - time, hovering, distant links…
The "hover" varieties are a simpler form of <<hoverrevise>>. The "mouse" varieties are for irreversibly changing text by mousing over it.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5409 - New Twine macros, <<hoverreplace>> and <<mousereplace>>, that alter or reveal text when you mouseover them.
Yes, I am annoyed that the popular CSS snippets for emulating the <blink> tag contain code that blinks the text twice as fast as it used to.
"The magic cave broke after some kids went up to it and chanted "Open sesame close sesame" really fast. We're tunneling in as we speak."
"This month, you'll Raise the dead, because a Full House of horror is heading Straight to the big screen, in "Poker Themed Zombie Movie"."
Planning the design of Twine macros past, present and future.
The hedgehogs napping on your tummy make it clear they'd surely roll over if you moved. You decide lounging for 5 more hours couldn't hurt.
Though you struggled and protested, bathing in the Giga-Frog's warm frog-snot has indeed helped you relax and feel better about yourself.
Having failed to simply pour the blood down the bendy-straw, your surgeon gulps up a mouthful and puts his end of the straw to his lips.
"I said I'd let you walk 20% faster, player… but I actually made you 20,000% faster! Why, you're welcome! …Oh, and watch out for the walls."
New CSS selectors:
* E <3 F ― an F lover of an E element
* E $ F ― an F dependent of an E element
* E ^ F ― an F roommate of an E element
"It's baseball, but the batter magically feels the same pain they inflict on the ball. A noble game of strategy, endurance and empathy…"
"Gamers tried to get the NPC with a key for a head into a relationship with the NPC with a lock for a face, though neither were interested."
http://l.j-factor.com/gifs/SuperMarioLand-BonusRoom9.gif - Super Mario Land.
"A generation ignorant of true culture! To think, if I asked our youth about Horaculus stealing the Golden Ovaries, I'd get vacant stares!"
"Time for today's tweets!"
*cracks knuckles*
*hurts fingers*
*tries typing with nose*
*nose types "DOWN WITH EYES AND EARS!"*
"B-betrayal…!"
The GiantBot enters the arena! You desperately try to scroll to 'weak spot' in its Enemypedia entry, but the 'trivia' section is too huge.
http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/mario+wiki - This is the only gaming-related Tumblr tag I actually find interesting.
"A shadowy company is buying the rights to all the Lassie inspired dog radioplays from the 50's… You know what to do." *offers laser rifle*
If only sleep were a beneficial status effect… its purveyors granting the player a blissful respite from the incessant toil of the world…
You grab the hanging vine and leap over the chasm, only then realising that it was the same vine you'd hacked off a wall on the floor above.
"We've disassembled this hammer to the core and we still don't know where the hammer-nail API calls happen - let alone the protocol!"
The Jonah format isn't really designed for linear games, but with these scripts http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/taxonomy/term/6601 I daresay it's much more viable.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5406 - Reminder that I did another script for Twine's Jonah format, one that makes all links behave like <<choice>>.
Feeling kind of perturbed that document.querySelector("#…") and document.getElementById("…") are the same character length.
"How iRONIC," chuckles the booming voice, "you tried to 'FIX' my bugs— and NOw… yOU'RE the INSECT!" You scuttle for cover under a polygon.
Blazing across the post-law wasteland, portable holo-projector beaming a sunset in front of your bike wherever you go.
"If you insist on staging a sit-in protest of this puzzle, can you at least do it on top of that button that opens the exit door? Thanks."
"The very popular W key is expected in a future model. In the meantime, simply remove the paper, re-insert it upside-down, and type an M."
What I enjoyed about Trine was, when shown green bottles on distant ledges, levitating nearby junk to knock them down rather than climb up.
Moving a goal object from afar in games like Trine or Portal, to shift it from its designed start position, feels pleasantly subversive.
I admire games with lock-and-key mechanics that give you the means to bring the key to you… Keys that are more than just 'stand here'.
I like the minor detail that shooting a Super Missile at a wall in Super Metroid causes wall-crawling enemies to be shaken off the wall.
Trapped in a lab with an omnipotent AI for so long, you can't adjust to a home where the walls and floor aren't alive and capricious.
Videogame where it's possible to 'steal bases' by quickly running through the Red Door to the next save point before the computer notices.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5406 -Twine script for Jonah that makes all links function like the <<choice>> macro: disabled when you leave the passage.
You live in the southern hemosphere - not a typo, but a moon of swirling blood oxygenating some bizarre bio-device. It's got weird seasons.
*angrily rips lottery tickets to shreds*
*a zillion-to-one gust blows the shreds back together in midair*
*glares, flicks each shred away*
The king returns, victorious! Unfortunately you all grabbed the trumpets with the 'defeat' flags, so your fanfare is confusing at best.
"Take your reward," he intoned, "a cup of water! For isn't water to a parched man worth more than all the world's gold?" Then he dropped it.
You smash the "In case of endless replicating lime jelly" panel. Behind it is a spoon. You sigh and move on to the "raspberry jelly" panel.
Every time I see "CSS" with dotted underline in a tech article, I STILL mouse over just to see if the words "Cascading Style Sheets" pop up.
If someone's finally created a Wikipedia page for the intentionally random text made by drumming the keyboard quickly, please do tell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake - I'm glad someone created a word for £ character encoding glitch text.
Game enemy accidentally copy-pasted out of level editor into text document… Saving it as ANSI turned it into shambling ASCII monstrosity…
You open the ship's emergency fuel store, and a pile of sneakers falls on you. There's a note: "Seems you'll have to walk back to Earth! ;)"
I also like how there isn't a point in Cave Story prior to the Core where drowning is a serious risk - the mechanic exists purely for plot.
http://l.j-factor.com/gifs/CaveStory-FirstCave3.gif - I mentioned this before, but I like how this Cave Story room teaches drowning, water physics AND long-jumping.
http://animatedscreenshots.tumblr.com/post/49959330213/quarth-block-hole - The US version of this game removed the cool steampunk spaceship. ;_;
*unfurls the spell scroll*
*puzzled, keeps unfurling*
*realises it was rolled up back-to-front and the monster's now reading the spell*
The computer tried to appear more approachable by saying "Land sakes alive!" when an error occurred. Then it tried saying it twice. 3 times.
"Vapid! Utterly banal!" snorts the job interviewer at your tweets. You hope the position of Social Media Procrastinator will soon be yours.
Just before you land the final slash, the King of Evil activates the Wish Orb! Oh mercy, he wished for 50% more HP! Now he's unbeatable!!
Oh no! Your finger can't hold the tiny barricade keeping the bug zombies from breaking into the living room! You may have to switch hands!
Sighing, you permit the installer to run. Toolbar options assail you from all directions as your Declinegun roars. Checkboxes bleed ticks.
In a fallout sheter with a supply of bananas… and the banana unpeeler's broken! Desperately, they try hypnosis to awaken their "inner ape"…
Before he threw away all the novels he'd never read, he opened them. Every page blank. Well, he thought, maybe I really didn't miss much.
"It was a town so decimated by the war that only the dogs and cats were left. They kept it up for a few years, but all quietly went feral."
"Dungeon tip: remember to shout "I said I wanted pearls, not pearly whites!!" as the giant grinning mouth catches up to and devours you."
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5405 - Thinking a few thoughts about making Twine links that set variables and got to passages simultaneously…
"Aah, it's only 10:30 and I've already subjugated another planet!" she sighs, resting her heels on a creature they'd never rested on before.
"Since oxygen has been copyrighted, this open-source space station has had to use a free alternative element called Respirozilla Laserduck."
"What letter makes the delayed delighted?"
"E makes the LATE ELATE!"
"Patch notes: It seems halfway through adding the cognip flizzleflop function, I entered a trance and typed an ASCII art Bart Simpson head."
Argh, I discovered a few of my Twine scripts have implicit globals, and the cliff with spikes at the bottom won't be open until morning.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5404 - Here's a fairly obvious Twine macro, <<else if>>, a convenient combination of the <<if>>/<<else>> macros.
"First Human/Brain Brain Transplant!
A human brain's brain has been transplanted into a human, providing it with a body for the first time."
"Inside the Brain, Second Smaller Brain Discovered
It is believed to be the 'brain's brain', providing your brain with healthy thoughts."
"Are you thinking to yourself "I want to eat it so badly, I can taste it"? Good! Now just relish the sensation for a few leisurely minutes."
"Bio-glitches? I don't know what you're talking about," you reply, quickly pocketing your left hand and its -127 fingers.
A man grimacing at a money tree whose notes are all maturing from fivers to tenners, stuck in invalid denominations like $7½ and $9¼.
"We're talking hit points off the charts here. You've got so many health bars you could straddle a live buzzsaw and barely break a sweat."
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5402 - Some hard-to-read thoughts about my <<cyclinglink>> Twine macro, inspired by a game by @bananafishtoday.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5401 - Twine script that lets you find out if the player's visited a passage previously, for use within the <<if>> macro.
"We of the Society of No-Williams are sworn to preventing the Star Wars theme from polluting classical music albums the world over."
"You'll be kicking yourself if you miss this opportunity to get the vaccine for Possessed Legs Syndrome."
"The fact that this cartoon anthropomorphic Earth is wandering around a grassy, sunny meadow has worrying astronomical implications."
"Look, I know I got confused about your request for a 'claw machine' for this carnival, and this tone isn't helping us barricade the doors."
First-person game where as soon as you try to walk backwards, you fall flat on your back and stare at the sky, giggle-groaning to yourself.
Setting a webpage on fire by opening and closing an expanding div rapidly… Sparks flying off the sidebar, bits of border-right flaking…
You idly tap the desk to the tune of 'Jingle Bells'. No one notices it's the 'Batman smells' version. Yes, you grin, there's a difference.
Being smuggled into the palace in the princess's mattress would have worked, if not for her most secret vice… using her bed as a trampoline!
Fire elementals are repulsed by seeing naked flames.
"If you're not familiar with it, C is basically the Super Mario Bros. of programming languages. (Pointer arithmetic is the Hammer Bros.)"
"Well, it seems we've finally hit Peak Better, but don't worry, a whole bunch of More wells in the tundra have yet to be tapped."
"When 1 goes missing, the other numbers try to fill its role of Multiplicative Identity - only for things to quickly spiral out of control!"
(The Beforus trolls are the Ewoks in this analogy.)
Thinking about it, Act 6 of Homestuck really does feel like the "Return of the Jedi" of the comic, compared to Act 5's Empire Strikes Back.
http://mspaintadventures.com/?viewmap=6 Ah, it seems the Homestuck chapter-select page is up to date. Finally some perspective on this whimsygarish folderol.
- Every so often Opera messes up its GIF animation, briefly resulting in these distinctly glitchy overpaintings.
Incidentally, I feel a tad resentful of simple boss fights that're complicated by some arbitrary unrelated extra threat, like that fireball.
http://l.j-factor.com/gifs/SuperMarioWorld-Lemmy.gif - Lemmy has so many goofy mugging animations in this battle, far more than the player would ever notice.
"Making progress in the same way a body tumbling down a jagged rock slope is making progress towards not tumbling down a jagged rock slope."
(I meant to do #OneYearAgo tweets for all my 2012 games, but I forgot for the past few months.)
#OneYearAgo tomorrow, I released Brainpan: http://l.j-factor.com/gmhtml5/Brainpan/
Yes, of course all programming is about feeling smug at overcoming very petty limitations that really, really should not have ever existed.
The "can't use backslashes in scripts" bug is annoying but it's resulted in me writing some quite ingenious workarounds, if I say so myself.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5321 - Also I've fixed the code of this script, since I forgot that I can't use backslashes in Twine scripts.
http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5400 Twine script that lets you suppress line breaks with backslashes, as a possible concise alternative to <<silently>>.
I hope someone's made a supercut of all those "Ah, I didn't see you come in" opening jokes by TV show hosts.
Your compiler finds a big block of commented-out code…
It knows it shouldn't look…
Takes the tiniest of tiny peeks…
BLUSHES BRIGHT RED.
http://animatedscreenshots.tumblr.com/ - The tag buttons atop my tumblr now link to pages in chronological order. Peruse the most distant of my past posts…
Your new government-installed capillary checkpoints prevent any illegal molecules entering your cells. At last, your body is a police state!
"Turns out it's WAY easier to save Christmas if you do it in early May when everyone else is off guard."
Undercover ghost trying hard not to elongate their O's - having to feign stubbing their toe every time they slip up.
Oh no!
"Okay, listen, I have a plan."
Damn you, yellow Koopas!
…It results in some really memorable interstitial sequences, with little more than a static sprite twirling around a scrolling screen.
http://animatedscreenshots.tumblr.com/post/49306080744/kirbys-dream-land - I love how rocket-like these things are - spurting tiny stars like exhaust, launching away with an energetic blast…
The brown substance oozing from between your keyboard's keys is worrying you, and your attempts to google for help are only exacerbating it.
"I'm sorry you're unhappy with your game being rated 'OUTTA SIGHT', but this magazine's 'UN-BEE-LEE-VABLE' score is not granted lightly."
"Obscene!" would be the cry of parents, were they to see your violent slashes! For other reasons, it'd also be the cry of your sword-tutors!
You pick the sword, despite the old maxim "live by a sword, die by a sword", and the new maxim "swords make the opposites of things happen"!
(If you missed it when I posted earlier, Dragon Drop is this game: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=1984 My current top pick of the compo.)
It really reminds me of Corrypt in that your short-term fixes end up causing more work later - a "Sorcerer's Apprentice" form of cheat.
What I ~love~ about the cheat in Dragon Drop is it makes the game twice as complex, and if you still can't win, you can try doing it again.
I haven't linked my Ludum Dare game in a few days, so http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=1084 have at it.
You're not sure what this bio-showerhead is grown from. Repurposed tear duct? Repurposed salivary gland? Will it weep or lactate hot water?
This sword's API doesn't allow slashing, but it does allow clubbing with the sharp edge. You wish combat wasn't so complicated nowadays.
"Being reminded that web programming is terrible is like being reminded of a death… Just dense, crushing despair at this hideous world."
It's clear that the tower's tallness from the ground was just forced perspective. These upper floors are hideously distorted and compressed.
"Dude this hedgehog is just crawling and rolling all over this voodoo doll representing all humanity quick stop moaning and get the camera."
"In wizard cases, the state is obliged to offer the defendant 2 defense attorneys, 1 conjuration attorney, 2 elementals, and 1 hypnotist."
If I'd made Dragon Drop I'd have probably stopped at just the 15-card Klondike variant, and not even thought to add all that hidden stuff.
#IPlayed Dragon Drop. http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=1984 This is my kind of game! For like three completely different reasons!
"Yes, I have tea with Mr. Zapf quite often. Recently I complimented his snowflake dingbat with his dear friends Wingdings and Jokerman."
"Version 1 of the virus gave users 5 seconds to dive at the wall socket and unplug their PC before all was lost. V2 gives just one second."
"Security experts recommend not using IE, not using Windows, not using any technology at all, or simply ceasing all conscious thought."
Apple unveils Even Mightier Mouse - "You have to wrestle it down and punch with two fingers. Each of these sculpted abs is a function key."
It turns out the kaleidoscopes were lenses showing the true nature of all things as symmetrical tumbling shapes. You embrace your true form.
I have this dreadful, sickening feeling that no one realised out why in App Escape you get slowed down when you walk on the Sticky Notes.
The police are stymied they can't arrest a ghost for being too scary. "T-there's gotta be a law, there's gotta!" they cry, quaking in fear.
In a stroke of luck, the traditional Dragonheim execution - being breathed on by the judge - will be performed by its only human justice.
"No one really knows why headless ghosts are so attracted to horse-riding," replied the trainer. "It's kinda like mice and cheese."
Declension http://videlaisstudios.info/games/2013/twine/declension.html for instance, requires an AJAX request (though it just loads a static text file in the same directory).
You may notice that in my "444 Twine games" archive from some weeks back, a few games don't work if they're run outside of a web server.
"Relax!" chortles your lawyer. "Innocent verdict, guilty verdict, I'll get you all the verdicts!" He whispers, "Mistrial's my favourite!"
"In the year 2000, we'll all say "Oh dearest tap / My thirst to slake / I'd like some water / And no mistake!" instead of turning a nozzle."
Each deep habitation sector boasts that only the ones above are addled by surface radiation, and only the ones below from mineral poisoning.
In one lithe motion, she sloughed off her body, leaving just her dress and shoes. She fluttered over and wrapped a strap around my hand.
"The pageantry of revealing the episode's 'mystery guest' gradually grew in importance until it pushed out every other segment of the show."
Your teammates don't know why you keep eating useless healing items like bread and meat all the time… but you just have this, this _hunger_…
You wake up to find a swarm of negative status effect symbols over your head… Your stat page is a field of red… Time to make a -5 breakfast.
"Prepare yourself, as I raise the curtain on your crushing defeat! There are NO intermissions, and your bladders WILL be begging for mercy!"
Forced to watch the pile of dropped treasure slowly, helplessly sink beneath the lava - the pain of loss prolonged over agonising minutes.
Programming themed puzzle game where you use the XOR swap to teleport from a pressure plate into an open door without an intermediary crate.
Footage of a robot slowly nudging a red key into a red door, to loud offscreen cheering - "Mars dungeon mission success" flashes onscreen.