With 2014 over I thought I’d put together a blog post talking about several games I worked on over the year. In 2014 I started working on games in a full time capacity while I lived off my limited savings. It’s quite a privilege to have the economic freedom to be able to do this. It’s been an amazing year with travelling over to Japan for the Tokyo Game Show and to Melbourne for PAX Australia being the highlights. I worked on several games and small prototypes throughout the year. Below are the more notable games I worked on.
Expand
I should start by talking about Expand which is the game I spent most of my time working on. Our intention was to finish the game in 2014 but it’s looking like it’ll need much more time. Currently we are about 50% content complete with the game and level editor programs being mostly feature complete. We were really fortunate in having our game part of Sense of Wonder Night at the Tokyo Game Show, the Indie Showcase at PAX Australia, Ludicious, Out of Index and the Indie Games Room at AVCon. These events took quite a bit of out of development scheduled but also really motivated us to improve the standard of the game. The second half of the year was really amazing, we travelled to Japan and were totally blown away by the reception of Expand at PAX Australia. If you told me at the start of the year that the game would be considered the best game at PAX Aus by both Kotaku and IGN Australia I would have thought you were crazy.
One for the Donkey
One for the Donkeys is currently not finished. It’s a simple platformer game with a twist, a neat kind of twist that I’m not going to spoil here. Unfortunately I’ve run into some technical problems that aren’t easy to resolve so for the moment this project is on the backburner.
Replay Racer
Replay Racer is a game I made at the start of last year with John Oestmann for the Global Game Jam. It’s a racing game in which every time you complete a lap your last replay is added as an obstacle to the race. I did the programming and graphics in this game. I’m particularly proud of the graphics which came out well considering my background. After the jam I added more courses, leaderboards and achievements. It’s a neat little game that I’m quite happy with.
Cave of Atman
The Cave of Atman is a game I made with my twin brother Daniel. The idea was inspired by his experience playing Jeanne d’Arc on the PSP. I was mostly involved in programming and helping him see out his vision for the game. He did a fantastic job on the puzzles and graphics. We also received some really nice comments on Twitter from different designers that we both have a lot of respect for. I’d be nice to take the game further but only if we can continue to build up the mechanics in a natural way.
Hectic Hippo’s
Hectic Hippo’s was made for the Adelaide Game Jam held in August. I worked on the game with Anton Axisa who I made friends with at the jam. Turned out that he was a pretty awesome pixel artist. He churned out a lot of art during the jam that was never used. I still feel guilty about that. In the game you are racing against four other players to push your orb into the hole. Other players can fire over projectiles onto your side of the map and end your plans.