Bennett Foddy, the fiendish fella behind QWOP and Getting Over It, has shared his own variant of iconic game Pong. It’s named FLOP, and you can probably guess what makes it different. Foddy actually made FLOP years ago, as a secret game hidden in the ace local multiplayer collection Sportsfriends, but now he’s released a standalone version so it’s simpler to play (with events in mind, really, but we benefit too). If you like a bit of jostling on a couch, it might give you some giggles. Read the rest of this entry »
Lofoten is the latest game from Jonathan Whiting, an Oxford based developer whose work you’ve probably come across before. The project is pretty simple: you create lovely little islands and then you make gifs of your cute retro worlds, and then you share those gifs with friends and strangers to brighten their day. It’s zen and nice to look at and it is completely free. I spent five minutes with it and I can feel my blood pressure lowering. This feels like a gift.
Oooh! What a lovely mind scrambler to start a morning with – Jonathan Whiting’s Ludum Dare 37 entry is delightfully simple in terms of the controls and the idea, but good lord it becomes deliciously awkward and so complicated (for humans) early on! Nest [official site] is a recursive single-room movement puzzle which gradually layers control systems in such a way that even moving one square forward becomes a significant challenge, while turning ninety degrees is a challenge worthy of the next RPS sports day! Here – I made a video to explain: Read the rest of this entry »
I’d never seen Loot Rascals [official site] before this morning and yet it seems to arrive fully-formed: it looks great, it looks fun, you can buy it now. Although it’s not fully-formed, and that’s even why you can buy it now: the Refinery Edition is so named because the game’s developers hope to use it to refine the game. There’s a cracking trailer below.
Zunus [official site] is the latest short game from Jonathan Whiting, he of BLOODWORM and Traal and Mussel and Sportsfriends and lots of other things. It was made for Ludum Dare and is about delivering calamari to your gran in space while dodging asteroids in a simple, 2D thrust-’em-up.
“Grow longer on the flesh of those that would opress you”, reads the description for Jonathan Whiting’s new elongated flesh snake game BLOODWORM [official site]. Yeah, it’s probably a metaphor for wangs.
In the case of Mussel, mussel stands for Miniature Underwater Strange Squid Eradication Liner and not any kind of bivalve mollusk with a brown or purplish-black shell. It is the name of the underwater fighting vessel you’ll be piloting in the shiny new indie shmup by brothers Jonathan and David Whiting.
I love puzzle games. But it’s not beating them that’s the exciting part: it’s understanding them.
Whether mulling over a cryptic crossword or somersaulting through Portal’s portals, there’s a moment of epiphany which, for me, pretty much transcends all other moments in gaming. But how do you design a puzzle to best provoke that eureka moment? What gives a puzzle its aesthetic, its pace and texture? Why does one puzzle feel thrilling while another feels like a flat mental grind?
Do you remember These Robotic Hearts Of Mine? It’s a puzzler with a narrative and even if it wasn’t entirely successful, the moments when the story and mechanics interlock were effective. The chap who created the puzzler has several other games available and even though it isn’t new, I discovered Traal last night, following its release on iOS. It’s a collaboration with Jonathan Whiting and while its chunky, murky pixels may be off-putting to some, it’s worth sticking around for the clever horror twist. In gaming, there are monsters that kill, monsters that make the vision go blurry, and, now, monsters that trigger an automatic flight response when the player sees them.
