Bad-Game-A-Week-A-Thon

A few people have asked if there is a donation link for the Bad-Game-A-Week project. Well, there isn't. Not directly, anyway.

But if you want to contribute financially to the bad-game-a-week project, a close friend of mine Carol is moving out to California in October and could use some help. Anything you could paypal her, (1 dollar, 5 dollars, 10 dollars, 20 dollars, 100 dollars) would really help.

Thank you!

Paypal: carolb167@gmail.com

Week 6: The New Green

Week 6: The New Green



Source flash file is available here.

This game actually originated from staring at the Kindle iPhone title screen for too long.

This is my first level-based game for the Bad-Game-A-Week project, and oh did I underestimate the tools needs that would entail. Originally I was designing levels in a giant 30 x 20 matrix of 1's and 2's. These really start to blend together, before marching off the screen and up your fingernails. By the time I knew I needed a level editor proper, it was too late. I quickly hacked together a language file in a text editor to at least color those 1's and 2's like the level blocks, and wrapped up the remaining bits.

The sad thing is, on Friday I realized that the display for the game was already 90% of the way towards a graphical level editor to spit out those 30x20 matrixes. Partially because of all of this, the game is pretty short right now (16 levels). If anyone would like to contribute more levels to the project, please contact me. I'd be happy to have the contributions.

Week 5: Consumption

Week 5: Consumption



I'm not going to say too much about this week's entry, because I want you all to experience it for yourselves.

Another big thanks goes to Carolyn VanEseltine at Mossdogmusic for the music this week. Sound effects come as part of the Creative Commons, by IneQuation, FreqMan, and timlaroche.

Source flash file is available here.

Week 4: Tissue Cat Grieves its Messy Destiny

Week 4: Tissue Cat Grieves its Messy Destiny



Source flash file is available here.

In response to last week's scope being way too large, this week I made a simple game about a genetically engineered cat which grows tissues off of its back. Needless to say, this cat started its life as a discussion around the office, which quickly got out of hand.

A huge thanks goes to Carolyn VanEseltine at Mossdogmusic for the music, the artwork, and running with an offhanded comment until it became this poor sympathetic everyman cat.

Cleanup on Aisle 4!

For the record, I changed around how the games are displayed. They're no longer inline: you have to click through to them. This should fix formatting issues on smaller screens. ChrisCanfield.net needs a complete re-write, and I just haven't had the time to do it. I could be doing that, or I could be making a game a week. Obviously, I chose the more fun one.

Also, I went back and fixed the endings for "Nice Planet: It's Ours Now." Now the game waits until you click to advance.

Week 3 Bad Game: Nice Planet. It's Ours Now.

Week 3: Nice Planet. It's Ours Now.

Warning: this game is incredibly geeky even by my standards. You're trying to make circles around planets. The trick is, though, that there are 6 moons around the planet, and you can make a circle along any of the moons, or the planet, or both.

Watch the instructions in the game proper, and play a few rounds. They do a much better job of explaining than I could.




Raw flash file is available here. As usual, don't re-name it and sell it on a Korean site somewhere.

I made a version of this game in high-school on paper, inspired by a 4-dimensional Tic-Tac-Toe variant. In 3 Dimensional tic-tac-toe, you take a 2 Dimensional tic-tac-toe board and just extend it again in one of those two dimensions, usually down. In high-school, I was entranced by a version of 4D Tic-Tac-Toe that simply took that 3d representation, and extended it to the right. It didn't *matter* what it was actually representing, so long as the mechanics worked. And they did, really well. It was actually kind of fun to play a game that wasn't physically possible to visualize.

I felt inspired. So for fun I devised a game where you tried to make circles around 3D spheres. Only 1 sphere (3D) seemed boring, so I made 3 full layers of spheres (9D), with 219 possible points to play. Unfortunately, that took forever... I've only encountered 2 people with that much patience, so here it has been simplified down to just 2 spheres (6D). I've also (I hope) simplified the representation of the spheres. Originally it looked kind of like what you'd make for a cardboard cutout of a cube, like this:




Where each circle represents a position, and the "back" position is actually all the way to the right. This is more or less what the full 9-dimensional original board looked like, which took bloody forever to set up before a game:



Even though it only took one and a half weeks of spare time to develop this flash version, it felt like it took bloody forever too. I don't think you'll see a weekly bad game as ambitious as this one for a long time.