My Kinda Game

So a friend of mine from @mmmskulljuice‘s circle was talking about their desire to make a “submarine Zelda”, and I started drawing this little guy on the assumption that you’re playing AS the submarine. More ideas followed:

The title of the game is Foot-Long Hero. You play as a very small submarine drone who’s on a mission to visit five to eight dungeony areas above ground, but they can only be accessed from underwater. 

You can name your hero sub whatever you want, but his canon name is Hoagy. 

The villain’s name is Grinder.

Hoagy is a member of a wandering group of salvage drones who call themselves the Poor Boys.

Yes, we’re riding the sandwich puns hard in this.

Hoagy is a sentient, mobile vehicle in the tradition of classic game characters like Twin Bee and Opa-Opa. He gets hungry, scared, and has emotional reactions to things that happen in the game, but he’s still a machine and has interchangeable parts.

Hoagy is equipped with boots, boxing gloves, a propeller, and a nosecone. The boots and boxing gloves are only used while on land: the prop and nosecone come into play underwater. Each of his parts are interchangeable and he’ll find new propellers, boots and so on that will give him new powers.

Being a sub, Hoagy swims much faster than he can run. He’s highly mobile underwater, to the point where the underwater sections of the game are more like a top-down Zelda, whereas on land it’s a traditional side-scrolling platformer.

On land you can run, jump, launch your boxing gloves, and perform a special Periscope Flip, shown on the bottom, that lets you jump much higher. 

Underwater, you can not only launch your boxing gloves but also extend your periscope up to the top, which is a factor in solving many puzzles.

Later in the game you may even acquire a special hat that allows you to grab things with your periscope and pull yourself out of the water.

You can also play as a female-presenting sub, which adds eyelashes onto your periscope but otherwise doesn’t change the game. The canon name for the female sub hero is Baguette, but again you can call her whatever you want.

Point of Origin: A Retrospective on Schadenbergiana

I’ve mentioned a few times over the years that I’ve not just cooked up entirely fictional games to go along with the music I write under my Gonkaka alias, but indeed an entire fictional company with it’s own history to go along with them, Nincom. After having a lot of fun putting together a retrospective for one of my ongoing Gonkaka projects, Efiáltis, I decided to dig deep into the back catalogue of work I’d done and do something similar for a Nincom game I had already finished writing the music for a long time ago; Schadenbergiana. Along the way, a point about the preservation of old games made it’s way in there too. This piece of metafiction was written for the 2018 Halloween Countdown over on Random Lunacy, and can be viewed there with embedded music players.

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Ever since day one, Nincom has been defined by it’s dedication to uniqueness and the fervent ambition- traits which have found the company in hot water more then once, and most famously before they even got their first game out the door. Theirs is an attitude described by many as “weird”, fewer as “punk”, and by their dedicated fans as something that “sets them apart from everyone else in the game’s industry”. The company has recently celebrated their 32nd birthday with a release that has been rather aggressively marketed through various online channels; The Nincom N-Sides Collection, a compilation of some of the companies rarest and most obscure releases, each of them painstakingly emulated as accurately as possible using emulators programmed in-house. In honour of this momentous occasion, we’d like to cover what was perhaps the hardest Nincom game to find in any capacity and even harder to get emulated correctly; Schadenbergiana.

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Made a little pixel animation for a friend, done in the style of an encounter from an old DOS space exploration game; Starflight. Looks like Scifer is going to have to brush up on his SpaceBunny-ese if he hopes to resolve this encounter diplomatically!

Done entirely with an EGA palette of 16 colours, which was pretty much the best you could get in 1986. ;)

ICE WARS was a fantastically-popular vector scan game, featuring a thinly-veiled representation of the Soviet invasion of the Aleutian Islands early at the start of what became World War Short. It was also the game that turned struggling Vectorpoint into a major power in the field of arcade gaming, sponsoring three sequels, as well as the spin-off game SNOWMOBILE CARNAGE, one of the only vector-scan games ever to be rated AR for graphic violence. A tamer set of graphics was included on some supplemental ROMs, but they proved to be so unpopular that they were discontinued (and it’s one of the cases where the more-restricted version of the game ended up commanding higher prices on the collector market).

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Obviously ICE WARS is based on BATTLEZONE (1980), itself a fantastically-successful tank simulator (and one of the first realtime 3D games). It’s also an amazing technical achievement given the computing power of the time. The designers, Ed Otberg and Owen Rubin did so much to conceptualize digital space and set out basic rules for gaming within it. 

I learned a lot in the process of making up these screens and designs (themselves based on vehicles created for the Microgame ICE WAR (1979) by the eponymous Elohrir, though I wonder if that designer turned out to be someone else.) Probably the biggest lesson was that games like BATTLEZONE are really dominated by negative space. You don’t shoot at the vector lines, because your target lies in-between them.

Common Types of Fake Video Games

The Violent Video Game

The AAA Pastiche

The Silly Title

The Specific Parody

That Time Spy Kids had a game called “Game Over”

The Ones that Actually Sound Real

The Ones that End Up Being Real

Elevator Dreams (2006, Midway) (Nintendo DS)

Games that don’t exist

hatoba tsugu fanart, 2019

Apple Quest Monsters DX is now available in digital form!

Just over 100 pages containing 85 lovingly crafted monsters, a map, photos and more! https://splendidland.itch.io/apple-quest-monsters-dx

You can buy a print version too! https://splendidland.bigcartel.com/product/apple-quest-monsters-dx

Free Idea for the Vidjagames Industry

A game based on Men’s Life Covers.  Basically, it would be like Far Cry Meets Wolfenstein Meets severe head trauma.

Features:

Custom-generated death screens based on your unseemly death.

Dozens of melee and ranged weapon options, including guns, knives, heavy wrenches, an angry weasel. 

Dozens of irrationally aggressive animals to lure Nazis into.

Customizable player character voiced by your choice of Nick Offerman or Jenette Goldstein. 

Unrealistic health systems replaced by new, even less realistic Bleed-o-Meter. As long as you can still bleed, you can still fight!

Optional Survival system tracks need for food, whiskey, cool one-liners. 

Realistically destructible environments, vehicles and shirts.

No microtransactions. You already paid for the cool stuff… IN PAIN!

There’s probably a yeti or dinosaur or something in there, I dunno.