I'm Not Playing

I'm Not Playing was my first 'jam' game. It won the Fight Magic Run battle, themed 'Independence'. FiMaRu had a very small pool of participants, so the achievement didn't go to my head. More valuable to me was the positive reinforcement that - yes! - I can make a game in 48 hours, as opposed to planning to develop a game in a short time and actually have it spiral into months and months.

I'm Not Playing is about a platform prototype sprite, called sprite_6, who becomes self-aware and ultimately rebels against her developer.

For a while I'd had an idea for a game lying dormant in the back of my head. Part of the game's challenge would be that the player would have to stuggle with and figure out the game's controls, like some kind of puzzle, as opposed to the controls being obedient and reactive to the player's every wish, like in other games. It's not a unique idea; many of us have played a game where our character's controls are temporarily reversed, for example, and left becomes right and right left. But I wanted to try to make a game based entirely around this concept, and explore its limits.

'Independence' gave me the chance to do just that, and even inspired a simple plot to give some structure and purpose to the mechanics.

The jam format can be exhausting, but it offers invaluable experience, and I'm pleased with the results I got. I've marked the next Ludum Dare in my calendar.

Ascent

It's been 3 months since I finished Ascent. Ascent is a personal game, because it centres on themes I'm passionate about. Without hyperbole, it contains no less than my philosophy of what I consider to be the meaning of life.

I feel I should write at least something about it before moving, finally, onto newer projects.

It had mixed reviews on Newgrounds. It was badly received by those who mistook it as being a religious game, when it is emphatically not a religious game. Actually, during development I thought my message was, if anything, too blunt. But perhaps just as the developer is in a bad position to judge the difficulty of his own game, so is he in a bad position to judge the subtlety of the point he's trying to make.

Poe's law comes in to play here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law, and I don't resent those who may have misunderstood Ascent. Nor would I change anything. If I were to simplify the game down to the point where there was no room for misunderstanding, then it would restrict its potential for interpretation; some of the best feedback for Ascent made me see its message from angles that I hadn't considered before.

I did increase the timer based on the feedback I received, but resisted calls for it to be scrapped entirely. The timer is not an arbitrary method of increasing the difficulty and longevity of the game. Its place is to serve the message.

I was pleased with the exposure Ascent got on Newgrounds. Tom liked the game enough to send it straight to the front page, bypassing the usual vetting procedure, and from there it attracted 60,000+ views and became the most popular game of that month. Very encouraging, for someone who released it on Newgrounds only as an afterthought, and expected the 400-something plays it generated on Kongregate to be about the extent of exposure it was likely to garner. In future, if it's feedback and exposure I need, Newgrounds will be the first place to consider.