Crosswordle is a 5×5 wordle clone (they were popular at the time
time). Each row and column is a valid English word.
I created this game while on vacation, where some friends and I were
guessing how many solutions there would be to a puzzle like this.
There were guesses everywhere from 4 to a million. It took a little
while to figure them all out, but there are 81,572 solutions. Note
that each transposed solution is also a valid solution, so the number
most people were guessing for was 40,786.
Toil & Trouble is a point-and-click adventure game with a potion
brewing mechanic. You play the role of a young witch who must explore
a mysterious (but cozy) cottage and meet the characters that reside
within!
Isolate yourself from society to contemplate the meaning of life and
create art of tremendous depth.
Pilot your submarine into a dark cave, carefully monitor your air
supply, and ponder existence in silence.
Depths of the Mind was a competition entry for Ludum Dare 49, which
had the theme "Deeper and deeper". The object of the game is to dive
deep into an undersea cave, contemplate for a while, and save enough
air to return to the surface.
Note: the object of this game is not simply
to dive as deep as you can. Please read the in-game "How to Play"
page.
In Loop City, you’re a harried delivery driver working to ensure
packages get delivered on time! The mail, as they say, “just keeps
coming”, but if you can find the hidden wormholes, and use them to
shorten your trips, you’ll be able to handle it like a pro.
This game is a 2d Crazy-Taxi-like where packages become ready to
deliver, and you have to pick them up and get them to their
destination before your time runs out. You get points and a time bonus
once you finish a job. The game keeps looping until you run out of
time!
Tardigrades on the Moon is a light real time strategy game where you
explore the lunar surface with a colony of waterbears. Tardigrades dry
out quickly, so you'll need to dig canals to keep them hydrated as
they wander around.
Avoid death aboard two rickety gondolas suspended beneath a zeppelin!
Enemies will try to cut your cables, destroy them before they do. Or
just move the platform out of the way! Your gun has limited ammo, use
it judiciously. Once a platform is gone, it's gone for good. Get a
high score! Reflecting buzzsaws gives you bonus points, and reflecting
them into enemies gives you even more points!
Credits
Zeppelin Defender was an entry to Game Off 2017, and was created by
our team of four:
Crowd Fiend is a crowd-sourced demon-summoning game that you play on
your phone. A large number of players connect to the game using their
smartphones, and are distributed among two teams. After the game
begins, every 20 seconds, they'll be given a ritual to fulfill.
Whenever a player completes a ritual, their team's demon gains some
points, allowing it to level up. After three minutes have elapsed,
these demons use turn-based-RPG-style rules to attack each other.
Crowd Fiend was created at Raritan Valley Community College for Global
Game Jam 2016, when the theme was "Ritual." When forming teams on
site, it attracted a large number of people, and as a result had a
total of nine contributors. The game concept came from Cory Williams,
who pitched a game about summoning demons cooperatively with phones. I
had pitched a different game where players would perform a large
number of easy, but repetitive tasks, until they were overwhelmed.
After hanging up posters to attract teams, we discovered that the two
could be merged quite well, and thus Crowd Fiend was born.
Despite network issues at the GGJ site, we managed to get a game with
36 players in it at the time of the demo. A link to the event can be
found below. I can't speak for the whole team, but personally I was
extremely nervous: the most players we had ever tested with prior to
the event was 8, and while testing was done on a LAN, when we
presented the game it was done over the internet connecting to a
Raspberry Pi 2 with a $5.00 wireless card. Despite our best efforts,
everything went quite smoothly, and a good time was had by most.
Zolf is a game about winning a round of golf during the zombie
apocalypse. Like any golfing game, the objective is to hit the ball
into the hole in as few strokes as possible. Unlike any golfing game,
you gain
negative points for killing zombies by hitting them with a
fast-moving golf ball. You also gain infinite points for getting eaten
by zombies (making you lose at golf).
Zolf was an entry for Ludum Dare 32, where the theme was "an
unconventional weapon." As a "Jam" entry, it had a 72 hour time line,
and was allowed to be a team project. It was developed by a team of
four:
Sports Medley is a local multiplayer game in which players rapidly
switch between playing hockey, dodgeball, kill the carrier, and
"ultimate flying disc." There is a bonus round where everyone is
playing every sport at once.
Sports Medley was a Global Game Jam 2015 entry, where the theme was
"what do we do now?". While it was a success at the jam, the
peculiarities around the web gamepad API make it very difficult to get
started. You can give it a shot if you like, or just watch
this video.
Sports Medley was designed and implemented by Chris Mondok and Justin
Giannone. Graphics were provided by Ben Harris and Jon Echavarria.
Brian Thompson created the audio. Nick Matthews provided the (mildly
disturbing)
game poster.
Snowman Race is an Next Generation Snowman Racing Simulator. Players
use their smartphones as controllers to race to the end of a simple
maze, gathering items to slow their enemies along the way.
Snowman Race was created for the Ludum Dare Competition. As such, it
was developed from scratch in 48 hours as a solo project. The theme of
the competition was "entire game on one screen", which I took to mean
a multiplayer game where everyone looked at the same screen. The
winter asthetic came from a potential theme, which was simply
"☃" (the unicode snowman character).
For reasons unknown, the game does not work on iPhones, nor on OSX. I
was unable to research this during the duration of the jam, and indeed
came to learn this afterwards when there were many confused
commenters. If you want to give it a try, you'll be best off using
Android phones, and Chrome or Firefox on Linux or Windows.
In Tether, you play the pilot of a Planet Collector Tethercraft,
gathering planets using a massive cable. The goal is to connect all of
the planets in the level into one network.
Tether was a Ludum Dare Jam entry, in which the theme was "connected
worlds". It was produced by a team of four:
Chris Mondok — Developer
Bill Rossi — Developer
Miki Tharp — Art
Ryan Shello — Music and sound effects
On a personal note, I love how this game came together. By Saturday
night, we thought the project would be a massive failure, and none of
us could remember our high school physics. Despite that, we got
everything working smoothly enough on Sunday, and things were looking
a lot better. The graphics by Miki and the audio from Ryan really tie
it together. We got the ability to have multiple levels, and then a
win and loss condition, within the last hour of the jam.
This game was also my first foray into the web audio API.
The Rototheremin is a fun little toy "instrument" played on a
smartphone. Tap and hold the screen to make a sound. While holding,
pitch the phone up and down to change the frequency.
It is tested on iOS, and on Chrome and Firefox for Android. Note that
android users might need to face north to produce a sound.
HAM-3R is an abstract game about doing three things at once. Enemies
(red squares) appear in a semicircle around the player's ship. They
can be defeated by clicking on them, aiming and shooting at them, or
by typing the words that appear above them. However, if you rely on
one method of attack, it will become much harder. Every time the mouse
is clicked, subsequent enemies become smaller. Each time the beam is
fired, it becomes narrower. When words are typed, incoming enemies get
longer and longer words.
HAM-3R was created for Global Game Jam 2014. It was very well
received, with other GGJ participants interrupting my progress to play
it for themselves (which was always welcome). The game is intended to
be played with a steering wheel, but it works fine with just a mouse
and keyboard. The game was developed before any of my browsers had
gamepad support, so using a wheel requires a Linux (or possibly OSX)
server written in node. This server also acts as the highscore table,
which is not set up in the online link provided below.
The game was designed and developed by myself, with audio by Matt
Strawder.
Pinger is a game about using triangulation to locate gold while
avoiding water and mining as little dirt as possible. By deploying a
sort of sonar pulse, the player can see how far they are from pieces
of gold. By deploying pulses from different locations, they can figure
out the precise locations of these gold pieces.
It was created for the Ludum Dare 29 competition, and was a great
success, earning 29th place, out of over 2000 participants.
(Amusingly, I did not notice this coincidence until writing this
document.)
Park-King is a sliding puzzle game about managing a busy parking lot.
The player arranges cars as they arrive, but they will need to depart
out-of-order. Additionally, there is a period of time in which the
player must break for lunch, and cannot do anything for a few moments.
The game is played by carefully dragging cars around with the mouse.
There is no requirement as to where the cars are placed, so long as
they can depart in time.
Park-King was an entry in the Ludum Dare 28, where the theme was "You
Only Get One". I had interpreted this to mean that the player
character only gets one break from his job, his lunch break at 1:00
PM.
Park-King was my first Ludum Dare project. Reception was mixed: some
players found the game amusing (and even addictive). Others had
absolutely no idea what was going on. The in-game tutorial is
confusing, not to mention cringe-worthy. While I enjoyed this project,
it was a harsh realization that I need to be extremely clear in
describing how to play my games in the future.
Ballin Spain is a game about bouncing a guacamole-colored ball off the
top of the screen as quickly as possible. Some of the platforms in the
game are not what they seem.
Ballin Spain was created for the 2010 Global Game Jam, where the theme
was deception. It was developed by a team of 6:
Brian Wilbur
Chris Mondok
Ian Dunlap
Ivan Potosky
Kevin Anderson
Zach Pinner
This was my first game jam, and while I was skeptical going in, I have
attended every game jam I can since. I highly recommend attending one,
even if you think you have little to bring to the table. You'd be
surprised what you can learn, and they're great fun.
