games.
I make weird, dreamy walking simulators as a hobby. I am not a programmer so I mostly focus on making small vignettes that capture a specific feeling or a mood. Years ago, I wrote a kind of abstract manifesto about the types of games I want to make titled ‘games are dreams’: most of my inspiration for making games comes from me wanting to recreate a feeling of a dreamlike state. I feel like it is worthy in & of itself for the player to experience and play with perception of a space, and this is my very artistic excuse for why my games don’t require much interaction to be implemented.
My latest game: Lights
I made Lights for a GMI game jam. The prompt was “lights” (I know, titles are not really my thing). Lights is made with bitsy (which I can’t recommend enough for aspiring game makers), pixsy and GPT-3. Yet again, the time constraints of a game jam enable me to actually finish something, and I’m quite happy with how Lights turned out. I feel like it pushed my knowledge of bitsy as this was my first time making use of a tool for bitsy and I experimented a bit more with the animations than I have done so far. The tool I used was pixsy, which allows you to turn any image into a room for your bitsy game. After creating the rooms with pixsy, I did go in and make small tweaks to the pixels of each room by hand, but it definitely streamlines the process a ton from having to hand draw every single pixel (which I did for Juice Quest for example).
Lights is a haiku written by GPT-3:
in the night sky, stars twinkle like distant fireflies guiding us home.
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Juice Quest
I made Juice Quest for a GMI game jam. The prompt was “juice”. Juice Quest is made with bitsy. I had a lot of fun making Juice Quest. It’s always nice when you are working on something for a game jam because you are restricted both creatively and in terms of scope/time. This is the perfect forcing function for people like me to actually finish a project. My short description of Juice Quest is that it is a game about hangovers and sleep paralysis.
That is probably not the most accurate description, but my goal was to create a short story that would recall the types of dreams you have when you are in between states of dreaming and waking, and maybe even under the influence. I was also obsessively listening to Bo Burnham’s Inside when I made this, which is why there is not one, but two references to Inside in the game. I recommend pairing Juice Quest with All Eyes On Me by Bo Burnham.
the 9
Maybe we’re not supposed to have favorites, but the 9 is my favorite. In fact, I may have shed a tear of joy when I just recently discovered that you can still play the 9 on PC. It hasn’t worked on Mac for a while, and sadly my original Unity project for the 9 is in such a state that there’s no way my non-technical brain can salvage it to re-export it for Mac. I might do a walkthrough video soon so that I can at least upload it to YouTube and have proof of it when it inevitably becomes unplayable everywhere.
the 9 was made with Unity. Sounds by freesound.org, credit to users: LimitSnap_Creations & InspectorJ.
All textures - yes, every single one of them, are made from a close-up image of a frozen windshield on a particularly cold morning in Reykjavík.
If you want to check out my other games, visit my itch.io page.