Mandible Games

The planet is dying.

Monsters raise themselves out of the ocean monthly. The skies themselves blacken.

You, and your civilization, have but one choice: amass enough magical power to leap across the starless void, to another, safer planet. But you're racing against time – every day the attacks get stronger.

The planet is dying, and it's taking you with it.

Ludum Dare competition page and voting

Windows (.zip version available)
Mac OSX (10.6 or higher)

Nieuwe Aarde was made for Ludum Dare 17, a 48-hour game development competition. Yeah, that's right, my normal week-long development process was compressed into two days.

Ouch.

The theme for this event was Islands, and so Islands is what I did! Nieuwe Aarde was inspired by Desktop Dungeons and Seafarers of Catan, and I feel like I've made a reasonably coherent little single-player strategy game with a whole pile of tooltips.

Postmortem up in a few days. Time to start on the next project!

Thought I'd give you a quick peek of my next short project, as well as an idea of what this stuff looks like early on.

I bet you want to know what those buttons do, don't you? Well they don't do anything whatsoever. You push them, they highlight, and then nothing happens.

But this is what 3.5 hours of development gets me. Tomorrow I'll hook the buttons up to work, and then see if the game design works. Might work. Might not. We'll see!

I should probably get this done before I finish another game.

What Went Right and What Went Wrong

This was a very focused game. I started working on gameplay and I pretty much ended working on gameplay. There's no graphics, no sound, and the game does suffer from it a bit. The gizmos started to look too similar – many of them are based on the same texture, only differently textured and shaped, and that really isn't enough. They should look more different and they should stand out better than they do, the wall texture is just too distracting.

The gameplay I think I pretty much nailed. Or, rather, I nailed it as much as I could within a week. I'm actually still coming up with ways to mathematically describe the levels, and I think I could make even more interesting game layouts. I managed to abuse Lua in some exciting ways that I hadn't done before, and it turned out really really well – I'm finally getting my dev environment set up so I can do extremely complex stuff easily, and that is just damn cool.

The Bottom Line

I continue to be excited about this game, and this is one of the few that I've felt possibly worthy of being fleshed out into something bigger. That said, I've got like two other games queued up before I'll have a chance to come back to it, possibly more. So we'll see! We'll see.

It's on the Short List.

It's that time of month again! The time for games.

Robert Recurring is a side-scrolling puzzle game that is arguably about time travel. No, I did not remake Braid. It is about a different time travel gimmick than Braid.

Windows (.zip version available)
Mac OSX (10.6 or higher)

I know what you're saying. "Oh, this game looks terrible! He must have given up again." No, on the contrary – I ended up spending the entire week working on really fascinating game mechanics, and I've got half a dozen ideas that I didn't have time to get to. Lots of design ideas = no graphics. You don't get graphics.

Graphics aren't for you.

Let me know what you think.