I teamed up for Global Game Jam 2015 with Mike Waterston and Tori Kamal so that we could bring to you a fully functional, honest to goodness, working Time Machine. This is not a simulation
Here is a little screen capture for the timid:
Cycho is Alfred Hitchcock meets Tron light cycles. Two players compete for survival as they maneuver on a giant moving eye. The two players can fight for control of the eye, or a third person can play as the eye and menace the two cycles. It might just be the weirdest game of "snakes" you'll ever play. Eye think you should try it.
I submitted Cycho to the 2015 Independent Games Festival. This is the first time I've submitted one of my games to IGF.
Cycho is based off of a 48 hour solo project that I created during the 2014 Global Game Jam. I used a WebGL bulge filter to create the 3D effect on the eyeball. The awesome music and sound are by Dan Knoflicek.
Tron rules apply... don't hit yourself, the other player, or the edge of the box marking the arena. Google Chrome gives the best experience. Xbox controllers recommended. There is an instructions screen in the game.
I've been working on a study of glitches in the NES rendering/sprite system. Here's a video showing realtime glitching of a Legend of Zelda screencap. What you see is a completely procedural and randomized effect rendered in realtime through a WebGL pixel shader written in GLSL with a driver program written in JavaScript.
Make sure to check out Cycho -- a more recent and more polished version of my GGJ 2014 project.
If you're like to learn about the original Global Game Jam project, then read on!
Global Game Jam 2014 was this weekend. I jammed with everybody at the IGDA-TC location. This year's GGJ had people participating at 485 locations in 73 countries. I think there were close to 80 people at our location, and several of them stayed on-site for the entire 48 hours. I think one person stayed there and stayed awake for the entire 48 hours. No, it was definitely not me. There are twelve of our games on the website, but I know many other games and prototypes were worked on by the attendees. I ended up making the game Eye Cycle.
This year's theme was the sentence, "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." I was pretty stumped in terms of game ideas from that theme, although I will say it left me pretty deep in thought about the nature of games themselves. Surely, the way we perceive other peoples' games often says more about ourselves than those games. And definitely the games we make say something personal about ourselves. The best games are maybe the most personally meaningful... even if that meaning isn't explicit to the player.
After the theme was announced, GGJ kicked off like it always does with a group brainstorm where people share their game ideas. This has always been one of my favorite parts of GGJ, because I love to see everybody's creativity and riff off the ideas that are shared.
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