Mat's blog

Game 1 ended up being a huge failure. I think the main reason for this was a lack of experience in game development in general, and a poor choice of programming language, which I didn’t really know how to use properly when I started (flash/actionscript). As a result I wasted a lot of time trying to learn stuff and wasn’t able to put together anything playable within the time span I set myself.

Trying to come up with good ideas in so short a time was challenging, but I think I did have some workable ideas. While the obvious interpretation of “space” is a broad enough theme in itself, I decided to explore other meanings rather than immediately settling for some kind of spaceship game. Some of the ideas I had -

• An abstract game where the player manipulates empty space somehow, by rearranging or destroying things
• A tetris variant
• Human expansion has left the solar system overcrowded and you have to destroy things to make space, possibly related to the Vogons in h2g2 (reflecting the theme in two ways)
• Something related to recycling and consumerism (not enough space for all the garbage we produce?)
• Any kind of space in the mathematical sense
• Something related to the concept of personal space. e.g. avoiding other commuters on a crowded train (I rejected this but kept the general idea for my final game)

The idea I went with was a game in which you have to maintain a certain amount of space around you to survive. The player is a boy who is trying to avoid catching “cooties” from girls who run at the player from offscreen. Also the player is armed with a baseball bat.

This is as far as I got:
Failed game

I was bored so I made this little flash thing where you can make blobs that move around and then disappear! Hurray!

A while ago I made this in flash: drawing thing

I also attempted to make a version which could save, and used it to make an exquisite corpse thingy where you have to draw the next part of the story. However, it turned out to be insanely slow since it has to send the data for each pixel to a php script before it can save each image as a jpeg. I’m still quite proud of it though. You can see it here. I might experiment with it a bit more in the future and see if I can speed it up somehow.

Also of interest: Eat Poop U Cat is a fun game where you have to recreate the previous sentence in the chain as a picture, or vice versa, which produces some very strange pictures.