A noir game where a vampire drives a taxi in the streets of New Wenders.
You play as the taxi driver, and get to talk with the passengers through a series of branching dialogues.
Ultimately, you can choose whether you want to take them to their destination or feed on them.
Taxi By Night was made in 5 days for #VampireJam, so it’s very small in scope, I used it mostly to learn a bit of 3d development. The game will be updated with more story bits 🙂
All 3D models are from Quaternius. You can get them for free on his website and support him on patreon.
Between E32018 and the World Cup, June has been a month full of distractions, specially since I make my makes on my free time.
Despite that, I still managed to get a good amount done, and a very important part of Blackout, even though it might not be the most exciting: text revision. It has been a long time since I wrote it, and some of the later chapters have never undergone a true revision.
In order to make this task easier I decided to change the tool I was using to keep the text, which wasn’t really a IF tool, it was just google docs, which is better than what I used when I originally wrote the story: two small notebooks.
So I decided to move the story from google docs to Twine, even though I’m not using twine for the game implementation itself (I’m using my own framework, which I’ll go into more detail on next month’s post) making it easier to have a good overview of the flow of each chapter, easier to find a passage and also easier to test.
Well that’s a bit messy
This is a chapter from Blackout, you can see how chaotic and non-linear it looks, even though in this specific chapter most paths end time leading to the same exit (wide boxes are the end point, and each of them leads to a different chapter). Even though a direct path through the chapter might be short, there are several different ways of approaching every situation.
This chapter has almost 8k words, if you’re the type that is interested in numbers, this is the average for most chapters, some are bigger and some are smaller. If you played through the preview that is up on itch.io, you saw that the writing style is very simple and direct, I want the player to move fast through the story, and do this several times over, so it can’t be some Tolkienesque thing where I describe every small rock on the way.
On other news, I also took some time on a weekend to participate in the Godot Community Jam. I tried Godot for the first time earlier this year in another game jam and liked it a lot, so I wanted to get more practice, and I thought game jams are probably the best way to achieve that right now, given the small amount of free time I have.
I ended up making a very simple game, in roughly 8 hours. The theme of the jam was Temperature. You can check all entries here.
That’s it for June, I decided to start making this monthly report because one of my goals for 2018 was posting in the blog more often. For the next post I’ll try to go a bit into the framework I’ve built (and am still building) for Blackout.
This Ludum Dare’s theme was “The more you have, the worse it is”. I didn’t have a lot of time so I setup to do something very simple: a clicker about lootboxes.
As it often happens, even though it was a simple idea, I didn’t have time to do everything I wanted, but the spirit of the whole thing is there.
The idea for this game was to take the concept of the classic “Rock, Paper, Scissors” game and try to do something cool and different, so the first thing that came to my mind was “what if the players have to throw big stones with the Rock/Paper/Scissor shapes at each other?”.
So we tried to think about it as if it were a kind of Sport, with spectators and all, something that would be like a mixture of Sumo and Jan-Ken-Po.
The game respects the rules of Jan Ken Po, so if a player holding a “Rock” stone hits a player holding a “Scissor” stone, the one holding the Rock will win. If one player holding a stone hits a player who is not holding any stones, the player holding the stone wins, regardless of the stone. The first player to win 2 rounds, wins the game.
The GameJam itself is based on the Famicase Exhibition that takes place in Japan every year, where artist draw the cover art for games that don’t exist. So basically the only rule is that you have to choose one of these covers and make a game based on it. This is the now we chose:
This past weekend we participated on a local GameJam in Limassol, Cyprus. The game jam lasted 48 hours, and the theme was Japan. Another requisites included using Microsoft Azure platform, Unity3D and some kind of multiplayer or leaderboards.
We tried to steer away from the most common themes like Ninjas and Samurais, so our entry was called Yokai Mask, inspired by the traditional Japanese masks used in dances and theater.
In Yokai Mask you play as a little girl who has to avoid and trick the Yokai by using masks that make her look like them. Another think we wanted was to create a game without combat, so instead of killing your enemies you must avoid them or drive them away, making it more of a puzzle platform than action.
Since we were very happy with the result we intend to polish the game a bit more, do a better level design and make it a bit longer. The game also got 2nd place on the Game Jam.
I made a small game for the #1BitClickerJam, did not have a lot of time to put into it, but thankfully the Game Jam was 2 weeks long, so I managed to finish the basic functionalities I wanted for this game.
I had this idea on my mind for a long time, so when I heard about the game jam I thought it would be a great opportunity to finally get it done. The main idea was to use all the mindless/endless clicking to draw a parallel to the stupidity of wars in general.
I am not an artist, and this was my first time trying to draw pixel art, so it really sucks. I probably should have gone for more of a minimalistic style, specially for the soldiers.
Finally had the chance to participate on my first game jam, and I had a ton of fun!
I made this game in 5 days (the game jam lasted 9 days, but I was busy in the beginning), the idea was to make some sort of a Typing-Shmup, even though I never played a typing game I thought it would be a fun challenge.
The theme was “Bleak Cyberpunk Dystopia” and/or “E3 Presentation”.
Mini Chimera Game Studio 