Games made for by SpindleyQ

Neu] [ower

SpindleyQ — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 18:38:23 +0000

Remember Neut Tower? I made it again, but for the Apple II!

Seriously, it's the same game, rewritten from scratch and running on an older, slower platform. It's been polished a little in some ways - there were accidentally a few ways you could get stuck in the DOS version, which I fixed, and I streamlined The Hellmaze (room 2) a bit. It's also less polished in other ways due to the limitations of the platform and my patience (6 colours, no real animation, occasional flickering, no screen-shake or glitch effects, 1-bit speaker sound). I think it's a good game with some neat puzzles, and you should give it a try if you haven't before!

I spent six months of my life making this, and I enjoyed that process very much. I think it was worth doing. The thing I'm most proud of isn't the game - though I'm still proud of the design of Neut Tower, this project in particular was obviously not designed to stretch my game design muscles.

The reason I built this was Honeylisp.

I didn't actually want to make a game - I wanted to make a tool. I wanted to know if the full, absurd power of a modern laptop could be harnessed to make it easier to program a small single-tasking resource-constrained computer. And one thing I know now, thanks to the experience of building Neut Tower - when you are building tools, it helps a whole lot to have a goal to build towards. So my goal became "can I build a tool that I can use to recreate Neut Tower?"

Honeylisp is, at its core, a collection of tools, designed to work together, that all run within an extensible text editor called lite. The idea was this: I would write a 6502 assembler, using Lisp (Fennel, specifically), whose output would not be a file, but a data structure - obviously the bytes, but also, the symbol tables and potentially any metadata. I would take the output of this assembler, and send it to a scriptable emulator (MAME), which could be told to load the machine code directly into RAM. This would allow me to do any number of useful things - I could assemble and run code on the fly, without restarting my program. I could load new versions of the game into memory without restarting the computer. I had visions of maintaining state between versions - load a new map, or script code, without losing your place in the game -- though the design of Neut Tower is sufficiently constrained that this never became worth my time to implement. But there's no reason I couldn't do it.

I also built tools for creating data for the game - a tile editor, a map editor, a font editor - that ran inside the text editor, as tabs. These tools were all built on top of love2d, which I had ported lite to run on as well, so I would have the full power of a game engine at my disposal.

In short: I wanted to interactively program the Apple II, and I built tools to do that. And they work. I made a game with them. Every byte of it, generated by me and my tools.

Now that I have built a DOS game on a 286, using tools made for 286s, and now that I've built an Apple II game using tools made for modern PCs, I'm hoping I can take what I've learned from this and apply it to building new tools for making games for modern PCs, using modern PCs. We'll see how far I get.

Neut Tower

SpindleyQ — Mon, 03 Feb 2020 01:13:00 +0000

Neut Tower finds a software developer named Jaye trapped in her office after an earthquake. Working together with NEUT, a program she's written to traverse the inner machinery of the tower, she must repair the damage and hack her way to freedom.

EDIT! I've been continuing to work on this and have put out a more fleshed-out "shareware" release! Now featuring more levels, sound effects, savegame support, a boss key, title screen menu, and ANSI shareware catalog. I'm really happy with how it has come together and think it's some of my best work!

ORIGINAL POST FOLLOWS:

What's up Glorious Trainwrecks! It's been a looong time since I released a game!

It so happened that this year, Global Game Jam coincided with a weekend during which the rest of my family would not be around, my house would be totally empty, and I would be highly susceptible to cabin fever if I didn't get out and do SOMETHING. So I figured, what the hell, let's make a game.

I knew going in that I kind of wanted to make a game where you controlled multiple characters that had to cooperate with each other to progress, and where the whole puzzle was laid out on a single screen. I have a special fondness for games like this; for whatever reason I keep coming back to Gobliiins & DataSoft Goonies. I didn't find out the theme ("repair") until Saturday morning, but in the shower I came up with a central conceit that I liked, and a bunch of mechanics that could fit.

I decided to write the game on a 286 MS-DOS PC. No emulators, real hardware. I did this because for about the past year I have been noodling around on a game, and had ended up with a reasonably capable engine (devlog) that I knew inside and out, having written every line of it. It has integrated sprite, tile & map editors and an interactive debugging console that runs over a serial port, and is fully scriptable with a Forth-based programming language interpreter (devlog). So I knew it was capable of being a solid basis for my game idea, and I knew I wouldn't have to spend any time reading bad documentation and learning how to do things, like I would have with Unity or Godot or a Javascript framework.

Anyway! Two days later and I'm really happy with how it turned out! I hope you all like it! I will probably keep working on it!

Lumberjack.wad

SpindleyQ — Sat, 13 Apr 2019 14:43:44 +0000

Here's a Doom WAD I made one day in 2013 and then abandoned for almost exactly 6 years. The other day I remembered it existed, dug it out of a dusty old backup of a long-dead laptop, and cleaned it up a bit.

LUMBERJACK.WAD: You are in an open space filled with trees. Somewhere there is a chainsaw. You can use it to cut the trees down.
TREEPUNCHER.WAD: Inspired by an earlier, buggy version of the same level, it's basically the same except you can also destroy trees by punching them.

Requires a ZDoom-compatible source port (such as gzdoom) and DOOM2.WAD as a base. (I used zdoom to develop it originally, because it was 2013.) It'll also work with Freedoom Phase 2 but it just doesn't feel the same.

I feel like it's appropriate to submit to The Great Resurrection Game Jam more than a year late?

Numerous Wizards

SpindleyQ — Mon, 09 Apr 2018 13:30:54 +0000

A game improvised in about 10 minutes in front of a live audience at Babycastles, to demonstrate the playfulness and joy of Klik & Play.

You can play it in your browser but it's just gonna start crawling when the wizards start flying, so if you're on Windows, please download it. There's a 32-bit .exe included as well as the original Klik & Play version.

Important: I made this game while dressed as a Klik & Play wizard.

SAVE GEOCITIES

SpindleyQ — Fri, 16 Mar 2018 02:22:47 +0000

A remarkably faithful recreation of the average Geocities website in Klik & Play, now updated to run on 32-bit machines. (Original thread)

Air/Sea Giraffe

SpindleyQ — Fri, 16 Mar 2018 02:06:38 +0000

"A love letter to Jeff Minter."

The Klik & Play classic from 10 years ago now has a slightly tweaked 32-bit version! The multiplier limit has been heavily increased, but your multiplier will now be cut in half if you miss the piggy. That's... that's pretty much the extent of it.

The Quest for the Platinum Fart

SpindleyQ — Sun, 04 Jun 2017 18:28:06 +0000

My 9-year-old son Eric and I sat down with Twine and this is what came out. Guess which ideas are mine and which are Eric's! (They're mostly Eric's.)

Metroid II: Return of Carmen Sandiego

SpindleyQ — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 02:39:01 +0000

Carmen and her gang are on the loose again! In this groundbreaking Metroidvainment software product, you are an intergalactic bounty hunter tracking down stolen monuments from all over the multiverse!

Artwork assistance from my son and my girlfriend.

(I made this game entirely, ENTIRELY because I wrote the music first, so speakers up)

For Lynx: Don't Shoot

SpindleyQ — Fri, 17 Jan 2014 20:29:12 +0000

Ho ho oh god it's more than halfway through January

MERRY BELATED XMAS LYNX

You gave me some difficult criteria! Like, "not stupid"! And "Depth"! Those are things I don't normally attempt, but this game turned out really good anyway!

Don't Shoot is an arena shooter where instead of shooting, you run into enemies to destroy them! Sometimes the enemies shoot at you but YOU CAN RUN HEADFIRST INTO THEIR BULLETS AND GET POINTS RAAAR FUCK YOOUUUUU BULLETS

Kill lots of stuff really fast without dying and your multiplier goes up! Complete all four waves and the game loops over, harder, and the multiplier MULTIPLIES! (I have yet to actually complete all four waves but I've gotten close!)

Sound effects courtesy of my son Eric, age 6. He insisted.

I finished this game like a week or two ago but I've been stuck on deciding what music to put in, and finally I decided that you should listen to your own music while you play. It's a feature!

If you want, you can edit the levels by messing around with waves.csv! Make the game vastly easier, or thrust yourself into a punishing, treacherous hellscape of your own devising! The choice is yours! The order of the columns is:
level name, max pursuers, max exploders, max orange circle fuckers (seriously fuck those guys), game ticks

uhhhh

SpindleyQ — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 01:58:50 +0000

so I spent the first hour of Klik of the Month Klub looking at weird VRML worlds in DigitalSpace Traveler

then I fucked around making cubes in unity

mission accomplished?

(arrow keys to move. you win when you have derived the maximum amount of joy from aimlessly gliding among the cubes.)

There Ought To Be A Word

SpindleyQ — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 17:40:01 +0000

An autobiographical game for the Pulse Pounding Heart Stopping Dating Sim Jam. My first game made in Twine.

I've been trying to make something on this subject for a while, so thanks to madamluna for providing an opportunity to frame it in a way that made sense to me.

For sergiocornaga: It's Christmastime!

SpindleyQ — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 06:27:33 +0000

It's Christmastime! Merry Christmas, Sergio!

Use the mouse or touchscreen to play.

Music is by Patrick Alexander.

Santabalt

SpindleyQ — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 06:50:42 +0000

oh my god it is now 2 in the morning

I did not intend to spend 6 hours on this

I am sorry Adam Saltsman and Danny B. Style for taking your work and adding so little

I am sorry Pizza Time for putting pants on your magnificent pixel Santa sprite

(but you can hit shift-P to take them off)

Deliver presents to all of the children of the world! Don't fall off a building before you finish or Christmas will be ruined!

Whirlybird

SpindleyQ — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 01:38:55 +0000

I'm mostly uploading this to try and suss out the horrible crashy site bug that happens when you upload a game, but here! Have a game from my distant past!

Made in 1998 at the age of 16, Whirlybird is a remake of a Commodore 64 game by the same name. (It's not a popular or particularly good C64 game, by any stretch; it was on a shovelware disk that a friend of mine had.) Shoot down helicopters before they fly off the screen! Hit the mouse button to detonate a nuclear bomb which destroys everything on screen! And that's about it!

Run it in DOSBox, I couldn't be bothered to port it to Windows.

Alright fingers crossed that I get the error message

RoboDinos

SpindleyQ — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 01:35:55 +0000

Game designed mostly by my son Eric.

You are DINOBOT, and your job is to undo the foul deeds of GIGABOT (pronounced "Jiggabot"), the bad giganotosaurus, who is stomping all the dinosaurs! Use your bring back to life gun to bring the dinosaurs back to life.

All graphics courtesy of JURASSIC ART

EDIT: Eric came to check things out this morning and decided the game needed more kinds of dinosaurs and also sound effects. So we added those things.

EVOLVE, YOU FUCKER!

SpindleyQ — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 16:49:57 +0000

I made a game for Ludum Dare! The theme was EVOLUTION so I made a game about turning into a lizard. EVOLUTION is a programmer-wank game theme so I made it for the Atari 2600. I have not had a chance to test on real hardware but it'll probably be fine.

Permanent video game instructions are included in the readme.

KaoS

SpindleyQ — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 01:16:18 +0000

Another TOTALLY FUCKING RHINOCEROS release
from Spindley Crew...
 ____  __.              _________
|    |/ _|____    ____ /   _____/
|      < \__  \  /  _ \\_____  \ 
|    |  \ / __ \(  <_> )        \
|____|__ (____  /\____/_______  /
        \/    \/              \/ 
A Mother-Fucking Klik & Play Fractal Zoomer
Released at Action Point 2012


Controls:
 * Space bar to start
 * Click on a pixel to zoom at that spot
 * R fully zooms out
 * C cycles through colour schemes

GREETZ TO: Secret European Software Cracking Unit,
   XaoS team, `snapman, mojofltr, bc_, Smedis2, EffBee,
   and anyone else who enters AP2012
   and every member of the Klik of the Month Klub

Apventure of the Valkyries

SpindleyQ — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 02:15:12 +0000

A faithful re-implementation of the classic Apple ][ game for the web!

I had this game years ago as a kid, on a disk with a bunch of other random pirated games. I could never quite figure out what I was supposed to do. Now, with the modern internet and FAQs and all that, I know it's actually possible to defeat the Valkyrie! Kind of ruined the magic, though.

As usual with Construct 2, I have problems running this with Firefox. If you do too, try Chrome. Sorry :(

Polyfurcation

SpindleyQ — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 01:57:02 +0000

The mechanics of this game appeared fully-formed in my head while half asleep one morning last week. I've been spending every spare moment working on it since.

Seriously this is the best game I've ever worked on. (EDIT: upon a few minutes reflection, I've realised that no, Putt-Putt is way better. But this is still really good.) So much potential. You should play it and tell me what you think of it so far.

It is a game about dudes on a grid that need to get to a goal, except you can create more or less dudes by passing them through blocks larger than one square.

I have four sets of levels that I'm calling "worlds". The first world is a set of 4 "this is how the game works" levels. The second world is a set of 3 "mazey" levels, which are good. The third world is a set of 3 levels involving enclosed squares, which act as crazy traps from which your dudes can never escape. These levels are also pretty good. The fourth world is a set of 3 mediocre levels about building weird shapes. I don't think these are very interesting, but I am very interested to hear what your experiences with them are like.

Putt-Putt Saves The Stew

SpindleyQ — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 01:42:24 +0000

So this is an adventure game designed entirely by my 4.5 year old son Eric.

He was playing a lot of Putt-Putt Saves The Zoo at the time. He started joking about Putt-Putt having to save other rhyming things (we do a lot of dumb punning), and we started talking about what Putt-Putt Saves The Stew would be like, and pretty soon we had agreed to set aside a big chunk of a Saturday actually making it.

I tried as much as possible to let him design everything without my input; my job was just to find out what his vision was and turn it into reality. We started by writing a little design document (spoilers!), where we hashed out what the central conflict was, and who the characters are, and what the puzzles would be.

Next we worked out the details of the geography of the game by drawing a map (spoilers!); I started drawing a few squares and linking them together, but pretty soon he got the idea and insisted on taking over.

Then we split up while he drew a bunch of art, and I started getting familiar with Adventure Game Studio.

Once I had a skeleton of the game in place, including scanning and putting in all of his artwork, we started to write and record dialogue. Basically, for all of the situations I could think of, I just asked him what he thought should happen, and I coded it up as we went.

Hints / Tidbits / Easter Eggs:
You can steal baby vegetables back from their parents by using the key on them. I thought this was a bug, Eric thought it was hilarious and made me keep it in.

There is only one ending, at his insistence. It is morbid.

Nobody has kidnapped the baby vegetables. There is no antagonist. They were just out walking and accidentally wandered into the cages and the doors locked behind them. Eric wanted to make it so that if you saved them, they would wander away, find their way back to the cages and get trapped again, but that was never implemented.

The thing that you start with in the inventory is your trusty dog Pep, who shows up in every Putt-Putt game and is mostly useless. Here he continues the tradition. There's only one thing you can do with him, on the first screen.

We recorded music, but it's not integrated into the game. Maybe I'll upload some, or we'll release a 1.1 with a title screen or something. Dunno. I get the feeling Eric's kind of tired of working on the game, and I don't want to push him if he's not enjoying the process.

EDIT: Mac port added.

Lasertube Sneak Preview: Trapped In The Closet

SpindleyQ — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 02:47:49 +0000

Oh, shit.

So a while ago I had this idea to write a tool that would let you turn any YouTube video into a Dragon's Lair / Dungeon Escape-like FMV arcade game. Specifically, I really, really wanted to turn R. Kelly's immortal 90-minute-long hip-hopera "Trapped In The Closet" into an awful FMV game. I've been poking at the project, off and on, for like a year now.

Well, I've finally buckled down and finished something that other people can check out. CHECK IT OUT. The editing tool is not terribly far away from being publicly releasable; mostly just some web backend stuff that needs tightening up.

It occurred to me today that allowing Typing-of-the-Dead-like segments where you have to actually type "oh shit" would make things much, much more interesting. So I'll probably tackle that soon, too.

This Game Always Tells The Truth

SpindleyQ — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 21:31:26 +0000

A game for What Would Molydeux? / MolyJam 2012. Based on this tweet (spoilers).

Here, finally, is a game that will always give it to you straight! Expect to receive nothing but the truth in this refreshing game, where everything is as it seems.

Dr. Sbaitso Dating Sim

SpindleyQ — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 23:29:09 +0000

Oh my goodness, you've got a hot date with Dr. Sbaitso, the famous computer psychiatrist!

NOW FEATURING VOICE ACTING.

(Everything Dr. Sbaitso says in this game is something Dr. Sbaitso said to me while making it. Yes, even the good ending.)

(this is totally a Socially Awkward Conversationalist fangame)

One-Button GIRP

SpindleyQ — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 21:15:21 +0000

So while at GDC I heard a story about this game. Apparently, while he was making it (at GDC), a "usability guru" came up and started talking to him about it. His suggestion: Use fewer keys. It's too complicated to use all ten numbers to denote points on the screen; people will get confused.

So of course upon hearing this well-meaning but obviously misguided advice, I decided to make One-Button GIRP.

Hold in the space bar to gather strength, release to launch yourself in the air. You grab handholds automatically, assuming you're not moving too fast to grab onto it. (In practice this means your "jumps" have to be pretty carefully calibrated.)

Sound effects by Daphny.

▓á^X░@{Å╣⌡

SpindleyQ — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 06:10:59 +0000

Press a key when the hidden colour matches the non-hidden colour! In the end, your score is measured in particles.

Made for the GDC Noisebridge Jam 2012.

Gavin on Mars: Eric Expansion Pack

SpindleyQ — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 03:11:39 +0000

Eric (age 4) was delighted with his Kickstarter reward game, Gavin on Mars, but he had a few ideas of his own that he wanted to see come to life. We left the original untouched, and simply added on to the end. You can skip there by pressing the "E" key at the first screen(s).

First screen: A two-player ape vs. robot fight! Here you are meant to bump into each other and go "Aaugh, you got me!"

Second screen: Was actually made first; thus the exploration of the different objects. Here the robot is not controllable; his job is to run around pinching everyone. The helicopter thing happened by accident, but understanding it is key to moving on.

Third screen: Here Eric remade the unicorn-riding segment to his own specifications. I'll let you discover what that means.

Fourth screen: He just wanted to see more plants.

Nothing happens.

SpindleyQ — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 21:20:05 +0000

Nothing happens.

Busgame

SpindleyQ — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 20:51:35 +0000

BUSGAME is the first ever BUS PASSENGER SIMULATOR. Wait for your bus! Get off at the right stop! Don't get run over! Also you're a sheep?

started writing this on a bus and then spent like another 2 and a half hours on it

this took way too long and I'm so sick of it jesus

Gatekeeper

SpindleyQ — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 06:05:34 +0000

Made for a Kickstarter reward.

Constellation Games is a serial novel by Leonard Richardson, who you might know as the writer of the excellent short story Mallory, or the designer of robotfindskitten. It involves a man whose first instinct when the space aliens arrive is to wonder what kind of videogames they play. Gatekeeper is one of them.

The best way to explain it would be to quote the chapter at you, but basically you're in charge of making sure people transition correctly from the land of the living to the land of the dead, and vice versa. (Ghosts with Serious Business to attend to are allowed to return briefly; but if it's the living half of a dead Farang demanding a refund, flick them back from whence they came.)

Played with the mouse, rather than the inscrutable abacus/pipe organ controller that the Brain Embryo originally shipped with.

Music by goto80; sound effects by RutgerMuller.

Eat The Earth

SpindleyQ — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 19:21:22 +0000

The earth is delicious and must be consumed! EAT IT. EAT IT ALL.

Sounds by j1987 and NoiseCollector.