Salem Fair

clyde's picture
salem fair.gif

Made for the 2016 Flatgame event. I broke a lot of rules, but the simplicity of the prompt certainly initiated this project.
Use WASD for movement.

Author: 
clyde
Made For: 
An event

Comments

2sman's picture

I wanna go back to the

I wanna go back to the guttering and bathtub expo!

I loved the touches with the art section.

The music added a lot (the pop up worked for me on a mac with chrome). The track I heard was Today by Bob Paisley or something like that.

really enjoyed this.

sergiocornaga's picture

I like that when I went back

I like that when I went back to the car it wasn't there.

Son of a dolphin's picture

i also liked that, overall

i also liked that, overall it had a good vibe, wandering around and seeing little things

fizzhog's picture

Really enjoyed this.

Really enjoyed this. Actually captured the feel really well of wandering around such ramshackle local events and wanting to see everything tucked away in odd corners. This one though seemed stranger than most such that I've been to; the rat and the circus family were especially unnerving somehow.

Sorry but I've got lots of technical stuff I thought you might want to know. Some of it may be down to me being an idiot but anyway.

Firefox:
Game worked nicely but sound was a disappointment - wouldn't seem to go further than an advert for me even allowing popups.

IE:
Took me ages to figure out how to stop the whole page scrolling down when using the down arrow. For anyone similarly stumped - click on the grey frame around the game (not the game itself) and then press F7 to turn on 'caret browsing' - this worked for me. Sound still as above.

Chrome:
Just couldn't figure out how to stop the scrolling problem at all in Chrome. Sound still as above.

I avoid arrow keys and use WASD because of this sort of thing and also because of laptop keyboards.

clyde's picture

Thanks. I'm looking into

Thanks. I'm looking into solutions for the scrolling problem.

mkapolk's picture

I really like the detail in

I really like the detail in this one. The top down sprites do a good job of capturing the atomicity of fair booths. Each having their own separate identity but bounded very precisely in space. I enjoyed the moment when I encountered the generator and the strange dialog text shocked me into noticing the little power lines connecting everything.

The embedded photos give it an interesting uncanniness. Uncanny maybe is the wrong word, but I think what I mean is there are certain tropes that become synonymous with fairs in media that don't really hold true in reality. And the photos give some insight into why the elements in the game world are placed as they are. I kind of wish some of the booths had close up photos that didn't, though. Like the rat beast. What does the rat beast look like clyde?

Also, what did you mean when you said that fair games are "foldable?"

clyde's picture

There's a little bit of

There's a little bit of extra context to the Giant Rat attraction that I find entertaining. We walked by it and it was like $1 just to look at the Giant Rat. I thought that this set-up was especially novel and I asked Chrissy if she wanted to see the Giant Rat and she was like "Yeah, I want to see it!" and I said "Well, I think it will be fun if you go see it and then describe it to me rather than both of us going to see it." She comes back and says "It's a giant rat, it's just sleeping there on some hay. It's not a rat though, it's got a head like a horse." I asked her if it was some sort of puppet, but she said "no", and that it was definitely alive. Later on she looked at animal photos online and identified what she saw as a capybara.

What I meant by "foldable" is that the structures (including the rides) all have to be collapsible for transporting them around. I feel like that gives them a particular quality that I find attractive.
Something I wanted to put in, but ended up skipping was that they had a caricature booth and all of the sample caricatures were celebrities from the 90's: Michael Jordan, Michael Keaton as Batman, Michael Jackson... HEY! there were a lot of Michaels!

Future homework assignment

Very interesting. This feels like a future homework assignment where a fifth-grader has to do an interactive report on something s/he did over the summer and their slightly lame parent suggested the Salem Fair and they weren’t super excited by the idea because it wasn’t really awesome enough compared to what other kids were going to present on but they couldn’t come up with anything better so they did their best anyway, 100%. Except that the commentary is from someone more thoughtful and way better grounded than any future fifth grader.

The local radio station really is an excellent touch.