david hayward contacted me at the end of august about exhibiting a game at the eurogamer expo’s indie games arcade going on right now in leeds and at halloween in london. i had just over a month to put something together, and it was a month i was moving across the country. to save time, i decided to just bundle together some games i’d already made.

cactus made a compilation of games he’s made in a couple hours, so why not me? (cactus helped out a lot with putting this thing together, by the way. thanks, cactus!) my one- and two-hour games are all from klik of the month klub, and you know what? i’m really proud of them, and i want to show them to the british. there aren’t enough satirical games in the press, and i don’t think many people outside of the klub played these. maybe they can get on playthisthing at least.

download calamity anna’s shootin’ starcade

like octopounce, shootin’ starcade is designed to run continously and to pass hands many times. there are some persistant elements in the game menu that allow a limited kind of communication between players. bullet holes shot in the wall linger, and hombres that pop up in the windows can be shot to add to a running score in the corner of the screen. at the end of a session, the score can function as a kind of gauge of player engagement with the arcade.

one of the considerations of designing a game to run all day, by the way, is making the quit command too obscure for anyone to figure out. pay attention to this, because you’re going to forget and have to CTRL-ALT-DEL out of the game: to quit starcade from the menu, press the Q U I and T keys at the same time! this also solves another problem: if the ESC key was used to exit both individual games and the menu, it’d be easy to accidentally quit the whole thing. (cactus warned me about this!)

annotations: bibleshock is based on this design document, patented by dr. elliot mcgucken. gay sniper is inspired by a video by “west virginia for marriage.” space invaders features graphics and sounds from taito’s space invaders, and the sounds in dodgeball were recorded by zarf for his 1994 puzzle game system’s twilight. the music featured in the arcade was composed by amon26, author of the just-out au sable. oh, and the above photo was taken by rob fearon.

speaking of me, cactus, and messhof, we’re going to be sitting on a panel in new york on november 5th! it’ll be at nyu’s tisch building, probably starting at 6:00 pm. be there!