In case you’re wondering what World of Goo is, click this link and watch the trailer and be amazed. It’s hard for me to put into words how much I admire what Kyle and Ron have done, so I’m going to borrow a quote from the Eurogamer review:

If there’s any justice, World of Goo will set the internet aflame and earn its creators a million dollars. The members of 2D Boy should be carried around in chariots while this glory lasts - because at some point, they’re going to realise what a murderously high standard they’ve set for themselves, and run away forever.

The reason is I’ve been working hard on getting Crayon Physics Deluxe done (that’s also the excuse for my the lack of posts, not doing the dishes and for pretty much anything that needs explaining). But I’ll promise to post more about Crayon Physics Deluxe soon. Unless I’m working so hard on it that I’ll forget to post about it.

I’ll also try to come up with a game for the Gamma 3D (the deadline is 15th of October), but things are pretty hectic now here at the Kloonigames offices (read my apartment), so I don’t know. We’ll see.

Me and Erik Svedäng (of Blueberry Garden -fame) made a game together during that weekend. That game turned out to be this NSFW art game, with a feminist message and we weren’t sure should we post it online or not. So what we did was I continued to work on the game a little and we agreed that I could release the SFW version of the game here.

Knock the Monster

Download

Knock.zip (7.4 Mb) (Release 1)

Instructions
Your girlfriend is dead and the Gods say that to bring her back you have to knock over dozens of Monsters.

The goal is to knock over the green monster with the 16-ton weight. You can draw chains and if the boulder hits the end of a chain it will get attached to it.

Draw chains with your mouse. Right clicking will remove chains. To start the simulation click on the Start button (or press space).

Once the simulation is running you can cut chains by clicking on them.

Troubleshooting
If you have problems getting the game to run I’d suggest on installing the newest DirectX 9.0c drivers and making sure you have .Net Framework 2.0 installed.

Credits
Game by:
Erik Svedäng
Petri Purho

Music: Martinibomb and the Coconut Monkeyrocket - Munster Beat!

Sound Effects: anvil_strike_1.ogg - anvil_strike_8.ogg are from Sample package “Industrial_Percussion” by l0calh05t.
chained_up.ogg is from cadenas.wav by plagasul.
click_ok.wav is from click 1 d.wav by TicTacShutUp and
click_deny.wav is sampled from click 1 off click.wav by TicTacShutUp.
Sound effects are licensed under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 License.

The game uses Erin Catto’s Box2D physics engine.

Inspiration source: Experimental Gameplay Project.

Knock the Monster uses: SDL and SDL_Mixer.

Wow, I think I’ve finally gotten the hang of this blogging thing: 7 posts this month, updated wordpress to the latest version, wrote a headline directly from a blogging guide. Those professional bloggers all say that the headline is the most important thing about a blog post and nothing drives traffic more than “Top X Y things” -headlines. Professional blogging career here I come!

Seriously. This is the link. I updated this blog a little bit and created this page that lists all the games that I’ve created. The order is chronological so it’s not really a “top 24″ list of my games, because it’s so hard to judge your own babies. (No it’s not, but the real reason is that this was much easier to do from the technical point of view. It keeps it self updated and everything.)

The fine people of kokoromi just announced Gamma 3D. Gamma has now become this yearly awesome indie art game party held in Montreal as a part of the Montreal International Game Summit. This year’s theme is stereoscopy and they are calling for games that use stereoscopy as part of their gameplay, instead of just being a purely visual trick. It’s an interesting challenge.

Last years theme was low resolution (256×256 was the maximum) and the results were surprisingly beautiful and inspiring. A lot of really good games came out the last year’s challenge: Mr. Heart Loves You Very Much, Passage and StdBits are the first to pop in to my mind. My entry was Bloody Zombies, which wasn’t exactly the most artistic entry of the bunch… So needless to say, I’m really looking forward to what will come out of this year’s Gamma.

If you’re interested in participating the submission deadline is October 15th. And the Gamma3D party, with the selected games, beer and 3D glasses is taking place on November 19th.

[via newretro.org]

I just finished playing though the first world (collected all the puzzle pieces), and I’m totally blown away by it (pun intended). My congrats to Jonathan Blow and David Hellman and everyone involved. You’ve created one beautiful game.

Also I’d like to repeat what Chris Hecker said about the game. If you enjoy the game (which you will) spread the word. Tell your friends, blog about it, digg about it. Independent games, like Braid, don’t have the marketing power that big studios have. They really need the word-of-mouth to be successful. And if there is any justice in this world, Braid should be a huge commercial success. Put your part in and make sure that Braid doesn’t end up being the Psychonauts of indie games.

Now I’m gonna go and solve the rest of worlds…

Jonathan Blow’s beautiful game Braid is finally available on the Xbox Live Arcade. If you’re an owner of Xbox 360 you should go buy it. Now. Seriously.

It’s the best game I’ve played in years. I’m predicting that the Internets will go nuts about this game. I know that I went nuts after playing the game. The game made me realize that I didn’t know anything about game design and after playing the game I got some what depressed because of it. So if you’re an aspiring game designer and you think you know something about game design, don’t play this game. You will get depressed, sad and fan boyish towards Jonathan.

(Btw. I don’t own a 360, so I’m actually really tempted to go out and buy one just to play Braid. Jon has promised that the game will be released on PC later this year, but still I’m really tempted to go buy one so I could play the game right now.)

Choke on my Groundhog, YOU BASTARD ROBOTS was my game development competition entry. I came in third! Which is cool since there were some really nice games in this year’s competition.

Here are the top 5 of Assembly game dev combo:

1   3692p   Dave the Ordinary Spaceman by Lasi Interactive
2   3056p   Kiuasturvat feat. VastaIsku by SX cracked by tAAt
3   2867p   Choke on my Groundhog, YOU BASTARD ROBOTS by Kloonigames
4   2636p   Pakoon III - First Blood by Mayoneez, Osmic & Kani
5   2107p   FlipOut by Mikkosoft Productions

Link to the full results

As you can see my archnemesis Jetro beat me again this year. His entry Kiuasturvat came in second and beat Groundhog by 231 points. Last year my game was fourth and Jetro beat me with just 10 points…

Also this year I held a seminar at the Assembly. It was called Making of Crayon Physics Deluxe or How I Got Lucky and Won the IGF. The talk it self went well and people seemed to enjoy it. Unfortunately the Assembly crew hasn’t posted my talk online yet (and I doubt that they ever will). But you can watch my archnemesis’ Jetro’s and Jani’s talk online in the meanwhile

Image stolen from http://www.assembly.org/

Choke on my Groundhog, YOU BASTARD ROBOTS

Download

Groundhog_r05.zip (7.0 Mb) (Release 5)

Instructions

Robots are always bastards. There’s no way around it. We build them and they killed us all. Well almost all, I’m the Earth’s last survivor. But with my time traveling groundhog sidekick I’m going to destroy the robot liberation army and take back Earth.

Control with [WASD or ARROW KEYS]. Aim and Shoot with mouse [LEFT BUTTON]. When you die press [SPACE] to travel back in time.

Trouble shootting
If you have problems getting the game to run I’d suggest on installing the newest DirectX 9.0c drivers and making sure you have .Net Framework 2.0 installed.

The game is lagging
If the game lags you can disable the background grid by using the parameter -no_grid.

I want to run the game in fullscreen
You can do that by adding the parameter -full.

Credits
Game Design, Code & Gfx: Petri Purho ( petri.purho (at) gmail.com )

Music: Retroboy - entering evil base. The song “entering evil base” is freely available at http://8bitcollective.com/music/retroboytimo/Entering+Evil+Base+%5B48HOURCHALLENGE%5D/ under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Generic -license.

Greetz
Experimental Gameplay Project
tAAt
XZM
TIGers
Special love to cactus, because he’s cool and he allowed me to use the character rotation idea from Brave Karma Warriors.

Choke on my Groundhog, YOU BASTARD ROBOTS uses: SDL and SDL_Mixer.