Forbidden.exe
My April Fools’ joke worked like a charm. The Divorce managed to fool some of my regular readers, most notably Bill of the2bears.com, who actually blogged about it 
And I also got an much needed extra day of development for the Forbidden.exe.
So here’s my real 8th done-in-under-7-days experimental game, which is a bit different from my usual style. It’s an experimental horror game. So be warned, there’s harsh language, violence and other fun forms of violation. One could say that it’s an experimental violation game.
The idea for the gameplay came from my talks with Daniel Benmergui at the GDC. After the Nuances of Design session, we talked about the idea creating a game (for the Eerie Horror Film Fest), where the gameplay would communicate that feeling that you get from watching a good suspense / horror movie. So here’s a elaborate prototype of that idea.
Forbidden.exe
Download
Forbidden.zip (8,7 Mb) (Release 1)
Instructions
I recommend you read the readme.html.
Credits
Game Design, Code & Gfx: Petri Purho ( petri.purho (at) gmail.com )
Music is from Brainsaw’s Music for the Paranoid Schizophrenic -album. The following tracks were used: 02. Gulag (Welcome to Hell - Part 1), 04. Gulag (Welcome to Hell - Part 2) and 06. Program Intermission. Big thanks to the guys for creating such a great and atmospheric music.
The songs are licensed under the: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.
The track level_01.ogg which is played in the background of the games first level is based on cymbal_lo05.wav by schluppipuppie. It was used under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 License.
The shriek sound effects are from river otter or weasel 2006-09-17.mp3 by stackpool and are also used under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 License.
Thanks
Thanks to Daniel Benmergui for helping me with the design and encouraging me to do the game in the first place.
Inspiration source: Experimental Gameplay Project.
Forbidden.exe uses: SDL, SDL_Image, SDL_Mixer and SDL_RotoZoom
April 2nd, 2007 at 9:24 pm
[...] Forbidden.exe is the real new game in Petri’s series of monthly experiments. It’s a game designed to “communicate that feeling that you get from watching a good suspense / horror movie”. [...]
April 2nd, 2007 at 11:45 pm
So I guess you actually used eight days? Shame on you! joking aside, the game’s friggin’ hard!
The gameplay isn’t to original, although it is different from others of the genre. It’s fun, but not nearly as fun as some of your other games, such as Pluto Strikes Back! or Cacodemon’s Barbecue Party in Hell. Nonetheless, good work.
~Joel
April 3rd, 2007 at 12:08 am
Please don’t tell anyone I used eight days. My reputation is gone if people find out.
Seriously, including the one extra the game toke 6 days to complete, so over all it’s still done in under a week
I was a little afraid that the game would end up being too hard. Sadly it seems to be the case. I do my own graphics with a mouse so I probably have a better eye-mouse-coordination than the average guy, but I it’s not depressingly difficult.
(by the way, thanks for writing the Pluto Strikes Back -article
April 3rd, 2007 at 7:15 am
Maybe you could control the orb with the arrow keys or WASD instead?
Also, the first time I played it, it was without sound, (on a school computer.) When I got home, I transferred the game to my computer, and played it with sound. It scared the crap out of me! Resident Evil pales in comparison to this! Actually, I guess Dave is sort of like Nemesis in Resident Evil 3.
April 3rd, 2007 at 10:46 am
Thanks for the compliments. Brainsaw’s music really adds a lot to the game’s atmosphere.
April 3rd, 2007 at 7:46 pm
Hey,
And I personally do not find the game to hard.
Great game as allways. I liked the storyline and the really deep developed NPCs
Oh, there is a bug in the .txt-file-level, when you hide at your startingposition you get ‘teleported’ to the file-cage entrance after they get killed.
April 3rd, 2007 at 10:05 pm
Thanks Exilberliner.
It’s also the mouse that plays a huge part on the difficulty of the game. If you have a crappy mouse (or you set it up to be very quick) the game is probably impossible to play.
I noticed that there seems to be some kind of random teleportation bug, that happens sometimes after the dialog window is closed.
April 4th, 2007 at 8:02 pm
Yikees!
I was just about to crap my pants everytime that Dave -guy screamed and tried to eat my ball. This game creeps me. Funny storyline, nice graphics and sounds & “music” were awesome! All in one, this is a freaking cool game!
BTW. What are those balls?.. o_O
April 5th, 2007 at 2:25 am
Thanks Mr. Spagethi for your kind words. I’m glad my game creeped you out. I really don’t have a good answer to the question about the balls
I put them there originally as place holders. I then tried to create a nice horror themed icon for the bad guy (it was a Jason style hockey mask), but it just looked like crap, so I kept the balls.
April 7th, 2007 at 8:02 pm
Ha! At first I thought “Oh another maze don’t touch the edges game” But the _feel_ was much different. I guess you hit on some base instinctual elements because my daughter (age 5) screamed upon hearing that horrible “scream” sound and seeing the ball chase me. Good job at setting the mood! I liked the “trapped in someone’s psyche” feel it had. Transformed the game. I really like it. Doesn’t work well on a touchpad though
April 7th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
Very atmosperic, bravo!
Was not too hard for me, i needed to replay on three levels for total of only 5 times or so. But my coordination is above average definitely. Maybe worth trying once more
There’s a typo on one of last levels: sentence with two “the”, while first “the” should be “to”. I managed to forget the sentence itself already :/
P.S. And yes, i believed your 1st April joke
April 8th, 2007 at 12:50 am
@ismellawumpu: Huge thanks for writing the critique on my games. I’m sorry but at the moment I’m at a convention, so I cannot give you more detailed response. I’ll give you a proper response on Tuesday, when I get back to my normal way of living.
@localGhost: Thanks for the feedback and for pointing out the typo. I’ll try to fix that one. I think your one of many who fell for my April Fools’ joke
April 19th, 2007 at 12:30 am
Wasn’t sure what to expect but this was really well done. I mean, it was just a black ball but it felt… dare i say it? scary… i didn’t think the mouse control was a problem, seemed pretty natural (if frustrating when I hit the edges)
April 21st, 2007 at 7:24 pm
Phew… That was a real pain in the arse. Especially when I saw Firefox being destroyed I felt kinda sorry for it, but hey still Opera is the best!
Well the game is damn hard. Really, and I know that I haven’t posted some comments to this blog lately but when you had to deal with a Linux it really gets annoying. Whatever, you should really easen the game. And I remarked something pricky, the IE logo has a higher Z-order (or a lower drawing order) than the one of the < hero >
Finally, I admit that I couldn’t stand against that annoying boost sound which makes me ike and feel frightened.
Again, a perfect game!
April 22nd, 2007 at 6:44 pm
I liked Forbidden.exe very much, as most of your experimental games. I appreciate mostly the idea, funny storyline and nice presentation. The game was pretty easy to me, I had to repeat some level approximately 3 or 4 times at all, so I think the difficulty is OK. The gameplay itself wasn’t very exciting but it’s understandable, due to time limit of one week.
Keep up the good work!
April 25th, 2007 at 10:52 pm
Fantastic. Great idea.
June 16th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
I’m wondering why I was afraid even if I knew the game would do nothing to my computer… well, the concept just worked ^^ great music also.
June 20th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
Nice game, great idea. Reminded me of Maeda:
http://www.levitated.net/daily/levMaedaPath.html
I like yours better, but the execution on Maeda is done well too. And if you wanted to make it even more terrifying, you could have that floating graphic be a grab of their actual directory listing… that would be evil
Nice to see you have FreeOrion btw 
July 13th, 2007 at 2:08 am
Love it….
And I love the SHODAN quote in the background :]
July 15th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
Wow! I was screaming each time i hit one of the walls and dave was coming for me
even some of the ppl who lived came to see what game it was.
only difference could have been that the game really would have deleted 1 or 2 files on my computer
February 21st, 2008 at 6:43 pm
[...] Kloonigames auch empfehlenswert: Forbidden.exe (ein toll gemachtes Horror-Spiel, ganz ohne Leichen, aber mit sehr bedrückender Atmosphäre) und [...]
February 27th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Can´t wait til crayon physics deluxe´s coming:)
When are you gonna rls it?=)
May 30th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
hey, you probalbly know this, but games for windows put your game in their magazine!
It’s on page 51 in issue #15 in febuary 2008, just to let you know.
Also, this game gives me the creeps (in a good way)!
August 26th, 2008 at 5:00 am
This is safe, correct? Damn thing at the beginning creeps me out…
Yes, I am a chicken.