Kloonigames

On this day, 20 years ago, I published the first post on this blog. I find it remarkable that both my indie game dev “career” and this blog have both survived for 20 years.

Instead of talking about my games, I figured I’d make a few comments about blogs in general.

First, I don’t know if any human is reading this. These days it seems that most of traffic that comes here is in the form of bots. Probably scrapping this to train their LLMs on stolen content. Listen bots, if you use this to train your AI, it means your company owes me a billion dollars. This is a legally binding contract.

Second, I disabled comments on this blog back when GDPR rolled around. Probably didn’t have to, but the comments section seemed to be nothing but spam bots. Around the same time I decided to “child proof” WordPress. There are and were bots going around poking this website for WordPress vulnerabilities. Oh how I yearn for the human touch of an old fashioned hacker, typing SQL injection code by hand.

It’s a shame that blogging is dead now. The social media sites, that replaced the blogging, have now all turned to shit.

So you now you, dear human reader, you understand why I find it an act of human resistance to keep this blog running. Let’s see if I can keep it going leisurely for another 20 years.

Another word solitaire game appears. After Word Solitaire I was kinda curious as to how the game would play with an inverted setup, so I implemented a small prototype. It’s a little easier and thus might be a good “tutorial” game for Word Solitaire.

The real reason for working on this game was not the game (although I feel the game is just fine), but I was more curious about working on the tech. I got a little curious as to what could be done with Emscripten, which allows for C++ to be compiled into WebAssembly. This involved porting a bunch of old code to use SDL2 and Emscripten. The process was fairly straight forward. I’ll probably end up using this tech to make some new games. So you can try playing the game in your browser here.

Play the game in browser!

Word Pyramid – Release 1

Download

Windows: WordPyramid.zip (4.3 Mb) (Release 1)

Instructions
Word game + Solitaire. You need to clear the board by doing 5 letter words.

• A-Z = To form words
• CTRL+Z = UNDO
• CTRL+Y = REDO
• RETURN = Input word
• BACKSPACE = Erase letter

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

Back in 2011, me and my good friend from Sweden Martin Jonasson, ended up making a two player party game called: Jesus vs. Dinosaurs. Somehow we got Danny Baranowsky to do the music and Evan Balster to do the voice acting.

Over the next few years the game was featured at a quite a few events. It worked really well at these events. But somehow we never officially released the game. Reasons were a mix of laziness, busyness and indecisiveness about what to do with the game. Now 10+ years later we decided to just put the game out there. It’s a fun two player party game, that requires controllers to play proper.

Jesus vs. Dinosaurs – Super Turbo Edition²

Jesus vs. Dinosaurs is a 2 player versus game.
2 x Xbox 360 controllers are highly recommended

Trailer

Download

Windows: jesus-vs-dinosaurs-windows.zip (24 Mb) (download from itch.io)

Instructions

God travels back in time to kill all the dinosaurs, because they’re not in the bible. Darwin gets wind of this and travels back in time to stop god. They both build cars a have the ultimate chicken race in history.

Player who gets a car across the screen will score a point. First player to reach 10 points wins the game. There are also power ups (which are usually bombs or mines). To get a power up you have to get a car to touch one of the crates that falls from the sky.

There 2 phases in the game.
In building phase both players build cars from tetris blocks. In simulation phase you can’t do anything except drop bombs (if you have any) with a button.

Playing with Xbox 360 controllers

• [Left Stick] – Move the blocks around.
• [A] – Place a block (or drop a bomb).
• [Left Shoulder] – Rotate a block counter-clock wise.
• [Right Shoulder] – Rotate a block clock wise.

Keyboard Controls

Player 1:

• [WASD] – Move the blocks around..
• [c] – Place a block (or drop a bomb).
• [x] – Rotate a block counter-clock wise.
• [v] – Rotate a block clock wise.

Player 2:

• [ARROW KEYS] – Move the blocks around..
• [k] – Place a block (or drop a bomb).
• [j] – Rotate a block counter-clock wise.
• [l] – Rotate a block clock wise.

(Note you can modify keycontrols by modifying the file in data/keybinds.xml)

Sound

• [m] – Mute audio
• [+] – Increase volume
• [-] – Lower volume

Screen Resolution

You can change the screen resolution by modifying the resolution.xml file. You can also set the game to run in fullscreen mode by modifying this file.

Credits

Game by Martin Jonasson and Petri Purho

Music by Danny Baranowsky
Voices by Evan Balster

Back at the end of April I participated in the Ludum Dare 53 Jam. I figured I’d just do a quick game over the weekend. And I did just that and the game turned out okay. Unfortunately on the last day I started feeling like I’m about to get the flu. So I did the adult thing and went to bed instead of pushing through. I did finish the game, but I never got around to making the web version and putting a real release together. It’s here now. Better late than never I guess.

Conveyor Worm- Release 1

Download

Windows: ConveyorWorm.zip (0.16 MB) (Release 1)
Play in browser: At itch.io!

Instructions
Push and pull the blocks, complete the levels!

• Arrow keys: move
• Z: Undo
• Space: Restart level

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

I made more solitaire games!

My spouse enjoys Spider Solitaire, Wordle and Dark Souls. So I made the Dark Souls of solitaire word games. It’s been a big hit in our household.

Play the game in browser!

Word Solitaire – Release 1

Download

Windows: WordSolitaire.zip (0.1 Mb) (Release 1)

Instructions
Word game + Solitaire. You need to clear the board by doing 5 letter words.

• A-Z = To form words
• CTRL+Z = UNDO
• CTRL+Y = REDO
• RETURN = Input word
• BACKSPACE = Erase letter

Credits
Game Design & Code: Petri Purho ( petri.purho (at) gmail.com )
Playtesting: Anna Zajączkowska