My games and similar ludic designs.
I took a weekend off from my vacation (sounds weird, I know) to take part in the GMTK Game Jam 2019, whose theme was "only one". My submission was Quest of the One – a weird little JRPG made in RPG Maker VX Ace that expresses the jam theme in having only one of each of the common RPG mechanics, like character levels, dungeons, companions, weapons, gold, etc. Now, RPG is one of my favorite video game genres (though not necessarily JRPGs, I am more of a Western RPG fan), but I have never actually tried my hand at making one before, primarily because I have until now been mainly experimenting with expressive mechanics instead of expressive content.
I had to solo this year's GGJ again (due to illness) and the topic, "What home means to you", left me rather uninspired, so my submission was Kalsarikännit, a simple but aesthetically pleasing (or so my few playtesters said) point-and-click game where you play a Grumpy Hexagon who just wants to go to sleep. However, everything is out to stress you, so you have to deal with things, one at a time, then go home to recharge.
I was at the GGJ again this year, and made a little game called Gears of Yore. The theme of the event this year was "transmission", so of course I made a game about rotating gears. Like with my other games, you can download it from my Google Drive and find the source code at my Github page. On a side note, I made it completely on my own, since nobody else on-site wanted to work on my project -- hence the lack of any kind of sound in the game (I have, in fact, tried to add some procedurally generated music later on, but it didn't really work). :-(
Winter Palace is an unofficial video game clone of the 2012 bluffing and deduction card game Love Letter by Seji Kanai. If you are familiar with the card game, you will find the mechanics of Winter Palace essentially identical, because, to the best of my knowledge, game mechanics and ideas are not copyrightable. Kanai's original art, however, is, so my version is a complete reskin that does not contain any materials copyrighted by anyone but myself. Consequently, while the original game was set in the Tempest universe, inspired by Western European royal courts, Winter Palace is set in St. Petersburg in the first half of the 18th century (hence the title).
You can download the Windows installer for the game from Google Drive for free. If you like my game, please consider buying a copy of the original Love Letter from your friendly local gaming store. :-)
Last winter term, I have attended a local school of arts for my minor in new media art, which resulted in one paper, one indie RPG, and now, one indie video game, Ghul. The development of the latter had taken pretty much exactly nine months (a truly difficult birth), from early November 2016 through late July 2017, with a total of six people (mostly graduate and undergraduate students from IT and arts) working on it at different times, including the incredibly talented composer Mathilde Hoffmann. My own role was that of the lead programmer, the AI designer, and, increasingly in the final months of development, the producer, and I've certainly learned a lot about game development from this experience. I may even have to do a post mortem on my blag later on...