A strategy game playable with a chess board and a deck of cards for two players. Individual games last upto 10 minutes each.
A ludological criticism of automated art and recent trends in English poetry. (Postmodernism, Procedural Writing, FLARF, etc.) Programmed in HTML5, PHP, and Javascript. Published in Issue 4 of the Incongruous Quarterly.
It is a video game which generates poetry when played. Like most pretentious things in life, I originally made the alpha for this as a convoluted way of not actually doing a workshop assignment that required me to write poetry in a style I thought was bullshit. (And still do.)
I do intensive and heavy-duty alpha and beta testing for indie game developers, when the mood takes me.
The following are some of the projects I have done testing for.
Brazilian indie studio's first game. While always somewhat limited by the Portuguese-to-English translation, it was a game whose narrative and beautiful atmosphere gripped me from the very first public alpha. (Effect of the writer, Miss Ingrid Skare.) The gameplay itself is light, but functional for what it goes for. It's a kind of slow game where you just find yourself wandering around and taking it all in.
First released independently in 02012, and after some difficulty interfacing between the American and Brazilian markets, finally found a publisher for their International Edition in 02016.
The indie child of a graphics programmer who normally worked on big-budget AAA games, seeking his own individual expression away from the corporate machinations of the crunch-time games industry. I was initially drawn to it as an idle wonder, just having gotten into the Mouse Guard books beforehand. What ended up keeping me there was the high amount of raw gameplay, with systems deeper than most other indie projects could dream of.
Circumstances had the game red-lined in early 02016. My only regret is that it couldn't have a deep and intense narrative to match its deep and intense gameplay. Indeed, much of it hangs on by just as much of a thread as my oft-reduced lifebar.
This particular fusion of games posed a conceptual challenge. On one hand, it was for Kirby players, who liked their games easy. On the other hand, it was for MegaMan players, who demand their games hard. By its very nature, BUSTER had to find some way to simultaneously please these two mutually-exclusionary groups.
Fine-tuning for balance required a lot of creative solutions, resulting in a strange mix of revisional differences which were not common to MegaMan-styled games at the time, many almost invisible to common notice. One of the most imposing differences was a progressive difficulty system which slowly increased the challenge level over the course of the first eight stages, regardless of the chosen order. There were even a few quality-of-life features I vouched for, such as automatically raising the extra lives to a mandated minimum every time a new stage began, and covertly spawning an ammo pickup in prebattle boss corridors whenever the player was on their last remaining life.
... unfortunately, the MegaMan fanbase was so used to the older and more unforgiving style of gameplay, they were less welcoming of these changes and more tripped-up by them. (Can't win them all, I guess...)
