Partway through making my first game in App Game Kit, I took a break to make something little and fun:
Greet 'em and Seat 'em" - a "catch" game that nods to a couple of notoriously NSFW games for the Atari 2600, Beat 'em and Eat 'em and its re-skinned Rule 63 counterpart, Philly Flasher, while still being completely G-rated and of course thematically unrelated. This is the first game I've actually finished in years. (And it took me a month to make.)

Making an old Atari-styled game was motivation enough for me to learn how to use an 8-bit music tracker to make chiptunes, too!

Anyway, I could do with some criticism at this early-ish stage in my journey in AGK, so have at it.

[Flash/Actionscript]

Hello again!

I signed up here in 2008 and made a few Flash/Actionscript games for competitions, but I've been away from these forums for many years. This year I've been getting back into programming thanks to App Game Kit, so now that I've produced my first AGK game and suddenly feeling like I'm a friggin' big-shot indie game dev and all, I'm back here again for inspiration, motivation, and the general game dev fun atmosphere that I remember. AGK as a tool for making games is a breath of fresh air after Flash, and it takes me back to the QBASIC programming of my misspent youth... Back then I used to make stuff as "AK Software" (AK being my initials), which I can't anymore because a real software company with that name has since come into existence! However, to reconnect with my programming roots I've updated "AK software" to "Absolute Kobold interactive". Sounds very convincing amirite?

Primarily I'm an animator and secondarily a musician, so I prefer to make all my own graphics and audio when I can, and they're a big focus for me - often bigger than things like genre and game mechanics. Presenting my artwork through the medium of video games (not to imply video games aren't works of art themselves) is what motivates me to keep pushing my artistically-shaped brain right on through that math/programming-shaped hole. (Also being an animator makes me a bit of a masochist I guess.)

But I don't think I've ever considered making a game without one of its purposes being to make somebody chuckle. All of the games that I enjoy (and some that I don't) seem to have some kind of joke or at least rib-elbowing wink at their heart. 

-AK (Toomuchsparetime)

G-rated parodies of early porn games. This one's about politeness and politics!

It's... "Greet 'em and Seat 'em"!

[Terror Soar]

An tongue-in-cheek old-school top-down shoot-em-up, with weaponised dinosaurs/pterosaurs instead of spaceships. You control a bone-spewing pteranodon and try to cause as much destruction as possible while exploring a range of bone-y weapons.

It's disappointing just how many pterosaur-based puns are already taken. But the top two contenders I'm left with are: "Terror Soar" and "Terror Dawn".
(The bottom contender is "Shmupasaurus", which captures the silliness of the game but is otherwise just awful.   )

I want puns because they undermine whatever shreds of seriousness might come across with the game's violent themes. What I really wanted was a word beginning with "T" that evoked badass destruction, so I could slap a "P" in front of it and then put "Pterodactyl" immediately before that word. Alas, the best I could do was "Pterodactyl Pturmoil". Ehh...

Looks spiffing!

The "9" in place of the "i" tricked me for a bit, until I realised you were making fun of that movie "Se7en". (Maybe "nIXne"? Roman numerals / slient X? No, that would probably smother the reference entirely.) Good show!

So bad it's better-than-good. Both thumbs up!

[Obstacle vs. Obstacle]

Obstacle vs. Obstacle - Not so much a game as a subgenre of "Versus".

Player 1 creates an "obstacle" and then Player 2 must overcome it within a certain amount of time. Then the timer resets and they switch roles.
 However: The less time Player 2 takes to "solve" the obstacle, the more time (s)he gets to set up a new obstacle for when the tables are turned. The winner is the one who has failed to overcome the other player's obstacle when the timer reaches zero.

This could take the form of:
- Designing vs. solving a maze (or other form of level design)
- Player 1 strategically places auto-defenses to guard a "flag" that Player 2 must capture
- Player 1 erects a structure that will crush Player 2's cute little puppy to death if dismantled improperly (Extreme Jenga!)
- Player 1 scatters pieces of some vital artifact throughout the realm and Player 2 must fetchquest for them (or, more simply, Player 1 makes a jig-saw puzzle for Player 2 to solve)

Should Player 2 be permitted to watch Player 1 set up the obstacle? If not, it would allow for much more fun for Player 1, who could be creatively sneaky and set traps and watch gleefully to see if Player 2 falls for them, but on the other hand it means Player 2 would spend some time having to sit there and not watch the game at all.

This gives me another idea to improve things: instead of having it timed, the challenge is that they BOTH set up obstacles using identical resources within a certain amount of time, and race to overcome their opponents' obstacle when the round starts. Whether this automatically makes the faster attacker win, or if it simply frees him up to defend his obstacle from the attacker by some form of intervention (adding more to the maze? Running in with a sword? Pulling out vital support structures of the Jenga-like tower?), is something to consider.

A fun game for people who like to create challenges, but who also like to beat other people's challenges. A double-challenge!


AKA "Let's make sandcastles and then trash each other's"

It's a puddle of blood! BOOM! HEADSHOT!


Alright alright I'll stop being a smartypants... for now

Hope I'm not too late. This thread is a great idea!

Oh darn. Now I'm going to have to follow through on this...

"BayeuxShock" 
Use weapons from days of olde and magic spells to help the mighty Norman empire conquer the English in a side-scrolling platformer tapestry world (that's you in the centre of the image). Harness the powers of alchemy and harvest humours from corpses to brew magic potions and become more powerful than ever!


^ Not necessarily the actual graphics - just a mockup using the Bayeux Tapestry Kit.

Yep, puns inspire me to make games, sometimes. The only problem here is that someone else might've thought of it first. Is a Bayeux tapestry-style Bioshock parody already out there somewhere?

Anagram Games! ("Anagames")

Take the title of a game, make an anagram out of it, and then use that anagram as a starting point for a new game that also has some other connection to the original.

Commander Keen -> Demon Caker Men
Space Invaders -> Ace van Spiders / Sad Cavern Pies
Doom -> Mood
Bioshock -> Bic Hooks
Pac-Man -> Camp N/A
Katamari Damacy -> Aaaa! Tricky Madam!
Duke Nukem Forever -> Move Rude Funk Reek
Super Mario Brothers 2 -> 2 Robo-Sperm Hurt Aries


I've seen anagram movie posters on Worth1000, maybe there's some anagram game-packaging photoshoppery somewhere on the web too - SomethingAwful perhaps.
Making them into games would probably be too close to Demakes though.

"Dodgefire" - a VGA, sideways-scrolling space-shooter whose title also described the controls. You could dodge the oncoming space-enemies by moving your spaceship up and down, and fire at them by hitting spacebar.

I made it in QBASIC when I was 15. Pretty much nobody had internet in NZ in 1995 (BBSs, yes, but I didn't know about them at the time) so I put it on a 3.5" floppy diskette and snail-mailed it to a friend of mine who also enjoyed messing around in QB. (I'd just moved away to a different town recently.)

I remade it later with finite-length levels in 3 different environments instead of just one unending level. No screenshots... the disks on which I backed up both versions have probably long since been corrupted by the ravages of time.

I think I also made a "mad-lib" program on a Commodore Vic-20 when I was 10 or 11, but that's going back a bit too far to remember well. Still, unlike Dodefire, it's probably still saved - on a cassette tape somewhere! LOL.

That is just brilliant! They thought of everything! 


Related: Something I did a short time ago.

Videogame mashup art: Team Fortress 2 meets Lemmings!

In the days of DOS, I was all about the CTRL/ALT/Space control keys in games. Then Windows took over and turned everything into a shortkey for something! 
Now I reconfigure old games' control keys to asdzxc.

Wow, that handlebar monobrow.  

I have to put my Flash game on hold for a few months as I'm behind in my "proper work" schedule, so here's a screenshot now that I've replaced about half of the placeholder graphics with polished ones.


This is from an early level. The first segment is mainly about mysterious foreshadowings, overlays pretending to be cheap lighting effects, and of course the ubiquitous video-game crates.
And zombies, once you reach the end of the blood trail.

I believe that, Droqen. Real reople can be a great source of inspiration.
Case in point: in high school, me and a friend were inspired by the creepy-looking school janitor and our crazy science teacher to make a game about a janitor who saves the school from the mind-controlling influence of an evil science teacher (by fighting the entire school). I say we were inspired to make this game, but even after 3 different attempts (text RPG, then side-scrolling platformer, and finally top-down) over the course of 3 years it was never fully completed each time. I probably owe it to my 14 year-old self to make that game at some point now that I have better skills and technology. Not as a first person shooter though... too soon...  

Environments (natural, man-made, even fictional) and time (of day/year/history/geological age) are what I seem to use for inspiration regarding storylines and themes, more than gameplay.

Glorious!  

Also it could be Patrick the starfish, in the shape of the rock he lives under!