The folks over at the Experimental Gameplay Project just recently announced their theme for September: the never-ending game. I was intrigued.

Given all the hubbub and ballyhoo on the Internets and Twitters and Fax Machines regarding “games as art,” I decided to throw together something entirely stupid—as per my constitutional rights—and the result is a real gem of a mess.

Behold! ArtLovr, a game thrown together over a handful of hours and a fistful of beers, with a little bit of HTML5 duct tape and Akihabara wizardry to suit the punters.

Yes, it’s Pong. Yes, there’s a finite score.

Or is there?

Well, yes.

But in real terms? Well, the way the game plays, the PONGBALL5000 takes a certain amount of time to cross the screen, and assuming it scores immediately, there is still a pause to display a message on-screen before the next PONGBALL3000 is released.

Now, for the sake of argument, let’s instead pretend that the PONGBALL is moving at the incredible speed of 320pixels per millisecond (the millisecond being the favorite time unit of game programmers and anaerobic bacteria), and that a point is scored every millisecond (we also assume no interim messages). A given player’s score is composed of 27 digits:
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
all the way to
999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999

Therefore, at the rate of 1 point per millisecond (in an increasingly lopsided game), how long until we hit 1×10²⁷ and overflow one of the players’ scores?

31.7 quadrillion years.

Or, in units more familiar to you and me, 2.3 million times the age of the known universe. So, frankly, for our purposes, I like to think of ArtLovr as pretty much a never-ending game.

And there’s my take on games-as-art. Entirely fascinating from a technical standpoint I’m sure, but varying from tediously infantile at times to pretentiously lofty at others.

And my opinion is final and the best, QED.

On September 25th of last year, I started a project: I was to take and share one picture a day over the span of a year. It’s still going strong, and I’ll report back when it’s finished in just over a month, but matters require a quick update.

I was hosting “A Year in the Life” on Flickr, because, well, all the cool kids were doing it, and I’m nothing if not suggestible. As it turns out though, a free Flickr account comes with an itty-bitty living space of 200 photos max.

Turns out 200 isn’t a big enough number to hold 365 days of photos, and so I’m moving my non-for-profit business elsewhere—to Google’s Picasa, to be exact, where free accounts can be comfortable in their sexuality, and have a somewhat more flexible 1GB limit.

The link is here.

I’m currently in the process of migrating the photos, so not everything will be there immediately, but it should be so in the next week or two. So say we all.

PLANETS ARE AWESOME
As an interesting bit of trivia, Mercury and Venus are the only planets in the Solar System on which “A Year in the Life” could be fully hosted on a free Flickr account—their years consist of a total of about 0.5 and 1.92 local days, respectively. Venus is an interesting case: it orbits the Sun in 224 Earth-days, but it completes a full rotation on itself (a sidereal day) in 243 Earth-days—its day is longer than its year! However, whereas all other planets (viewed from above the Sun’s North Pole) rotate on themselves in a counter-clockwise direction, Venus rotates clockwise, or in retrograde. It’s because of this retrograde rotation that—to an observer on Venus—the Venusian year would last a total of 1.92 Venusian days.

My good friend Erin Robinson recently released her biggest game to date, Puzzle Bots. If you haven’t played it yet, now’s your chance. Trust me, it’s a keeper. Go ahead, I can wait.

Given that I’d also recently started following The Drunken Moogle, it seemed only logical to somehow combine the two. It is therefore with a great deal of pride—and a moderate amount of less-shame—that I give you…

PUZZLE SHOTS

I tried to ensure that all the ingredients would be readily available, or at least easy enough to find in stores. So, without further ado, let’s meet the team (from left to right).

HERO

• 1 part orange juice
• 1 part vodka
• Dash of blue curaçao

Directions: Mix OJ and vodka separately. Pour blue curaçao into bottom of glass, then gently layer OJ mix on top.
Tasting notes: Refreshing and citrus-y. Quite the go-getter.

ULTRABOT

• 1 part crème de menthe
• 1 part Jägermeister

Directions: Slowly layer Jägermeister over the crème de menthe.
Tasting notes: The Jägermeister provides an initial, punishing Eastern bloc-style punch, while the crème de menthe reveals the sweet underbelly.

KELVIN

• Literally a few drops of crème de menthe
• Sambuca

Directions: Pour a few drops of crème de menthe into a glass, then top up with sambuca.
Tasting notes: As this is mostly made of sambuca, clearly it is meant to be set aflame.

IBI

• 1 part gin
• 1 part grape juice
• 1 blueberry

Directions: Mix the gin and grape juice in a glass. Add the blueberry.
Tasting notes: Ever the shy one, Ibi tends to curl up into a ball on land.

BOMCHELLE

• Rosé wine
• Dash of tabasco sauce

Directions: Pour a shot full of rosé wine. Then add generous dashes of tabasco.
Tasting notes: Starts off sweet enough, but carries a surprisingly potent sting.

And there you have it! Remember people, always drink responsibly. And if that’s not an option, blame the new guy.

I made another small, obnoxious prototype-y game, Everything is Wonderful.

Progress on the recently de-titlised procedural stealth game was slow (many random engine refactors), so I took a break to learn the LÖVE2D API, and see if I could throw together a game in a jam-like time frame (two days to a week).

Mission: Potentially Accomplished!

It was vaguely inspired by the G20 Summit, and the fun with nomenclature they clearly had in granting police unreasonable powers under the “Public Works Protection Act.” The rest just came from me being bored at work.

It’s not exactly a very deep or subtle game; nor, frankly, is it that much fun. But it came together on schedule, so I’m pleased. As others have said, putting together even cheap, short, and unpolished games can be a good thing at times.

Instructions

• Use the arrow keys to do everything.
• Don’t leave the designated area.
• Don’t get caught with illicit materials.

Download the game here.

Apple has famously flashed Adobe the ol’ digitus impudicus by abandoning Flash in all of its most recent i{*} products.

What this means from a business standpoint, I’ll leave to more intelligent and informed pundits 1 (modulo a digression later on, methinks)—but what it does of interest to me is throw Apple’s not-inconsiderable weight behind HTML5 for browser-based gaming. Accordingly, Darius Kazemi and Darren Torpey recently uploaded a series of tutorials for Akihabara, a JavaScript API for HTML5 games. While it’s still in its infancy and perhaps not fully-featured (I wouldn’t mind seeing mouse/touchpad input down the line, for instance), Akihabara’s one of the first such APIs out of the gate, and will hopefully encourage devs to experiment some more in HTML5.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve never worked at all with Flash. That’s not to say that I never will (next on my list is to tame the wild FlashPunk), but the Akihabara tutorials popped up right around the time I was looking for something new to learn. To top it off, I’ve never worked much with JavaScript either (notwithstanding some recent tinkering in Unity), while I’ve been getting more and more interested in browser-based cross-platform gaming in general. All I needed was a modest project of my own to code.

Cue KJumpingcube, one of my favorite free, built-in Linux games. It has the mindlessness and simplicity of Minesweeper with a competitive twist, and massive end-game reversals are always fun to watch. Given that it’s horribly straightforward, it seemed a good choice to implement with Akihabara.

After about a week of intermittent coding, the game in its most basic form is available here, dubbed Cube Jumpr! in honour of its main inspiration as well as the vowel-challenged Web2.0 sites that I’ve grown to despise. Fun!

Cube Jumpr! makes use of the arrow keys and the ‘z’ key. Since Akihabara maps the external ‘z’ key to the internal ‘A’, you’ll notice a lot of “Press A to do something or other” prompts that actually require a ‘z’ press. That’s a feature I may be addressing in future releases. Or not. Also to be (potentially) addressed are some improved sprites, as well as possibly adding the aforementioned support for the mouse cursor and/or touchpads.

The rules are thus:

• Players take turns clicking on individual tiles—either blanks or ones they already own—to increment the value contained within.
• When a tile’s value becomes larger than the number of immediately adjacent tiles, these adjacent tiles are incremented and “claimed” by the current player, while the original tile is reset to a value of 1.
• The first player to claim all tiles on the board is the winner.

As I say, the game is extraordinarily simple—my own implementation even more so—but it’s moderately enjoyable, and made for a good first project in Akihabara.

HTML5 gaming is no doubt going to have an uphill battle against the entrenched ecosystem of Flash developers, publishers, and players. To make things even more difficult, being written in JavaScript means (for the moment) that the games are publicly readable, and thus open-source and impossible to market commercially 2. But I’m still looking forward to seeing what the community will come up with, as APIs like Akihabara become more fully-featured and powerful.

1 The Internet: Truly, the natural, logical development of civilised Socratic debate.

2 “But Linux is open source and some people do market it commercially!” Yes, well, you know what I mean.