For my followers on this site: I dropped a truth bomb over at the KO-OP Mode dev blog. That is to say, I talked about how weightlessness is weird.

A good portion of Red Rover takes place on the first human ship to Mars, christened NOMAD-V (pictures posted previously). Since she doesn’t provide any form of artificial gravity, that means her occupant(s) will necessarily be bouncing around in zero-g; a mechanic that seems oddly under-represented in games.

Check it out.

As promised, it’s the long-awaited, Emmy-nominated, gluten-free video recap of IGDA Montreal’s recent DemoNight, where a passel of programmers (and artists, and soundfolk, &c) were given seven minutes apiece to showcase their works-in-progress. I’m on with Red Rover at 00:31:00 and very, very dark — apparently it’s hard to show off The Cosmos on a projector? Meanwhile, my comrades-in-arms Saleem and Bronson drop their Skipping Stones poetry-slam jams at 01:13:41. Check out those and the rest of the sweet and nutritious lineup below.

And once again, a big thanks to IGDA Montréal for putting together a great show!

About a week and a half ago, I had the opportunity to talk a little bit about Red Rover at IGDA Montreal‘s yearly DemoNight, which is a night where people show demos. So that was pretty rad.

Honestly though: it was great to speak alongside some really interesting projects (check them out on the IGDA’s website, above), and to start actually showcasing in public. What I had on display was very rough — we’d only hired our 3D artist about two weeks beforehand (unwise) — and so it was a lot of talk, but I think people got the gist of it. I got some genuinely positive feedback, which would really work great as an IV drip.

The video’s not up just yet, but I’ll post again when it’s online (and be sure to check it out if only for Saleem’s surprise poetry-slam demo of Skipping Stones). In the meantime, it’s that time of the week. Have yourself a teaserful, pre-early-alpha Screenshot Saturday.

Being an Orthodox Canadian, I was raised on The Raccoons, and there’s this one shot during the show’s intro where villain-with-a-heart-of-maybe-like-tungsten Cyril Sneer is shown playing what looks like capitalism. Check out 0:43 of the video:

I’d always wondered just what in the log driver‘s name that thing was, and this past weekend’s Ludum Dare 48-hour game jam finally gave me a chance to explore that question.

The result is a new thing: Greedy Aardvark.

It controls rather strangely, but I was working off the 1.5 seconds of footage in the show’s intro. I managed to have some fun with the level design, particularly in the latter third of the…well…ten levels. As I wrote elsewhere — this is not the game Cyril played, but perhaps the first voice in its choir.

Read the README and sing it with me.

Errata

The Unity folks were kind enough to provide a 4-month trial of Unity Pro to those who participated in LD48. Unity Pro is pretty rad.

How many times did I type “groovy aardvark” instead of “greedy aardvark”? Many, many times.

Didn’t have time to model Sneer, the evergreen trees, the money bags, and the random blue thing. Next time, Gadget. Next time.

The “runs” of blue lines caught me completely by surprise, so I played with ‘em a bit more in the final levels. The importance of playtesting.

Jonas Kyratzes has this thing where he writes pretty good: he and his games first won me over with The Fabulous Screech, and he pretty much picked up a lifelong fan with The Sea Will Claim Everything. The games are confidently-written, incredibly original, and possessed of this crazy, carefree, despairing, empowering life-force that mixes whimsy, nostalgia, surrealism, wonder, and really, they are very, very good.

His latest — Moonlight — brings the sweetness yet again. It’s been receiving some rather nice words elsewhere, so I’ll try not to be too redundant: it’s a dreamy game to be sure (it is literally a dream), but the feeling that struck me most was that of a new, enchanted, interactive improv theatre. It’s not some wild experience over which you have no control; instead, you point the way, and the game winks and says “Why yes, why wouldn’t we?” and away you go. It’s intentional, it’s effortless, it’s joyous. That this sort of improvisation can be felt in a browser-based, text-only game is remarkable.

Play Moonlight. Go on.