Chris’ Interview with Adventure Games Podcast and also Game Dev Necromancy!

I recently had the great pleasure of being interviewed by Seoirse Dunbar for Adventure Games Podcast. We had a long and fun chat where we discussed my history as a game maker, my work with Talespinners, and my work with the WordPlay Festival where I am proud to continue to serve as Festival Director. You can listen to the episode here.

Besides promoting the WordPlay Festival (coming up this November 9th and 10th), one of my goals in the interview was to talk about my own experiences making games in a way that would be accessible to people new to the game development world and may even inspire them to try making their own games.

That goal led me to talk about one of the first games I’d ever worked on as a game designer: Curse of the Mummy’s Brain!! As mentioned in the interview, I’d made Mummy’s Brain in 2011 during OrcaJam, an annual game jam that is run by IGDA Victoria. It was my first game jam and it opened my eyes to the amazing things that could be done by a small team of creative, motivated individuals over a short period of time.

After talking about it on the podcast, it seemed like a shame to me that listeners wouldn’t be able to experience the game for themselves, so I did some digging around, found the source code, made a bunch of updates to make it run on modern hardware, and posted it on my itch.io page for all to see. It’s a bit clunky, and there are definitely a few things that aren’t working as they’re meant to, but once again it’s back from the dead! I hope you’ll enjoy playing Curse of the Mummy’s Brain!! as much as I enjoyed making it.

Advertisement

The good kind of TOJam

I recently had the pleasure of participating in the Toronto Game Jame or “TOJam” for the first time. As described on their website, TOJam “is a FREE, annual, open-to-the-public event where the craziest game makers in the world gather for a 3 day game making binge”. And what a binge it was!

The game my team worked on for the jam is called “Grimistar”. It’s a funny and unconventional 2D space shooter game inspired by the venerable arcade game Sinistar and aims to turn standard shooter conventions on their head. I worked as both a programmer and a writer on this project and had a great time collaborating with teammates Rocco Commisso, Brian Wong, and George Kallika.

Grimistar is available to play for free here on the itch.io page (while you’re there, have a look at my new Ironic Iconic Studios itch.io page). Give it a try and let me know what you think. I hope you have as much fun playing it as we did making it!

uglyduckling