{"id":167,"date":"2015-08-26T00:29:18","date_gmt":"2015-08-25T23:29:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.powered-up-games.com\/wordpress\/?p=167"},"modified":"2015-08-26T00:29:18","modified_gmt":"2015-08-25T23:29:18","slug":"you-are-the-monster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/powered-up-games.com\/blog\/wordpress\/archives\/167","title":{"rendered":"You are the monster"},"content":{"rendered":"

This weekend I participated in the Ludum Dare<\/a> game jam. The theme this time was “You are the monster.” So I made a small game about a troll. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

My initial plan for the game was to make an experience for what it would be like to be a “monster.” But when I thought about it I realised that what defines a monster is not the creature itself but our reaction to it. That led me in a somewhat relentless and melancholic direction.<\/p>\n

A troll’s life<\/a><\/p>\n

My inspiration for the style of this game was the early home computer games of the 80s like Frak<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I painted the sprites in the Gimp directly onto the canvas. This was somewhat laborious. I’ll look for a better pixel editor if I decide to create any pixel animations in the future.<\/p>\n

\"troll-sheet\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The only useful feature of the Gimp I used was to produce the flash effect for the lumberjack selfie. (You will only see this if you wait around after the game is over.)<\/p>\n

\"human-flash-large\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Other than that it was all pixel by pixel painting. I’d like to have got a few more frames into the troll walk cycle to give the animations a little more bounce, but I started late and was already running short of time.<\/p>\n

I think in depicting the troll’s death I was unconsciously influenced by the pictures of the death of Cecil the lion<\/a>. I think that helped to capture the mood I was going for:<\/p>\n

\"troll-dead-large\"<\/a><\/p>\n

With the music I lucked out. I tried several of the tools suggested on the Ludum Dare website in an attempt to create a sombre backing track. But it was my very first try with Otomata<\/a>, as I was testing the ability to capture a wav, that I got exactly the feeling I was after by pure chance. I was unable to recreate it over several subsequent attempts so I edited the capture I had into the loop that ended up in the game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This weekend I participated in the Ludum Dare game jam. The theme this time was “You are the monster.” So I made a small game about a troll.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,10,5],"tags":[34,37,36,38,35],"class_list":["post-167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-internet","category-video-games","tag-ld48","tag-otomata","tag-scratch","tag-the-gimp","tag-video-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/powered-up-games.com\/blog\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/powered-up-games.com\/blog\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/powered-up-games.com\/blog\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powered-up-games.com\/blog\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powered-up-games.com\/blog\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/powered-up-games.com\/blog\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":174,"href":"https:\/\/powered-up-games.com\/blog\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions\/174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/powered-up-games.com\/blog\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powered-up-games.com\/blog\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powered-up-games.com\/blog\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}