Joey Schutz
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A member registered Oct 23, 2016 · View creator page →
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When Kyle asks for a kayak, you better believe Santa always delivers the goods.
Racing
A short game about brothers, doors, and loneliness.
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really like this one phil :) very meditative, nice to have to balance all these different columns whose priorities are constantly shifting and crowding each other out. one small note is i keep trying to make a last second click to save myself but do it just as i lose, and accidentally click past my score! haha maybe a different button to restart could be nice -- otherwise lovely!
Winter, 2001: Someone tell Luigi I love him comments · Replied to hatimb00 in Winter, 2001: Someone tell Luigi I love him comments
ahh thanks hatim :)) this was my very first game, and i had a loose idea in my head of what i wanted to do but i didn't know nearly enough about game dev to actually execute haha so most of the development was me pivoting and letting a new shape take hold. actually the opening dialog was added last, which is sort of funny since i think it's what holds it all together -- my background was in writing, but i had read so much in game design articles / textbooks / etc about how visuals and mechanics should be driving everything and writing was bad, so i felt i shouldn't have writing in my games, or use it very sparingly (which is a bit of an overreaction probably on my part lol). anyways it wasn't working and so in dismay i finally added some writing and it really transformed the game into something i was happy with :) thanks for playing!
this has been on my to play list for ages (i guess 2 years if that can be believed!) and really glad to have finally gotten around to it. switching between the 2d / 3d views is pretty magical. lately i've been really taken by games where the navigation feels "fidgety" enough (or perhaps "janky" is the historical term, which i bestow with love!) to allow exploring to hold real doubt as to whether a route is "intended" or not. it leaves me totally absorbed in my own in exploration. all the different angles of approach, the variable upgrades, and the level design captures this feeling so beautifully -- just me, my boat, and a coin glinting in the distance. amazing :)
beautiful. sound is so lush and evocative. i really liked the feeling of the world shifting around me as i walk, and the aspect ratio is so striking -- sort of surprising more games don't play with that! was reminded a bit of this oldish game "three short nights in sin city" which hopefully one day gets made public again, and which you might like in the unlikely event it does! (also has black and white orbs everywhere haha, but in that one each orb emits a sine wave tuned to a different frequency so you get these really wonky harmonies as you wander between them)
https://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/10840
anyways i really loved this, thanks for making it :)
i want to be a tree (but life has other ideas) comments · Posted in i want to be a tree (but life has other ideas) comments
this is beautiful, ian :') it's pretty amazing how moving it is to just amble around. it's like a heartfelt GIRP haha which is an amazing thing!! just gathering leaves in my basket, swishing around on screen, it all just feels very tactile and delicate and additive into something that feels so sweet, and quiet, and meaningful. and the ending!! just lovely -- grateful for a new ian game!!! :))
(ps congrats on the amaze nomination!!!!!!!!!!!!)
i love this game...took me basically the entire game to grasp the controls (in a good way). love that the bones stick around after eating the wings, and also that the diary is there and takes up space. at one point the diary was stuck between my mouth and a chicken wing and it took a lot of effort to contort my arms in a way to knock it free. the final gauntlet of chicken wings was great, especially a few moments when i got multiple in a row. so good!!
this is so so so beautiful, wow. a very moving collection of thoughts / images / experiences. there is an air of tragedy in a lot of them, and i found myself incredibly moved by how much hope and love they all contained for the world, for their communities, for themselves and each other. you have presented them all with such grace and radiance -- it frames them beautifully. the way your world shimmers and hums and moves meshes wondrously with the texts; i went to spend forever here. and the music and audio!! this is surely a fault of my own but i hadn't realized you did audio stuff (and i am thinking back to the angelically beautiful sounds of R.E.M., the wonderfully tense textures of Crossing -- i LOVE your sound + music, wow). a stunning work <3
wow, pretty in love with this. forefronts the visual beauty of language on the page in a way that is quite striking -- in this way reminds me of hao's bike game, and actually an art series my (artist) roommate did called The Shape of Language which you might like! but also in many ways this is quite different -- i love the idea of staring at this moving image (which carries visual and linguistic meaning at once) and fighting to keep up with a pace i set for myself (by setting the autoplay to 1 second, as instructed). somehow having set the pace myself (even by instruction) gives it a very different quality than having it forced upon me. also quite interesting trying to find a "stream source" -- gives the visual movement meaning, even if i struggle to find it. when i first played it i felt it was too short but actually i love how brief and fleeting it is, never allowing the feeling to settle, but rather capturing the feeling of things falling out from under me, at all times, before i can grab hold. great!
The Moon that Bleeds, Cries, and Grows. comments · Posted in The Moon that Bleeds, Cries, and Grows. comments
nice -- took me basically until the end to realize i could shift between layers of physics which made for a sort of chaotic playthrough haha but texturally quite interesting! nice feeling just sort of having to wait in these rooms, all with their own feels and tones to them; and the overall structure of it is loose but just enough to ground everything in a way that imbues it with human meaning. have fallen off of prototype studio games but this is a happy return! :)
wow, really adore this. the feeling of pushing through leaves and debris is pretty amazing. i love how mysterious navigation is, how difficult it is to parse the layers from each other, and then how good it feels to latch onto a new ledge and climb ever higher. the ending is playfully beautiful, and i ended up taking the plunge back down, causing all the passed layers to come rushing back -- gorgeous!
love this. the textures in this game are pretty astounding. i really like the feel of mouse + WASD but WASD rotates the image in sort of unwieldy ways (rather than the traditional move) -- feels disorienting and off kilter in a really striking way. i only saw one scene (the tree scene) but the feeling that the environment could change at any moment gave it a real sense of life and dynamism in an interesting way. would love to put this up in the background some time to see more of the scenes :) just lovely!
btw, if you don't already know them you might like GURN GROUP's games! they make little games that feel like they share a similar space with this :)
https://gurnburial.itch.io/
nice. it's an interesting feeling being forced to spend so much time in a small space. you've built a really tactile and interesting little nook, and in combo with the really dim and limited lighting i found myself continually surprised by it -- it wasn't until about halfway through the game that i found the buddha statue, for instance (which was a very nice moment), and then shortly after that i found the small scarecrow. certain rock formations struck me differently at different moments (like there's one that really juts out high nearish the edge, and when i came upon once more after finally starting to properly map out the space in my head, it jarred with how i thought i understood the area). this is somewhat of a drumbeat for me haha, but so much of traditional level design logic seems to focus on how we can shepherd players to and from locales as rapidly and efficiently as possible. but i find it to be quite beautiful and enriching to stop and spend time in these places, have levels that stop and start in ways that force me to engage with them, or just generally have designs / spaces / experiences that are not afraid to present their own frictions, which have sharp edges, certainly, but give us something to latch onto and mull over.
i've not watched the movie so i think i missed a lot of the context / some resonance with the text, but apart from that it sets a nice tone; and it's refreshing and quite striking to play such a small game with voice acting (and incredibly good voice acting, at that)! beautiful little game :)
this game is so so good omg. you create such evocative spaces. amazingly funny and charming game, and the sense of movement is pretty amazing too. i love how floaty and dreamlike the jump is, the supreme and towering scale of everything, the feel of falling between rooms / spaces. amazing ending haha. so good!!
nice. i like how the level titles sort of coach you through the mechanics. the concept of the puzzle mechanic is really cute in a way that gives the whole game this nice warmth. a lot of the puzzlescript games i play tend to be much too hard for me haha -- i suppose they end up falling into this design rabbit hole of taking ideas to their ultimate extremes, to see how much complexity you can wring out of something seemingly simple. but i think what i most love about puzzle games is these small little expressions of an idea, the little surprises that arise from nuances of rules i hadn't fully grasped. i love this game for not falling down those rabbit holes, and being content to simply live in the difficult-but-not-dizzingly-so area. lovely little puzzler :)
really like this one. mechanically simple but you get a lot of nuance out of it. i really like having the 2 lives per tomato, it creates a lot of interesting scenarios where i was strategizing over whether i should let certain tomatoes drop and lose a life in order not to create inconvenient blockades, and sometimes i would create barriers of full-life tomatoes that were protecting my last-life tomatoes which felt really satisfying. the pace is great as well -- like how long it takes between tomatoes. a lot of the game is this tense anticipation, trying to decide where to position my mouse between releases, which parts of my tomato wall felt the most vulnerable (and thus which ones i needed to protect the most!) and i LOVE your mechanic of not keeping a high score, but having to choose when to die haha, it creates a really nice risk/reward mechanic!
high score is 17!!
this game is so hard omg -- been trying to beat it for a few days haha. perhaps tomorrow i'll be ready...!
feeling of sweeping through a bunch of hands is really great, and once i get into the "zone" ducking and dodging the bad hands feels incredibly fluid and juicy. music of course is great. the moment (***spoilers!!!***) halfway through when the hands slow down is a wonderful moment, and the subtly shifting background gives it a lot of vibrancy and life in a great way. these sorts of deeply difficult games often carry with them a nice humor, and i think you get that here as well which i love. often find myself chuckling at a fresh defeat, given the goofy absurdity of a towering blockade of solo-cup-laden hands; but somehow (perhaps it's that it restarts immediately, or that the skill curve is very nice towards the beginning, or simply that swimming my mouse through green-flashing hands feels great) it feels like a very encouraging game if that makes sense lol, like it wants me to succeed in ways difficult games don't always feel. lovely! :)