...featuring a state-of-the-art 32-bit Integral Rounding Engine for maximum numerical fidelity.
Alex Stuart
Creator of
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For anyone who liked "VVVVVV," or for any masochist with a sense of humor, I humbly present "Vuess Vow Vong Vo Vold Vown Vhe Vey."
It's a 1D game: you hold down a key to fill up a progress bar. The challenge is that the progress bar stops filling if the key isn't in the right position. Sometimes you must hold it down, and sometimes you must let it up.
It's natural then to wonder when to hold down the key. And that I can't tell you; you have to vuess when hold it down.
I made the original version of this game in 2011. It's a parody of my most extreme experiences playing "VVVVVV." It was the first game I made all by myself from fundamentals.
Before I wrote the Haskell program for "Peoplemon," I wasn't sure that the programming techniques I wanted to use would really work. I tested them by re-implementing "Vuess" in Haskell, and they turned out to work surprisingly well. This was a key moment of inspiration for making "Peoplemon" a reality.
The game is a joke, it can be nakedly aggravating, and it uses the "troll face" that people have gotten in trouble for using commercially. But even now I still chuckle at it, I'm proud of its technical merits, and the music is a lot of fun.
For these reasons, it's available to download absolutely free on macOS, Windows, and GNU/Linux. Please check it out!
I turned our modern malaise into a short RPG.
Peoplemon
https://linearity.itch.io/peoplemon
It looks a lot like a certain monster-collecting phenomenon from the late 1990s. But instead of catching monsters and making them fight each other, you catch people and make them fight each other.
Consider, say, Pokémon. Isn't it weird that an entire society would just take animal blood sports for granted? A lot of modern societies consider these practices savage and backwards, and they prohibit them by law. And yet Pokémon has for 20 years immersed us in a beautiful vision of an idyllic world where people live in harmony with each other and these monsters that they kidnap and incite to violence for sport.
If you were to really wake up in such a society, you might feel as if you were going crazy. Or rather, that everyone else were.
I came up with the idea at a baseball game in 2011. I told it to my friend and she laughed. I laughed too. That should have been the end of it.
Instead, I decided that I should actually make it into a real game. I tried and failed to do this on two separate occasions, and it wasn't for lack of effort. It turns out that programming can be very difficult, even for professionals. But eight (8) years later, here it is.
Over all those years I had time to think of a lot of weird and funny concepts to put in the game. And the real world gradually got worse, making the basic premise of a world gone insane a lot more timely and relatable.
So, please play Peoplemon! I think you will find something in there that entertains you. When you do, I'd love to hear about it. And if you don't like it, keep that a big secret. Never tell a soul. I don't want it to get back to me that I spent eight years making some piece of crap.