This is a funny story. Back in May, I was out in Williamsburg to show Hot Throttle at Babycastles. There happened to be a German/French TV crew out there from Europe’s Arte TV and they produced this segment. I sound much classier talking about Cactus and man-cars in French.
Finally, here’s a segment from PBS on the cultural relevance of videogames in the modern age. About halfway through, Hot Throttle makes an appearance.
It hit twitter the other day that a bunch of indies were banding together to bundle up a slate of games into an IGF Pirate Kart. This inspired me to polish up a couple short games that I’ve never released before.
The second is a game about being a mosquito. You have to sneak up on people and press Z to suck their blood, before they attack you and start calling in cropdusters of DDT.
So I’ve just finished a little iPhone game with my friends Alec Holowka and Danny B. It’s a simple physics-based color smashing kind of thing, with lots of explosions.
Way back when the App store first rolled around, Alec and I put together a game engine and started cooking up some projects. One of them was this game. In the interim, I started doing a ton of iPhone contract work, and Alec put out Paper Moon, and forged ahead on Marian.
But we finally came around and polished this one up, and Danny (composer for megahit Canabalt, and future megahit Super Meat Boy) wrote us some apropo music.
I think the game turned out really nice. It’s a little more casual than anything I’ve ever done, but in a good way!
And the actual game framework we’ve built is kind of cool. It allows for a fairly rapid prototyping of games on the device — I feel a little sheepish that we’re only releasing our first project based on it now. In any case, check out the game and let us know what you think!
Owl Country is a short game I worked on in collaboration with several TIGSource regulars. We hatched the idea for the project during GDC, wrote the bulk of it while we were there, and added the finishing touches in the weeks afterward.
The premise is that you are an owl tired of the sea of pigeons plaguing the Montreal skies, along with the humans indifferent to their infestation. It takes place over the course of one night, ending in sunrise, and you must swoop as many pigeons as you can in this period.
How To Play?
Spacebar Swoops. Steer your swoop with the left and right keys. Don’t hit lamps. You get more points for successive pigeons attacked in the same swoop and extra lives for knocking pigeons into humans.
How Did We Do It?
Aquaria‘s Alec Holowka wrote the music. Adam Saltman, myself, Kevin Coulton, and Ivan Safrin did the art. Voice talent includes Goo developer Tommy Refenes, Fez superhero Phil Fish, and Raptor Safari troubadour Steve Swink, among others.
The game is written in straight C by Ivan, myself, and Alec, using OpenGL, SDL, FreeType for text, fmod for sound, and libpng for texture loading. Interestingly, the entire game was written on a sum total of five different MacBook Pros, and then the finished version was quickly ported to Windows.
Why An Owl?
After Gamma 256 ended this past November, a group of us were standing around outside Montreal’s Society for Arts and Technology chatting. Suddenly we heard a commotion above our heads and a pigeon dropped to the street beside us, freaked out for a second, and flew off. An owl had swooped in for an attack, failed, and had flown back several yards to perch in a tree.
And as we were all still processing this, pigeon feathers slowly floated down around us — eventually inspiring Owl Country.
Notes
It was a blast to work on a project with so many people I respect, and hopefully it will lead to other cool collaborative efforts in the future.
