Last summer, I collaborated with my mate Mark Vale to create our very first mobile game app. It’s all about pushing buttons as fast as you can. So, a great little time-waster when you’re on the loo, or waiting for your bread to toast. Mark came up with the concept, did all the programming in Unity, and I provided the art and music. There’s only one rule – hit the green light as fast and as many times as you can.
It features an extensive leaderboard system for you to compete with other players, across all of the game modes. There’s an ‘Endless’ mode where you have to survive as long as you can by maintaining a fast rhythm. There’s ‘Delay’ mode which really tests your reaction skills as you never know when the next light will appear. And there’s ‘Countdown’ mode where you have to hit as many lights as you can within a set amount of time, but making mistakes costs you precious time. We also added some simple accessibility options for those with visual impairments – you can set each light to whatever colour you like.
It’s available on Android and iOS, so check it out!
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
Is bingeing bad for us? It seems an obvious question, but I have been thinking about it lately, while revisiting Lost, the tv show that started 22 years ago (cripes, I feel old). Back when it was airing, my friends and I watched it religiously every week, talked about it in great detail, eagerly awaiting the next episode. It was the definitive show of its time, sparking debates and endless theories. It felt great to be a part of that, the sense of all experiencing the same thing together over a long period of time – most seasons had over 20 episodes, which is way more than most shows get these days – and they aired one by one, every week for several months. In today’s age of bingeing a show from beginning to end, I wonder what we are missing by not taking our time.
I’m currently enjoying getting down and dirty with nature. Taming dinosaurs in Ark: Survival evolved is exciting and frustrating in equal measure. Exciting because I’m taming friggin dinosaurs. Frustrating because bigger dinosaurs keep eating them… And when I’m not playing that, I’m exploring the freezing mountains in Rise of the Tomb Raider – seriously, I have never felt so cold playing a videogame. It’s the way Lara hugs herself in the chill wind as the snow clings to her jacket. It’s one of the most beautiful games I’ve seen in a long time.
I’ve got an enormous backlog to catch up with, so my gaming time has been pretty varied lately as I jump from one thing to another. I’m squeezing every spare moment I can in between work, life, and fatherhood duties, and enjoying some side-scrolling platform action, blasting zombies in one of the best remakes around, and scaling a literal mountain.
Hello, world! This post marks the moment in time and space when BangClickReload got a little redesign and was dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Every post before this point is rather old and might not look right, and unless I decide to go through them all to fix them, they’re going to […]
