1) I have a working iPhone version of the shipping game from Wholesale Hero – it functions just peachy and is nearly ready to go, but I have my own personal doubts about it: The regular version of Wholesale Hero has been well-received thus far, but isn’t exactly the most popular download from Mojiferous Industries (that would be Desktop Cigarette, followed closely by Atomic Combat.) Oddly, convoluted number matching games aren’t wildly popular! Who would’ve guessed?

2) I can finish Increase Speed, Drop Down, Reverse Direction – which I have been meaning to do ever since I last posted about it in January, before school got in the way. The game is pretty much done, it would just need some soundtrack love from King Thor and a little gameplay tweaking. It would be nice to get this game out of the laboratory…

3) I have an inane idea forming in my head for a new game, it’s nothing more than bits and pieces right now, but it could easily form into something magical. Right now it involves lots of drinking, talking birds, cacti, and abstract expressionist level design… It could be magical, or it could end up being a Mojiferous Industries project!

My options, therefore are:

1) I can spend another month or so testing and deploying WH iPhone so it can rot in the far reaches of the App Store.

2) Finish Increase Speed, Drop Down, Reverse Direction

OR

3) I can start up a new Quixotic quest for something else that isn’t even completely fleshed out yet!

I’m leaning towards #3, surprisingly enough. Anyone have any input out there?

Good luck!

—Mojiferous

1) I updated Wholesale Hero yet again, the link is the same (here). Build 286 fixes a few bugs, adds some boring features, blah blah. Here’s a breakdown:

Bug Fixes:

~ Fixed issue with shipping round not responding to clicks after second round
~ Fixed issue with saved games not opening correctly
~ Long company names now display more gracefully

New Features:
~ Added a preference option to turn off Growl
~ Added preference for news display time

Changes:
~ Disabled Sparkle to allow for easier Windows integration
~ Added date and version number to internal error reporting

Exciting, no? By disabling Sparkle it will allow me to start testing for Windows (which I am already doing right now — a few more bugs need to be worked out before I’ll make the beta public, but at that time the builds for Windows and Mac will be in sync) so the current auto-update scheme won’t work, you’ll have to download again. And a big thanks to all of you who have been playing WH and sending me feedback!

2) I have uploaded a gameplay video of my latest project (the Space Invaders project) which is now more than far enough along to spill the beans about and not have to worry about someone shitting out a flash version before I can even start coding. Basic synopsis: inverse space invaders, you play as the invaders and the computer tries to destroy you, etc. This whole concept came out of a strange, feverish dream, and after consulting with King Thor, we determined that no one had actually made a Space Invaders game from the point of view of the invaders… This was not only surprising, but lead me to start development right away. So here is the video — Right now the game is called “Increase Speed, Drop Down, Reverse Direction,” because I am, as my girlfriend so quickly pointed out, a complete dork and Futurama is still funny. So enjoy some unfiltered gameplay, complete with accidental Albert Ayler soundtrack (didn’t realize I had Screenflick’s sound recording turned on) and mid-movie tweet Growl. The algorithm isn’t perfect yet, and I’m no good at being the aliens (as a side note, this is the first level, so you can only have 2 shots on screen at any one time — I did this to make the game more difficult on early levels. For you, that is, not the computer.)

3) I’m growing a beard for a charity mustache festival and look like a homeless guy. Oh, and I’m going to GDC/IGF this year in San Francisco, without a game in the festival but with full intention of mingling with the other developer weirdos. Hopefully I’ll have shaved and gotten a haircut by then.

The invaders (and their lasers)

The defender and some explosions:

And finally, the bunker and some more explosions:

You might be asking yourself “what the hell are those oddly shaped cracked things?” Those may be the chunks taken out of the bunker… possibly. Obviously this is still in the design phase and nothing is set in stone yet, but I’m really happy with the way things have turned out thus far — stay tuned for more!

1) I updated the website with a new look and feel for 2010, with a simpler update system for me, and a better system for permalinks. I also moved all the old pages into an archive folder, because after three years of updates and old links I figured it was about time to start fresh and clean. There are some CSS 3 additions and it looks fine and dandy on Safari, Firefox and Chrome, but I’m sure the 5% of my visitors using IE will be presented with something less than spectacular (I don’t have any Windows software, so it’s hard to say what they’re doing there anyway)

2) I uploaded Wholesale Hero build 263 to the website (available here) It is mostly working and ready for the world, but it definitely needs some beta testing, so if you would be so kind as to download it and send me feedback, I would appreciate it! I’ve played it pretty extensively during the build phase, but I’m sure there are still bugs that will pop up, so any help would be great.

3) 2009 was another busy year for Mojiferous Industries, with contest entries, contest wins (Most Creative Game and a bronze for Best Sound in uDev 2008 for Simoebic Dysentery), my first utility (FontUtensil), and what seemed like a never-ending build for Wholesale Hero. Atomic Combat and Desktop Cigarette continued to be the stars of the show, with 10s and over 100 thousand downloads respectively, and more and more people [and their bizarrely named countries] logging high scores in AC. The fact the “France” was finally knocked out of the top spot in the AC Top Ten amazed me, since I have never gotten anywhere close to the over 7000 mark that “Uri” achieved just last month. No one seemed to really care about FontUtensil, although the few people that have seen it in use or used it themselves seemed to value it, but I still have yet to get any feature requests or traceable bug reports (which means I should just call it a 1.0 release, but who has time for such things?) King Thor and I also entered Simoebic Dysentery another contest, and they have yet to contact me about my ability to post the new Simoebic build to the public, or for that matter, if they even received anything beyond my entry fee. We won’t see results from our efforts for another couple of months, but hopefully the time we squeezed in between school and work was enough to make a winning game of some sort… And then there was Wholesale Hero, which started as a lark and then became my semester project and now may finally see the light of day — I slaved unusually hard upon it, making sure everything not only looked okay but also functioned well, and I think the results have paid off. I wouldn’t hesitate to call WH the most complete game I’ve released: full working update system (thanks to Sparkle), a graphical theme I actually spent time refining and tweaking until I I was happy with it AND it looked okay, the start of a truly helpful help system, more than just basic sound (although music would be keen), a gameplay concept initially stolen from Motor Pants but refined and expanded to a point where my simple matching game is much more enjoyable (and with another game type added on), and a full-featured online scoring system that is much more robust and interesting than the simple one I developed for Atomic Combat. I have high hopes for Wholesale Hero in the coming year, and you’ll have to tell me what you think!
And so 2010 is shaping up to be another banner year here at Mojiferous Industries: still no money coming in, yet more strange games (KT and I are currently working on something that could be pretty interesting) and maybe some swashbuckling adventure!

Or maybe no swashbuckling, I am getting a little too old to be running around with a sword stabbing pirates.

—Mojiferous

Atomic Combat:
Is definitely just a game. I may have toiled over the artwork for many days and may have poured my all into the damn thing, but my goal was to make something playable (which is open to debate). There is an overwhelming pacifist statement in the game, since there is no technical way that you can ever truly win (you can survive and not be a loser, but forcing the surrender of your enemies without a single death is nigh impossible). Would I call it art? Hell no, but it is one of my best-realized games.

Desktop Cigarette:
I guess you could claim that Desktop Cigarette is some kind of a meditation on health and fitness, but the truth is that I am a smoker, I enjoy smoking, and although I would like to quit, it has not happened yet… No, instead Desktop Cigarette is a study in absurdity, a gadget with no function, a digital representation of a physical item that has no business being digitized. It was made as an aesthetic object and a curiosity.

Heatstroke:
Is just a poorly made, poorly realized game built around a horrible idea. There is nothing to see here, move along.

Lobster Petting:
Lobster Petting is another endeavor in absurdity, and nothing is more surreal and absurd than lobster petting. Unlike many of its peers, (like fart games or virtual staplers), there are a few things that I think distinguish Lobster Petting from a simple work of stupidity:
1) There is no real world equivalent, or at least there are no petting zoos with lobsters that I am aware of (however you could probably have the same experience at a supermarket lobster tank).
2) It is not cute. There is a good reason no one lets children pet lobsters: they are ugly little things, all slimy claws and eyestalks.
3) It is not funny at all. Strange, yes. Funny? No. At least not funny in a traditional jokey kind of way, nor in a stand-up, observational, snarky kind of way. Lobster Petting is funny to me because it is so serious, because it can’t really be serious, and because it is so far from serious. Does any of that make sense?
4) No one in their right mind would ever make another, or so I thought until someone I didn’t know ported Lobster Petting. However, no one is rushing out to make Tarantula Slapping or Antelope Mangling, because that would be absurd. I suppose even Lobster Petting’s existence is absurd. And now I’m talking myself in circles.
So there you have it — absurdity, in the form of a lightly fondled lobster.

Motor Pants:
The concept here may seem like another attempt at the absurd, but really, this was a failed attempt to make a real game that happened to be salted with my own flavor of strangeness and obsession with pants. In a rush to release the game, I skimped on the game play and logic instead of taking my time and it ended being a confusing mess of unplayable hoohah (the general unplayability probably also tends to make one think that I may have had artistic intentions, but in actuality I was simply being lazy). I recently started Motor Pants up to refresh my memory as to what it was all about, and I had no idea what the hell I was doing. I was confounded by my own game. Because of this, I’m spending my sweet ass time on Wholesale Hero, which in some ways is the successor to Motor Pants but better designed and infinitely more playable.

Simoebic Dysentery:
Nothing arty here, just a game about an amoeba and the body it lives in… Since this was a joint project of myself and King Thor, from concept to execution, I feel that it is also the most straight forward and least peppered with my weirdness.

Zoltan:
Ah, Zoltan. I believe Zoltan is the pinnacle of my artistic endeavors in the digital medium thus far. At first glance, you may believe that he is merely an appeal to primitivism, or a simplistic caricature of Neolithic religion. However, in my eyes Zoltan is so much more: an appeal to the rational, against the mysteries of religion, and all the absurdity that it embodies. He is all-knowing, at least when it comes to the weather, a feat accomplished through human ingenuity and technology, not through smoke and mirrors or the hokum of faith. He requires a sacrifice to function, sometimes money – my own nod to the business of modern religion – and sometimes a fish – a subtle take on the symbolism of religion without getting bogged down in trying to represent every faith equally. Of course there is also a priest present, to allow you easier contact with Zoltan, but he really doesn’t do much, and there is a book on the mysteries of Zoltan, a reference my own personal thoughts on some zealots’ ludicrous literal readings of religious texts. Even the all-seeing eye pyramid thing from the dollar bill makes an appearance. All of this is wrapped up in a serious layer of absurdity: grass that needs to be trimmed, a beard that also needs looking after, a drunken moon, a help file that is far from helpful… And finally the fact that the program does nothing at all, but is merely meant to sit there, look good and do its thing, and I think you’ve got a good argument for a piece of digital art. Or a worthless pile of dung.

There are others, of course – Wholesale Hero promises to be a rip-roaring anti-capitalist good time, no one outside of my friend P. Brown has even seen Modern Worker 2 (which mostly involves a malfunctioning copier and endless filing), and I have half-baked plans for things like Poaching Hero and Litigation! which should bring my sense of the absurd together with a more coherent philosophical standing.
I hope that this has made things a little clearer, because it took me hours to shape this into the semi-coherent mess you’ve just read and I don’t really want to do it again. Conclusion: Mojiferous Crap ≈ art.

In other news, Wholesale Hero continues to develop — I’ve got a ton of new features, including live updating to the Mojiferous Industries website, multiple different game options, and some added bonus blocks for both the manufacturing and shipping phases. There is still a whole lot of work to be done, but maybe, just maybe, I’ll run the damn thing for some other contest coming up… However, I do need beta testers for the damned thing — so anyone willing to spend a little time with what amounts to Motor Pants Double-Plus Size, just shoot me a line.

–Admiral Mojiferous J. Colossus