1) The beginnings of Atomic Combat 3.0, or “rebuilding the Pyramids”. I have a UI, and most of the basic functionality, and it’ll probably be another couple of months before this sees the light of day. I will likely release it on the app store, prepare to hear more about it in the near future.

2) I’ll soon be releasing an iPhone app in conjunction with King Thor… More on that soon, as well.

3) I’ve also started finishing FontUtensil (with an improved UI) for final release.

4) And finally, I’m prepping an overhaul of the website for 2011 (since I seem to redesign every spring) — stay tuned!

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, after this resolution debacle I decided that I needed a better issue-resolution and user-communication method, so I started the Mojiferforum… So if you need help or want to complain about whatever oddity I’ve shat out, you can do so relatively easily now. I expect the Mojiferforum to become a disaster fairly quickly, filled with nothing but spam, midget and/or turtle porn, damned kids, and the occasional googly-eyed gibbon molester. Have fun!

…and in case you didn’t know, you can view the Atomic Combat Top Ten right on my website. Right now the fine country of Sweden is beating all contenders with an amazing 5920 score! Soon enough I will publish my first list of bizarre country names that people have used, because all of you need help. Mental help.

–Mojiferous

Good King Thor may not be fully finished beta testing the game, but I decided that for my own sanity and the sanity of all those around me I would just unleash Atomic Combat 2.0 upon an unsuspecting public… Everything seems to be working magically, so I figured “fuck it, I’m gonna release the thing,” and so I did… Now comes the inevitable onslaught of downloads and then the onslaught of confused emails- “Why does everything show up sometimes?” (The Spy Plane/Spy Satellite “features” still aren’t explained that well) “How do I play the card game?” (ditto) “I don’t understand!” (neither do I…)

I’ll probably post updates within the next few days about how the games getting along- I expect mixed feedback, so we’ll see… However, I am quite proud of how the damn thing looks, and at least no one can say that this release is somehow uglier than the last!

–Mojiferous

Atomic Combat 2.0 is progressing nicely, with almost all of the core finished (all that really needs to be added is a help file.) The game itself works wonderfully, and I’ve slowly ironed most of the kinks out (including killing the ability to save & open games- it unbalanced things too much.) Right now the game not only features a score (!) which makes things infinitely more interesting, but also keeps track of said scores online, with an ongoing scoreboard in the works at mojiferous.com. Multiplayer is not a reality yet, as the complexity of the current build makes it less feasible for one very busy guy to implement… but maybe soon. In the meantime, enjoy some screenshots!

The real reason for my blabber today is the first birthday of mojiferous.com- One fine year of impossibly confusing games, nearly unplayable crap, weird mustache obsessions, and horrible programming! Over the last year I’ve transferred a little over 327 Gigabytes of games, and had about 54,000 unique visitors resulting in a little over 360,000 hits… Not exactly Google numbers, but pretty damned good for a guy who makes smoking ashtrays and racing pants. I’m finally putting the finishing touches on the new version of Atomic Combat and it should be ready for beta testing within a week or so (which means that King Thor and Kloewer should be preparing themselves now…) Anyway- Happy Birfdey Mojiferous.com!

Well… not entirely true- I have been working on an updated Atomic Combat on and off (in my [ha ha!] free time) for the last few months- I’ve built a new user interface that is simpler and more straight-forward, revamped the graphics to be bigger and prettier, and tried to rewire the gameplay so there is less emphasis on between-round construction and research, two areas which seem to have been the source of most complaints about the original Atomic Combat- players suddenly running out of missiles or not noticing that all of their factories have been destroyed and having to suffer for 10 turns because of it…
So I changed the gameplay to shift the focus of construction and development to a “pre-war” construction phase that happens before bombs start to drop (much like in real life- the likely scenarios for global nuclear war would probably not allow for construction of new bombers and warheads in between strikes.) Consequentially, the “meat” of the game, the actual attack phase encompasses a blizzard of attacks and counter attacks with no interruptions for construction of a new reactor, or to research more reliable missiles in the middle of a war. In many ways, this had made the actual nuclear combat a little more “realistic”, with a number of concepts from the inability to research new technologies in the midst of an attack to multiple simultaneous attacks (a feature I initially included in the original, but it proved to be quite annoying when coupled with the construction/research/manufacturing model of AC1.0)

So here’s a run-down of current features:
-new rendered (3d!?) graphics
-3 levels of zoom! (still determining why, other than “because I can”)
-manufacturing/research phase shifted to beginning of game, reconstructed as a “card game” (modeled partially on Nuclear War.) That’s right, all 4 countries draw cards, place ‘em down, etc. etc. to determine how many of what kind of warheads, missiles, bombers, etc. they possess. There are of course “action” cards, almost like Mille Bornes, allowing you to screw another player… This is still early on in the development phase, so we’ll see how it turns out.
-wind now dynamic- no longer will radioactivity simply float across the screen from left to right, but will be subject to changes (due to nuclear detonations and possibly storms)
-probably a whole hell of a lot more features as I get further into development, however seeing as how I’m only spending a few hours a week (of my precious little free time) on this project, it may be a while before everything is completely ready for beta testing…

In other news, I recently finally got around to playing Spore… Only to be supremely disappointed.
Don’t get me wrong, the game looks nice, it’s easy to play and advances fairly quickly. Which, truthfully, is also my biggest complaint about it- in the space of a day I advanced from a tiny one-celled organism to a galaxy-hopping creature and only “died” three times (eaten by slightly stronger creatures before [quickly] learning that evolution/creation got more advanced the farther west and south of my nest I wandered.) Admittedly I was playing at the easy level, but I also never read instructions and towards the latter stages of the game was so bored with it all I was skipping all the in-game tutorials just to make the game a little more difficult.
I was hoping for an in-depth game much akin to Will Wright’s Sim Earth- so dense and difficult, without careful study of the instruction book and repeated trial and error you end up with a burning hellhole of a lifeless planet- but no, instead I got The Sims Wildlife Version. Even the so-called “city management” phase- pumped so heavily towards “fans of Sim City and Civilization” as it was- was a disappointment. I don’t know what “fans of Sim City” the developers talked to, but tribal, global, and galactic phases had about as much city management as your average game of C&C (is my city making tanks? no? Can it make tanks? yes. Make tanks.) In the “global” (or whatever the hell Maxis calls it) phase I could build three (3!) different types of buildings, and six (6!) different vehicles- I probably spent a grand total of two (2!) minutes managing my cities- in fact the hardest part about the stage was figuring out what I was supposed to be doing after willfully ignoring the in-game tutorial. Sim City, a place where layout and design time stretches into days sometimes, it is not. In fact, the only times that I even thought about Sim City were to ponder how great a new version of the game would be with a Spore-like construction system, with endlessly different buildings, some downloaded live off the internet from other users, etc. etc. Now that would be a game I would not leave the house for…

Anyway, long story short: doing both of these things at once- redesigning Atomic Combat and playing Spore- has led me to a couple conclusions that will probably influence the outcome of Atomic Combat:
1) Razzle Dazzle should never come before depth (a full-3D world would be really cool, but I would rather improve AC’s rather lackluster play than add graphical bells and whistles- Sim Earth [with it's mind blowing 256-color graphics and single-1.2Mb floppy install] was a more interesting game than Spore)
2) Finding a way to present necessary information to the user without a maze of menus and clicks is key to AC’s improvement (Spore can tell you everything you needed to know, just with one screen…)
3) I need music and better sounds.

Anyway… Look for more soon!
–Mojiferous

In other news, The Good King Thor and I have begun a project… A game project of mindshitting complexity, a project that will make Myst look simple and well-programmed… There will be more news to come, I assure you!

–The Admiral