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

In other news, I made some rather surreal little commercials for Wholesale Hero… Watch them here:
http://www.youtube.com/mojiferous483

I’ve been busy with a few projects that are more like actual programming work and haven’t been able to focus as much precious time to making incredibly pointless games, but rest assured there are still evil projects coming down the pipeline.

First amongst those may be the LAMP Motor Pants, which is still early in development, but the puzzle portion is entirely playable and I’m still trying to decide if it needs anything more than that or if I want to devote the time and resources to make it multiplayer aware, or if I should just finish the thing off for now, make it a Facebook app and then maybe decide where to go…

I’ve also begun work on another puzzle game concept called “Wholesale Hero”, which is kind of a Motor Pants offshoot- more puzzly, less confusing racing BS. I have a working engine and some great concepts, but scheduling time to work on it has been harder than I thought (July seems to be full of birthdays, tiresome holidays, and days spent outside and away from my coding lair.) Eventually I will post some pictures and more information, but for now this tiny blurb (and probably a mention on the forum) will have to do.

–Mojiferous

Many thanks to everyone who voted for the game, to Liaht for the technical advice, and especially to King Thor for the concept, ideas, levels, early testing, and that amazing fucking soundtrack (the guy’s got a natural talent for video game music…)

p.s. We’re going to continue work on the game- finally record the dialog, fix some annoying bugs, add content, retool the difficulty… Look for it soon!

You can download the game Here…
And vote for the game (and download and vote for everyone else’s) Here…*

*This is an indie-developer do-it-yourself in a short time without-billion-dollar-budgets and teams-of programming-monkeys contest: I encourage everyone to download and rate all the games in the contest, if only to support indie developers (especially indie Mac developers!)

I also just sent the Good King the first build of the level editor, which is far from feature complete but will get our level building adventure started. I’m not completely satisfied with the graphics right now; they’re not quite etched/woodcut-Gray’s-Anatomy-like enough for me quite yet, but I’m hoping to get them there soon enough… Anyone have any suggestions?

That’s all the news that I have for now. As soon as we have a playable beta I’ll post it here!

–The Admiral