— Meaningful Gameplay

The "goaterpillar" is about to eat blocky strawberries

Hunger is a game prototype created by Dusty Peterson and Ryan Hoffman in the span of about 16 hours. The idea of this project is to try and communicate the idea of hunger through gameplay, and do so without text or gauges. It’s not a political statement about starvation or world hunger, we just wanted to recreate that feeling that everyone gets a few times a day.

While the subject itself is very simple, it actually turns out to be pretty difficult pull off. Video games are great for sound and visuals, but we can’t really give people a physical sensation. We decided to work around this by attempting to recreate symptoms of hunger through an avatar which the player feels empathy towards.

Download Hunger Here (Windows only)

Note: The art in the game is from StencylForge because I didn’t have enough time to add Daniel Xiao’s excellent art. His feedback throughout development helped make the prototypes better than they could have been.

Learning to Fly Prototype #1
Learning to Fly Prototype #2

“I wished to say to men, ‘If you desire to continue freely in your creative work, it will be necessary for you to enter the struggle and conquer the forces of darkness that are about to invade the world.’” –Jacques Lipchitz, on his sculpture Prometheus Strangling the Vulture II

“Learning to Fly” puts you in the role of a bird struggling to fly as high as possible. It’s also a game about how I’ve felt in my first year as a full-time indie game developer. My overall goals for the project were to convey the following ideas through game mechanics:

• that you should celebrate your accomplishments and progress
• that you should avoid comparing yourself to others
• that you should enjoy the journey instead of doing things for external rewards

“To change with change is to remain in the changeless state.” ~ Bruce Lee

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Download the Prototype(Windows Only) : Here

Requires : OpenAL & DirectX 9

In the zip file is a 3rd party folder. This contains Visual Studio 10 run time files. If you don’t have VS 10 on your system, you will need to install either the 32 bit or 64 bit depending upon your os.

It doesn’t have sound but the engine requires OpenAL.

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When looking at ideas for what to explore at this jam. I kept coming back to things like commitment, drive, tenacity. As I thought more on it, I began asking myself what do these things have in common? To me the big thing is that they are all components to achieve something, specifically for me, these things relate to my goals as a game developer of being able to operate my own studio. But why are these things important and why is there such an urgency from these things? The answer, impermanence. Impermanence could be looked at simply as change. We are all impermanent, we will live for any undermentioned amount of time, and we will die, at least at this point, all of us. Now what death is and what actually happens there is another topic entirely. But what can be said is that for any of us, dealing with impermanence is something that we must all endure.