Tag: CatLifterPage 1 of 2

Gnome Oppressor is a game about a gnome flying and dealing with enemies. I created it for the Game a Month challenge and it’s the first game of (ideally) 12 that I’ll be a part of creating this year. As a personal challenge I’ve also decided to give myself design constraints on each game.

For January I decided the following:

• Make it in GameSalad
• Use only art from CatLifter or creative commons licensed material
• Only use open sourced audio
• Incorporate procedural generation
• Have the game entirely played in one scene
• Use the Video Game Name Generator for the title

The rationale behind some of the above is to show people who don’t have artists on their team that games can be made using the creative commons. Only two art assets from previous work were used in Gnome Oppressor (the plane and bomb button) which was done by the very talented Krys Chiem.

Most of the visual art game from the platform pack made by Kenny.nl and the amazing people at the now defunct Glitch. The team at Glitch decided to toss all of their beautiful art into the commons, which is awesome of them. If you’re an art director you’d be screaming at me for all this mismatched art.

By far, it was the easiest to find audio for this game. Audio was also from Kenny.nl and some sound effects from OpenGameArt.

Procedurally generating content in GameSalad isn’t the easiest thing to do for a variety of reasons that are boring to go into. However, it is possible; additionally, I wanted to see if I could make an endless runner style game. When making CatLifter one of the bottlenecks in release was level design which is why I opted for procedural generation.

You can play Gnome Oppressor soon, I’m submitting it to the App Store and the game will be available for free.

Disconcertingly, mid-month I discovered that one the mechanics I wanted to use nearly impossible to build in GameSalad. This meant that in order to have semblance of fun I need to rethink a mechanic and that led me to add the bombing mechanic.The game could use more love and attention from me, it’s still not fun enough. So be it, I need to keep moving along with my game a month goal.

This is my second game that uses gnomes because gnomes are awesome. If you want to know more about gnomes then you should get the definitive resource on gnomes.

Thanks again to all the people who play tested this game!