Array Game

It’s pretty normal today to have compelling games in just a web browser. There is a certain class of game that is causal, and while it may have achievements, it doesn’t require long periods of attention from you. I find these to be just the right thing to play in the background, a minute or two here and there over the day or week.

Array Game came to via waxy. This is like an earworm, but it’ll eat up your attention. If you visit the page, you’ll get a screen that looks like:

Nothing is happening until you spend the 10 points you have on a generator. The game play is very simple. Earn points, spend them on upgrades, continue.

At one point you’ll be able to sell all of your progress to get some B points. This opens up another level, for which you can slowly earn more points and eventually start earning those points directly. In the course of the game, there are upgrades which will automate some of the button clicking.

There are levels A, B, C, D, E and F. There seem to be placeholders for G and H but as far as I can tell no way to earn those. The game does get updates from time to time so maybe one day there will be more, and if you dig around you can join a Discord server to discuss it but that’s beyond my level of interest.

It took about a month of casual play for me to ‘complete’ the current version of the game. I don’t know if it was my approach, or if the game has these built into it, but there were times when the only thing to do was just wait it out (hours) while you slowly earned enough points to move to the next level. I don’t see this as a bug, but a feature – it in a way forces you to make this a more casual game vs. a furious button clicking effort.

Now this is just a simple JS based game, and it’s running entirely in your browser. You can open up the web development tooling built into your browser and go mess with the code.

Spoiler alert – here are some simple console scripts you can run to automate the button clicking. This is incomplete, but I hope it inspires you to mess around in the console. Remember, this is a game, sure you can take some short-cuts but will that ruin the fun?

Shout out to Demonin and the other games and web things they’ve built, thanks for making a great time waster.

Playing in the Cloud

mirrors_edge_2dThere has been lots of talk lately about “the cloud” – I was a little taken aback by this blog posting from Google which implied that Google is the cloud.  Pat also recently posted about web UIs that I’d recommend people check out.  I’ve been keeping an eye on some of the instant on OSes, and it turns out a friend of mine is involved with one of the companies offering a cloud solution.  I’ll admit that the cloud concept is very cool – but what I really want is to host my own cloud (and yes, that does seem a bit backward).

Let’s get back to what computers are good at – entertaining us.  If you haven’t seen this yet, you need to check out mirrorsedge2d.com – a pretty neat flash based game that is a 2D take on Mirrors Edge.  It only take about 30mins of toying around to exhaust the content on the beta site right now, but if you enjoy 2d platformer games this will hook you.

The other night my internet connection was down for about 30 minutes.  How annoying will that be once all our data is in the cloud?

World of Goo

world_of_goo1

I caught sight of World of Goo while browsing slashdot of all places. It turns out that a Linux version of it was recently made available, so I had to give it a shot.

The style reminds me a lot of Tim Burton’s movies.  The gameplay is similar to fantastic contraption mixed in with lemmings.  I’ve only played for a few minutes to get a feel for it, I suspect it gets a lot more challenging as you go on.  The little bit I did play, impressed me enough to want to tell others about it.

There are versions for Linux, Mac and Windows – as well as Wii.  If you’ve got any interest in puzzle games, give this one a spin.  Kudos to 2D Boy for  making a cool cross platform game – nice to see that a small team with a vision can still make a go of it.