Reviving the local multiplayer spirit

Today Elongo goes live on BGA. It’s an abstract tile-placement game which I implemented, designed by Robert Smith.

This marks the fifth year that I enter 7drl, a yearly game jam in which participants create a roguelike in 7 days. My entry is Perimeter, and I’m really proud...

I have given JustMeet, a website for organising events with your friends, a new makeover!

Karvi marks the second BGA implementation I make this year (after Botanicus). Again, it’s a Euro game by Hans im Glück, but it’s little meatier than Botanicus.

I received an email about a platform for building multiplayer games called Rune, and it intrigued me. Having already started my own multiplayer platform, Kangaroo, but never managing to find...

In 2018, I was asked to make an educational physics game about Neutrinos, an experience I really enjoyed. And, I’ve been asked again – this time a game to explore...

In February this year, I said goodbye to Board Game Arena as a full-time developer after having worked there for about two and a half years. Working with the team...

My submission to 7drl 2024 is Trichromat. You play as a spectre who has discovered that they can perceive three colours…

I’ve been playing Worldle daily for almost two years, and I love it. It’s a game in which you are shown the outline of a country, and you have to...

I’ve just released a micro update to Magpie which you can play over at Itch.

Magpie is my submission to 7DRL 2023. As appears to be my habit for this jam, it’s another Broughlike. You play as a trinket-loving Magpie, navigating a garden full of...

My entry to Deck-tember is Loco Card. You can play it on Itch, via the link below:

When planning an event with various people, it’s hard to know when and where would be the most collectively convenient for the attendees. Recently, in trying to solve this problem,...

Puzzlescript is a simple-yet-powerful game engine for tile-based puzzle games. I’ve played some really cool games made in Puzzlescript (you can see an absolute wealth of creativity in the gallery),...

After Cloudpierce (from 2018) and Towers Besieged (from 2019), our collaborative fan Magic: the Gathering block is due to conclude later this year with Steepleclimb .

Kangaroo’s predecessor was called Playground, and was a PHP-backed engine for playing turn-based games. The site offered two boardgames of my own devising: The Happiest Town and Kingsville. I found...

The mysteriously titled WDL by Internet Janitor popped its way into my Itch notifications recently. It is a Wordle variant with three-letter words, made in Chip-8 as a submission to...

I created some Green specials for Wodka last Summer themed around the idea of specials that were all negative in some way. For example, if you won a trick with...

Exactly one year ago, I submitted Escorial to 7DRL. Despite the game’s crude appearance and simple mechanics, I was overjoyed that people really seemed to enjoy it. I had a...

In somewhat of a break from Uwe Rosenberg’s usual worker placement games, A Feast for Odin introduced an element of luck in the form of die rolls. These die rolls...

In 2019 and again in 2021 some former colleagues and I (we call ourselves Feralites) participated in a two-day game jam. They were both a lot of fun, and so...

When I went freelance last February, I had intended to spend more time on my own projects, and make more games. However, it didn’t quite work out as planned, largely...

I have really enjoyed the boom in dedicated two-player games, and I own several: Le Havre: The Inland Port, Caverna: Cave vs Cave, Agricola: All Creatures Big And Small, Patchwork...

Since I was first exposed to it, Agricola has been one of my favourite boardgames. As a student I used to go and visit friends and go on (what we...

A while ago I spoke about Crazy Chess, a chess variant where you can spend your points budget on whichever pieces you like. Eventually, I plan to make a game...

Skull is a beautiful party game which revolves around bluffing, and marks my fourth released adaptation on BGA. It comes from designer Hervé Marly. Each turn you must play either...

My third adaptation for Board Game Arena is now live: Rest In Peace is a 2-player boardgame, designed by Fabien Gridel and published by Blue Cocker Games.

Back in 2019, I hosted a game jam with some colleagues of mine. Two years later, all now having moved on from our old company, and we decided it was...

When making Escorial, I created a library to help make queuable tweens/animations in PixiJS. It’s called pixi-actions and is available as an npm module. See the readme on github for...

Now being without job, I want to enter a couple of game jams this year. My first submission is to 7DRL, a yearly jam in which the goal is to...

At the end of last month, I took the decision to leave my job. Working from home for almost a year was taking its toll, and I felt a little...

Abyss is a 4-player boardgame, by game-design titans Bruno Cathala and Charles Chevalier. I’m excited to have created the implementation for this game over at Board Game Arena, where the...

I almost exclusively read fantasy, and I love richly developed worlds which include linguistic, geographic and cultural detail. I am also a fan of board games, and as such I...

A fourth set of specials has now come to Wodka: the Blues. This now means we can have games in which every card has an effect… it’s complete chaos, but...

I used to play a lot of Age of Empires when I was younger, but I had largely forgotten about the game until my brother suggested we try playing the...

I think chess is a fun game, no matter that I’m wholly awful at it. I approach chess as I would approach any of the genre of modern European board...

On a late-night whimsy, I decided to buy kangaroo.games in order to move Kangaroo to its own domain. For starters, “xikka” is difficult to spell and pronounce, and for seconds...

Halloween is almost upon us, and we have two special events in Wodka with which to celebrate.

I’ve created a simple ‘game’ on Kangaroo which can be used to host quizzing events which do not need a quizmaster. In Quizzie, each participant gets the opportunity to write...

Chapters: 1 2

Although I have read a couple French novels as part of an educational requirement, I had never read a foreign-language novel for pleasure until now. I have just finished reading...

On the 20th September 2020, the very first Wodka tournament will take place. This is seriously exciting news for the Wodka scene! If you like the game, add the date...

In Wodka, there are 14 specials assigned to the red suit. There have been hundreds of games with the same assignments: the 4 always skips the next player, the J...

I’ve picked three works of fiction which are freely available from Project Gutenberg, and extracted the 10 most common 6+ letter words from each.

I thoroughly enjoy trying out new game development engines, and as a consequence have tinkered with many of them.

Linguistic evolution happens just fast enough that we can watch it happen in front of us. What an exciting prospect!

Square Worlds has had more success than other mobile games I’ve made. It still rests solidly in the “losing money” zone, but regardless I’m happy with how it went. I...

There have been over 200 games of Wodka played on Kangaroo thus far, with hopefully many more to come. But where did Wodka come from?

Time for another silly geography game: I can draw flags is a game where you draw the flags of 10 countries in a row, and get ranked on how close...

I saw a tweet last week from Matt Henderson with a simple algorithm for building a fractal pattern inside a hexagon. I have embedded the tweet at the end of...

I’m planning another silly minigame for my site, but it requires the player to do a bit of drawing. I only need two tools: pencil and fill, so I threw...

This is now the third post I write about Square Worlds, and it’s not going to be the last. Bear with me.

Finishing a game brings with it a relaxing wave of calm. My evenings will once again be free, I think. No longer will I fret over a list of remaining...

Wodka is a 4-player trick-taking card game played by two teams of two. It’s now available to play on Kangaroo.

Kangaroo is my framework for creating multiplayer turn-based games. It’s something I started work on a while ago, but the pandemic induced lockdown has driven a lot of progress on...

Shiftgrid is a puzzle game similar to those slider puzzles you have probably played with. You have to try and recreate the picture by sliding entire rows and columns.

Last February, I ran a a game jam with some work friends, and made a little 4-person digital board game which I wanted to turn into a single player mobile...

In a previous job, I used to work with Perl a lot. To make life simpler, I made a quick and dirty REPL (read-eval-print-loop) for Perl. It is similar to...

When I was younger I was so much more motivated and productive when it came to making games. Although I have had the same hobby for many years, I feel...

Whenever I try and make bread, I follow these steps:

How well do you know the United Kingdom? In my case, it turns out the answer is not very well at all…

A few years ago, I saw a video of linguist-psychologist Steven Pinker discussing an experiment designed by Peter Wason in 1966. Unfortunately, I can’t find that video anymore, but Pinker...

Though I may be a programmer by profession, the inner workings of a computer largely remain a mystery to me. Modern computers would be far too complex for me to...

For today’s Puzzle Time, I pull Tessera from my ever-growing graveyard of incomplete games. It’s one I started making some time back, when I was learning Cocos2d-x, but as is...

Welcome to the first installment of Puzzle Time, where I share some puzzle games I have made. Crossclue is like a wordsearch mixed with a cryptic crossword.

I remember playing Fizz Buzz at primary school in my Year 6 class (age 10-11). Starting with 1 and going down the register, each kid counts the next number. If...

The kind of games I most appreciate are also the hardest to find: little games made by hobbyist developers. My favourite moments come when I feel I have connected somehow...

There are several features of other languages which seem completely alien to me, a native English speaker. When I come across one of these features, I enjoy trying to come...

Chapters: 1 2

After having first tasted living abroad during an Erasmus year in France, I have been longing to repeat the experience. The main attraction for me is to learn another language,...

Last year, me and three friends created some custom Magic cards and drafted them. It was the most exciting and fun Magic: the Gathering experience I’ve ever had, and so...

Here is a snippet of me aaahing twice. What do you think their relative pitches are?

I used to be a stickler for grammar, and an avid prescriptivist. I would get annoyed at signs proclaiming “5 items or less”. I read Lynn Truss’s Eats, Shoots and...

This weekend I participated in a game jam with some colleagues from work. Our theme was Small World, and each of the six of us took it in a completely...

Not long after I added a commenting system to my site, I felt oddly proud to discover I was getting spam comments. I made the commenting system from scratch, so...

Note: this is a follow-on post from follow your dart.

Polis: Fight for the Hegemony is a two-player asymmetrical territory-control board game. I’m usually cautious of territory control games, but Polis avoids most of my reservations. Firstly, it’s strictly two...

Imagine throwing a dart at a dartboard such that it will hit any point on the dartboard uniformly randomly. What is the expected distance between the dart and the centre...

I don’t like traditional four-sided dice. When you toss them, they just thud to the table without really rolling. Reading the number is also awkward. All in all, bad.

For the purpose of filling out an in-development site with placeholder data, I decided to make a random name generator based on Markov chains. The goal was for it to...

Our bootleg Magic: the Gathering set which I hinted at last month, Cloudpierce, was a success! Busting open a pack and rifling through all the new cards is really exciting....

Wordability was a scrabble-esque boardgame made by three brothers. Its gimmick was that words could be placed in any direction – forwards, backwards, diagonally, anything goes! Unfortunately, the game didn’t...

Spellsmith is a quaint and challenging adventure puzzle game for iOS and Android. I made it with my brother, who is an illustrator. I particularly like his goblins and fish...

Spaceheist is a fast-paced coop game for mobiles and tablets.

Codegrid was a game I entered into a game jam back in 2015. It’s a programming game in which you write your programs in a 2d grid.

NuOdyssey is a game I made for Durham University’s stand at the Royal Society’s Summer Exhibition as a small part of a demonstration coordinated by Professor Silvia Pascoli and Dr...

I often come across a pun in English which I suspect can’t work well in other languages. Some of my favourites come from Magic: The Gathering. For example, “Hex” is...

Some friends and I are getting together to create a custom Magic: the Gathering set for drafting. We each are taking two weeks to create three booster packs’ worth of...

I really like the elegance of cryptic crossword clues, and a little hobby of mine is trying to come up with them. I have attempted to devise a relevant clue...

M4ldonado mentioned to me a process for converging on a target image only by randomly drawing lines on a canvas; you can see a video of his algorithm at work...