Bennett Foddy

In 2021, the last time I taught the class, I didn’t want to hide the homework in the games. Instead I used the games as ways of presenting ideas. I made several, but I like this one, a reinterpretation of the fortune-telling minigame from Ultima IV.

The Fortune Teller Game

For my very final prompt, I wanted to leave the students with one lasting idea: that I make games for enjoyment and want to do it as much as I can, even when I’m limited to a day or two’s work and 8192 Pico8 tokens. I hope that came across in this little game.

The Last Prompt

The second hidden-homework prompt for this year is this 3D Maze game, similar to the ‘Zebra’ game. Visually speaking, it’s an homage to Paul Woakes’ Commodore 64 classic, Mercenary.

Maze of Wires

For 2019 I ran two prototyping classes – one in Pico-8 for the undergraduates and a graduate version with no platform constraint (which generally means they work in Unity). So this year I hid the same prompt in two different interpretations of the same idea. I tuned the Pico-8 game for the youthful reflexes of the undergraduate class, but I did not count on the fact that none of them would have ever played a bullet-hell game, and as a result, only one of them was able to reach the end and find out what the assignment was. I instructed that person that they could keep it a secret if they wanted to.

AlleyRat

AlleyStrat

This is 2018’s assignment, a diabolical puzzle. You’re a monk who has forgotten where his cell is in the monastery, and who must walk the labyrinth in order to remember it. If you can find his room, you’ll find out what the assignment prompt is. I was a bit worried the students would be unable to find the prompt hidden in this one, but about half of them got there eventually. (The rest were expelled from the university.)

2018’s class was 100% Pico-8 so it seemed appropriate that the prompt game should be in Pico-8 too. Pico-8 is so great for prototyping — as a case in point, it builds to a single JS and HTML file which loads quite happily in the browser from a local file, so you don’t get annoying permissions or crossdomain problems.

Monastery

Frank Lantz

Everybody House Games

Universal Paperclips is a browser game were the player takes on the role of an AI tasked with creating paperclips.

Universal Paperclips

This is a little experiment Bennett Foddy made in Pico-8 a while ago on a flight. It uses a control method they hadn’t seen before, where the movement is damped according to the rate of change in the acceleration (the ‘jerk’) which creates a strange oscillating movement.

Plan Bee

For 2017 I made Last Word, a little action word game where the difficulty increases as your words get longer. There’s a proper videogame version (with no prompt hidden inside it) here. Made in Terry’s Haxegon engine, a nice ultra-minimal Haxe library which is perfect for small prototypes. I love using engines that build to the web as well as native targets – makes it very easy to share prototypes without asking the player to do anything more annoying than play the actual game (which might already be quite annoying, honestly).

I made this little game as a way of learning Terry Cavanagh’s work-in-progress game engine, Haxegon. It’s a bullet-hell game where you are always trying to eat a particular bullet… you try to build unique words to gain points, but it’s game over if you form a series of letters that cannot be a word. I think this is a new idea? But I’m not totally sure.

Last Word

This short maze game is inspired by Op-Art pioneers like Reginald Neal. It combines two ideas: first, your brain can easily segment areas of an image based on the direction of shading, without any color or tone information to help… making the game quite playable. Second, this kind of image causes conflict as your eyeball moves, making it really annoying to play.

I used it as a talking point in my microtalk on optical effects in games, from GDC 2016.

This is the second time I hid an assignment for my prototypes in a game. See if you can find the secret prompt.

Zebra

The game is a simple physics game, a reinterpretation of the speed-skating from Epyx’s C64 classic Winter Games. Downward pressure from the skates on the ice is converted into forward momentum, which would be easy enough were it not for the hazards of the ice rink.

Made in the old version of Ruby Bergstrom’s Luxe, which used to be a rather lovely Haxe library and is now on the way to becoming a rather lovely Wren library. I don’t mind either way; I’m not a good enough programmer to have opinions about languages. Whatever library or language I use, it seems to lend its own flavor to the work you make with it. I don’t want a single tool that I can use for any game… I want a digital toolshed that looks like Depeche Mode’s synth collection.

This game is my take on 'Fight of the Sumo Hoppers', and it was originally designed to be controlled with two trampolines.

Get on Top!

A spiritual successor to QWOP where Players control the individual limbs of a unicorn.

Clop

A spiritual successor of sorts to the developer's earlier QWOP, this one takes the physical feats out of the realm of organized sport and instead puts the player in control of a man desperately clinging to a rocky oceanside cliff at sea level. Numerous handholds are available with which to pull himself up, helpfully labeled with keyboard letters, and if a handhold proves out of reach the player can activate a muscle-tensing big push, really striving to get close enough to the handhold to grab it. The player's body is governed by ragdoll physics, meaning that sometimes some rocking or swinging motions are needed in order to get close enough to make use of a handhold. Additional challenge is provided by shore birds who have made their nests in the handholds, obscuring the relevant letter with their feathery little bodies, plus of course the gradually-rising tide.

Girp

Gameplay Video

Ryan Chisholm

Evacuation is a puzzle game where you try to rescue as many astronauts, so without letting them in a room with aliens or into outerspace. You do this by clicking on the colored doors, on which all doors of the corresponding color also open or close.

Evacuation

Too Many Ninjas was the first game Bennett Foddy ever finished. It is a reinterpretation of the excellent and elegant bouncing ball minigame from Archer Maclean’s incredible IK+. Swing your sword to defend yourself against the horde of ninjas and their flying shurikens.

Too Many Ninjas!

Winner vs. Loser is a two-player, one-button athletics game in the mold of ‘Track ‘N Field’. Press your button rhythmically to build up speed, and hold it down to jump the hurdles.

I wrote this for Kokoromi’s Gamma 4 event, which called for games that could be played with one button, but they didn’t go for it. Maybe if I had pressed my button more rhythmically…

A training mode is included for people with no friends, but really it’s designed to be played with one or more people standing by.

Winner vs. Loser

Little Master Cricket is Bennett Foddy's attempt to make a cricket game that focuses on compelling gameplay rather than realism or verisimilitude. The real pleasure of cricket is to swing a bat and hit a ball, something that’s missing from every commercial game and most free ones as well.

Little Master Cricket

Noodlecake Studios

QWOP is a 2008 ragdoll-based Flash game created by former Cut Copy bassist Bennett Foddy. Players control an athlete named "Qwop" using only the Q, W, O, and P keys. The game has become a popular meme since it's outbreak in 2010.

Bennett Foddy Browser Games