Nor'Easter 2018 Games


I’m demonstrating five games: one that I wrote solo, two that I collaborated on, and two by my brother Ross.


Variations on Rockdodger

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Variations on Rockdodger is a game that my cousin Jason Woofenden and I wrote in 2004-2006. It’s a fork of an earlier game by Paul Holt. Written in C using SDL.

Dodge the rocks until you die, surviving as long as possible. You have thrusters in the four cardinal directions.

The screen scrolls freely to keep up with your ship, though there is an invisible wall which will catch up and push you if you go too slowly for too long. Rocks bounce off each other, and your jets push the rocks (though they’re fairly heavy).

Beginner challenge: you may only tap the keys (no holding). You may only use the up/down keys (no left/right). Play on easy mode (press ‘1’) and try to make it to 45 seconds on a single life.


Gunpods Vagabond

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Gunpods Vagabond was written by Ross Grams in 2016 using the Godot engine.

A side-scrolling shoot-em-up. Fly a helicopter-like spaceship, using your ship’s dash attack and seven different weapons to blast through waves of blocks, rocks, and 15 different enemy types. Deal with the giant explosions of proximity mines, fend off swarms of tiny tracking drones, dodge flights of fast-moving fighters, and try not to destroy yourself or your friends with the grenade launcher.

Supports local co-op with up to three players.


Asteroid Blaster

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Asteroid Blaster was written by Ross Grams in 2017 using the Defold engine.

This was his exercise in taking a very simple game and making a complete polished version to gain experience in end-to-end game development.

It has nice audio, jelly asteroids which subtly change shape, and two enemy types. The lightweight bumbling blob enemies mostly putter around minding their own business, and then occasionally run into you when you’re not paying attention. Then there are the extremely dangerous Hunters which chase you down and fire seeking missile blobs at you.

Your ammo slowly regenerates over time, or you get it back immediately when you hit something, encouraging accuracy and penalizing misses.

Your bullets push the asteroids, so they can get going very fast if you shoot them from behind. This adds another layer of tactics and makes the blobs more dangerous, as they can move quite quickly when dodging asteroids.


Oxygen Trail

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Oxygen Trail is an as-yet unreleased spare-time collaboration between Philippe Patenaude, Michael Ackerson, and Joshua Grams using the LÖVE 2D engine. We have been working on this since late October of 2017.

It’s a lighthearted space adventure game inspired by Oregon Trail and Seedship. Manage your food, water, air, and other resources as you traverse a hazardous galaxy to bring your shipload of colonists to their new home.


Yam of Endor

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Yam of Endor is a game that I started for the 2018 Seven-Day Roguelike Challenge, spending about 20 hours building the initial version, and a further 70 or so hours polishing and tuning it. It’s written in the LÖVE 2D engine.

It’s a turn-based roguelike space shooter where you explore five levels of randomly generated caves to collect food, then return to the surface to save your starving space colony.

This is an attempt to capture the feel of Asteroids games or cave flyers but without the time pressure. So it still has that sense of momentum and inevitability because it takes as long to stop as it did to get going. And there’s still the tension between wanting to aim in this direction to shoot the enemies but in that direction to slow down before you crash into a wall. But you can stop at any point and take as long as you like to think about what to do next.