T-Rex Poop Quest

I'm just about finished with the Twine RPG that I mentioned earlier, just some proof reading & balancing & bug squashing to take care of.

When it comes to making a reasonably featured RPG, Twine really isn't the tool for the job. It was fun to make one, and you could certainly make something much more complicated with Twine, there just isn't much reason to. This game was a little experiment to see how far I could push Twine before it stopped being fun & I think I found that point.

It's a short, grindy, fetch questy RPG called T-Rex Poop Quest, and it features what is possibly the most shallow battle system ever implemented in any game ever. Still, I think it brings some things to the table, you know, enriches the genre somewhat. Like, you know how RPGs never have a "Sarah Palin's Fart in a Can" item that you have to carry around? Well, don't worry, we've ticked that box for sure.

T-Rex Poop Quest should be ready to play in like a week.

OSFBM'97 is Dead.

"In a shocking move, indie giant Potato Clock Games infuriated investors this morning when they announced the official cancellation of the year's most hotly anticipated title, Outer Space Future Battle Massacre 1997. Potato Clock Games could not be reached for comment."

-The Wall Street Journal

Giraffe Adventures Official Release & Origins Tale

Get it while it's hot from potatoclockgames.com!

The Origins of Giraffe Adventures

So, one day, many years ago, I was bored at work & realized that what little HTML I had learned in high school had evaporated out through my ears & into the cosmos. I threw together some simple linked pages just to assure myself that, in a life or death situation where the most rudimentary knowledge of HTML would come in handy, I would have a shot at survival. Those pages were the first few of Giraffe Adventures. I'd add a little more to it whenever I was bored & it soon grew into an unmanageable pile of HTML files with bizarre names meant to convey their position in the branching structure. I promptly forgot about it.

I stumbled back upon it recently & there were some laugh-out-loud moments, but still, it just seemed like too much of a pain in the ass to work on. For better or worse, someone introduced me to Twine at about this same time, which is a cool, free, open source tool for doing branching HTML story kinds of things. So, fuck, I figured I had to finish Giraffe Adventures now.

It took way longer than I thought it would. I can't believe I spent so much time on this thing. I mean, I'm glad that I did, if ever there were a story that had to be told, it is Giraffe Adventures, but jesus fuck. You know?

Anyway, if you're an alien in the future curating a museum exhibit on The Spectacular Downfall of The Human Race & you'd like to use Giraffe Adventures as an example of the horrifying decline of human culture & society, then maybe you could put the above paragraphs on a little plaque next to the exhibit. Otherwise, I'm not sure of how it could be of any use to anyone. What am I doing with my life?

Love,
Potato Clock Games

Giraffe Adventures Update #4

I've committed myself to never letting my "playtime over the past 2 weeks" stat on Steam go over 20 hours. This has had an embarrassingly positive effect on my productivity. I'm suddenly a week ahead on my homework, I've finished Giraffe Adventures, & I'm about halfway finished with a little Twine RPG which I'll talk more about later.

Giraffe Adventures Final Node Map

Right, so Giraffe Adventures is finally finished. It has its highs & lows but overall I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. There are a few laugh-out-louds in there, I think, swimming among the groans & the huh?s. I'm holding onto it for a bit of proofreading, but let's be real, this was not an entirely sober endeavor. It is going to be full of humiliating grammar & spelling errors, not to mention the irreconcilable plot holes & narrative jump cuts. What I'm saying is, I'm not planning on wasting a hell of a lot of time proofreading this. It is what it is & it should be out in the wild next week.

Potato Clock Games Summer Sabbatical

Giraffe Adventures is so close to being finished & it's the last thing I really wanted complete before school starts back up (which happens in two days), but you know what? I don't feel like working on it.

So there.

So that's it for a while, I probably won't get back to game development for a few months. TRY TO SURVIVE WITHOUT ME.

Giraffe Adventures Update #3

I got back to work on Giraffe Adventures today after avoiding it for quite a while. Here's the thing with choose your own adventure stories: even if you're only giving the reader binary choices, after just 10 pages you have 2^10 = 1,024 story threads. ONE THOUSAND AND TWENTY GOD DAMN FOUR. In practice, of course, it doesn't necessarily work out to quite that many, as threads are terminated in story endings or merged with other threads.

Both of these mitigation tactics, however, carry certain limitations. You can't just end a thread because you feel like it. I mean, you can, obviously, but then you've ruined the whole experience for the poor sap that took the time to read your stupid thing just to end up at a shit ending. Don't get me wrong, Giraffe Adventures already has a few shit endings, but I want to avoid them as much as possible.

Thread merging is a whole different beast. It's really difficult to do right, to make it work while maintaining continuity in the story, & at the same time it's kind of a bullshit thing to do to the reader. It really only benefits the writer & maybe not even that since it makes writing the story a confusing mess. To the reader who chooses to give the story multiple readings, it's just annoying. Making different choices just to end up in the same place as before kind of defeats the whole spirit of choosing your own adventure, right? Of course, I'm merging threads like mad right now.

The old choose your own adventure books that I used to read as a kid were fun for their novelty but they were always pretty terrible. I could recognize that even as a kid, though maybe I couldn't tell what exactly made them so bad. Now I know. They did all the things that I just wrote about not doing, but look, they did it because they had to. They had to cram it all into like 50 pages. My upper bound on pages, on the other hand, is large enough to be considered infinite. It is equal to the maximum number of pages I could possibly write in my entire life.

YOU GUYS. Do you see how hard I'm overthinking the crafting of tale of a retarded baby giraffe who does things like catch great white sharks in his urethra & hang out in pyramids with Beyonce & Karl Malone? This is why I can't get shit done. I'm just going to get drunk tonight & finish this thing.

Justin Bieber's Mega CockBlockaz Official Release!

The internet's premier Beliebers-only puzzle game is now available from potatoclockgames.com!

While the first installment of Justin Bieber's now infamous Mega CockBlockaz puzzle game series was released in Japan to overwhelmingly positive reviews, legal battles over the game's graphically sexual nature and overtly racist message stalled & eventually prevented an official U.S. release. The game's sequel, Justin Bieber's Mega CockBlockaz 2, has been censored heavily for U.S. audiences, though keen players will still find it difficult to ignore the game's racist overtones. Bieber has publicly denounced the U.S. version, complaining that it, "seriously detracts from [his] original message."

Get in on the controversy! See what all your favorite celebrities are blathering on about!

"While I am obviously disgusted by the game's shameless racist soapboxing, I cannot help but to find myself equally enthralled by the way that these brilliant puzzles have changed the way that I see the world. Everything that I have, I owe to this game."

-Kim Kardashian and also Bill Gates

LET'S BLOCK SOME COCKS!