So, GDC China just ended. I had a great time, met some great people, and listened to some fantastic talks.
But that’s enough of that (at least, for now). Because, you see, the first morning of the conference was the day MochiAds accepted my game Why Am I Dead. It was also the day I was allowed to put my game on the bigger flash portals. I just sort of did this without any real expectations for anything, except for maybe a transient increase in ad impressions. Mentally, I had already finished the game and made it public. This was just a little footnote.
I was so, so, so stupidly wrong.
With such a promising mechanic, I hope WAID ends up being more of a proof of concept for a bigger project… As a standalone game, Why Am I Dead? has flaws, but it’s still plenty fun enough to justify sinking 30 minutes to an hour into it…
Clearly at the moment, the developer has a greater amount of skill at constructing an effective mystery than depicting it in Flash. However, it is an ambitious, atmospheric work reminiscent of Hotel Dusk or Colonel’s Bequest, and it has quite the killer ending. This marks Peltast Games as a designer to watch out for in the future.
It’s certainly not perfect, but Why Am I Dead? is brilliant enough to be worth a few confused hours this late Sunday evening.
- It got the daily first spot on Newgrounds on 11/17/12 with about 9,500 views
- …and is continuing quite healthily on the “Popular Games” section with, as of now, over a 4 star rating
- Also got included on FreeIndieGam.es, a web-blog that I am a big fan of
I don’t know how all of the above looks to people who are not me. After all, a lot of the praise is qualified with good criticism, and there are Daily winners on Newgrounds every, well, every day. So, perhaps none of this shocks or awes you, the audience.
As for myself, however, well. I. It’s just. Ahem. Forgive me as I pretend that I’m on Tumblr for a moment.
There’s a lot more to say on the game as a whole and I may write up a post-mortem in the near future. As for now, there’s still a lot of work to be done on the game regarding bugs and APIs and whatnot and I should be doing all that and not posting on my blog!
peltastsoftware.blog 