Monsters are attacking your village and you must send your heroes to fight them off. There’s just one catch – you don’t know anyone’s levels. You’ll have to deduce all of the hidden levels through repeated trial and error to win. Can you beat the odds?

A game made for the 7-Day Rogue-Like (7LDR) game jam 2021 featuring found assets.

Steve is an underappreciated insurance agent who falls into a subterranean labyrinth when his subway commute goes awry.

The most complete game to date made with the Elm Narrative Engine.

I made this game as an experiment to see if I could make a Twine-like game with the Elm Narrative Engine. Like Twine, the interactive links are inline with the prose of the story, but unlike Twine, you can click on these links more than once, and different things happen depending on what has happened so far.

I entered this game into the 2019 Spring Thing festival, which was a fun experience. I wrote a postmortem about the experience.

This is less of a “game” and more of a demonstration that I made for a tool I wrote for making AIs based on behavior trees. The point is to set up a board with your “ships” and then see how well the AI can sink them all.

You can learn how the AI works in this video of a presentation I gave on the subject:

With the release of version 3 of the Elm Narrative Engine, I made a series of demos to show off how flexible the engine had become. The demos included a “classic” text-based version of the story of Little Red Riding Hood, as well as a “point and click” style version (with amazing art from Samuel Herb), and a top-down RPG style version that integrated with phaser.js.

The power behind these demos is that the engine and rules for the narrative are the same between each version, with only the presentation layer changing, to create vastly different playing experiences.

You can play each of these variations here:

Classic text-based

Point-and-click adventure style

Top-down RPG style

My friend Maor Leger wrote a Mastermind scorer and solver in Haskell, and I worked with him to create a frontend for the game in Elm with some fancy CSS.

The backend uses a “hill-climbing” algorithm, and can guess any code in 7 or less guesses, and detect discrepancies in the player’s scoring.

I wrote this entire game from scratch in vanilla javascript (except for the audio and web sockets libraries), including the inverse kinematics. The backend is a simple node.js app with socket.io. This is the first networked game I’ve made. All of the code is open source at https://github.com/jschomay/climbing-game.

The idea came from thinking about how you would capture the physical experience of holding a grip while rock-climbing in a computer game, and I thought of the idea of “Twister” for your fingers, and not having to let go. The motivation came from wondering if it would actually be fun. Doing the IK turned out to be very challenging and a bit buggy, but I’m quite proud of how well it works. I think the end result has proved to be very fun, and even rather addictive.

Note: the Elm Narrative Engine is in active developement

One of my most ambitious recent undertakings has been building the open-source Elm Narrative Engine, a tool for building iterative stories, which combines my passions of coding and storytelling.

This story demonstrates the type of stories the engine makes (at least at version 2.0, which is already outdated and limited). You play by clicking on different items, locations, and characters, which will advance the story based on what you have done so far.

Note: not completely finished!

This is a simple game based on the Stroop effect. It is best played on mobile.

Its simplicity is its strength, and I am very pleased how simple the interface is, and yet how challenging it can be. I worked hard on the pacing in this game, and developed 36 levels of increasing complexity and iteration on the main mechanic. It is the first game I have done with a level selection and advancement system. I intend to make a better title screen and release it on the mobile app stores.

My favorite part of the game is the soundtrack, by Josh Cutler.

I had the idea for this game after thinking about how players discover secret key combos to do special moves, like in old-school fighting games. I realized that process could be turned into a puzzle game, but I had no idea if it would be fun or not.

I had to finish 90% of the game (and cut and paste random quotes with my eyes closed for testing) to see if it was any fun at all. Happily, it turned out to be very fun, despite being quite challenging. Some players don’t “get” it, but the ones who do find it extremely addicting, which makes me proud!

I wrote the entire game from scratch in coffeescript using a functional programming style with ramda.js, and designed a pure, reactive state machine as the central engine.

This is one of the first games where I added music (by Jamison Rivera). I think the music pulls the whole game together and I thoroughly enjoyed working with the composer.

This is also one of the first games where I integrated with the Facebook api to socialize parts of the game. I launched the game both on Facebook and Kongregate, though it hasn’t performed particularly well on either platform. Nevertheless, this is still one of my favorite games that I have made.

When I was first learning game dev I learned the phaser.js engine, which is still one of the most popular javascript game engines today. I made this game as a tutorial to teach others what I learned. The tutorial is still online if you are interested, though it is very out of date!

My main focus in this game was adding “polish.” Notice how the ships appear to tilt as they bank from side to side. I also put a lot of effort into the exhaust from the ships, and I tried to make each ship type act in a unique way. I am especially proud of the boss ship and how it “hunts” you and charges its weapons before shooting.