They're Back And They're Free - Aug 14th, 2005

Half a decade ago I designed and programmed two experimental "game" titles. We called them Screen Opera back then - sort of half games/half screen savers. A year or so ago I released them as freeware for anyone and everyone to download and play with.

Unfortunately the download links were inactive but luckily I just upgraded to IX Web Hosting and now have massive amounts of web space to play with. So now I am hosting them on my www.passfieldgames.com site where they should remain until the end of time :-)

The two titles are "The Chronicles of Jaruu Tenk" and "Halloween Spirit Board". Both represent my foray into AI and living worlds and both were done completely out of love on a part time basis (ie. for a zero budget and with extremely limited resources - I did all the game coding, design and writing, while Steve Stamatiadis did all the graphics and Tony Ball did the 3D renderer). Looking back at them now I wonder what we could have done with a bigger budget, a proper schedule and a design that included actual gameplay.

Still, I'm quite proud of the results that we achieved and hope that they can serve as inspiration to other budding garage game developers out there. Just five years on there are so many more tools and resources that have made game creation a whole lot easier!

If you have time to check them out, please do and let me know what you think.

In the coming months I'd like to dig into my giant grab bag of IP that I own and see what other interesting games I can upload now that I have the space. I'll keep you posted :-)

John