Hello World
Several years ago, I decided to develop video games. I spent 2 years self-educating myself in comics and illustration skills, which I would later evolve into basic animation skills. I watched tutorials for drag and drop platforms and even built half of a game, before coming to terms with the fact that I also needed to learn to code. After watching more tutorials, I used Unity Engine to create my first game, Wicked & Brutal.
Wicked & Brutal
2017 | Arcade Shooter | Desktop (not currently available)
The story was as old as time. A dragon and witch fall in love, wage war against the king’s army, and fly across the sea to an island where marriage between witches and dragons is legal. The end. The mechanics were pretty simple. If you crashed into the pikemen you’d die and start over. When you’d hit one with a fireball, they’d burn to death and cease obstructing your path. Like most of the games in this article, it lived on the Insolent Cool website as a browser game for awhile and was phased out as I committed to releasing higher quality games.
A.N.T.
2017 | Arcade Shooter | Desktop (not currently available)
I filled notebooks and text applications with ideas and the result was A.N.T. in which a war raged between anthropomorphized insects and a lone soldier ant fought an entire platoon of rival colonists to retrieve a piece of food. Wicked & Brutal was the starting point for understanding my baseline skill level and potentiality as a game developer and gave me insight on how to further push myself with this new game. I upgraded from one level to three, a solitary cut scene to one after each level, and one poorly animated enemy type to three with simple smartly drawn sprites. The background pieces and faction logos also looked pretty cool.
Gobble Squabble
2017 | Puzzle Adventure | Desktop (not currently available)
I was inspired by the origin story of id Software, as chronicled in the book Masters of Doom by David Kushner, and decided my ideal development time for a small indie game was one month. It was November, so a game set on Black Friday featuring an angry turkey fighting past a gaggle of other irate turkeys through a maze of destroyed store shelves to get a cheap television seemed appropriate. Gobble Squabble was a new gameplay genre for me, which meant new development challenges since much of the code and design elements from my previous games weren’t reusable or sufficient. The animations were a few steps back due to the time constraint, but I still shipped in under a month.
Labor Elf
2017 | Text Adventure | Desktop (not currently available)
Labor Elf was a text adventure about an elf escaping a forced labor camp in the North Pole. Gameplay worked via a series of expository prompts with multiple choice options. The background images under the text were gloomy with deep shadows of hulking reigndeer* overseers forcing elves to produce toys. I made a separate image file for every possible choice, which was inefficient and made polishing gameplay and writing nearly impossible. I decided to kick the one month ethic for awhile to study and train.
*It’s intentionally spelled “reigndeer.”
Ha$$a
2019 | Casual | Desktop (not currently available)
After several months of reading books on software development, training as an animator, and developing the game Black Ham: BBQ, I again wanted to see what I could do in under one month. The answer was, Haa,asillymini−game,wheretheHaa, a pig wearing giant shades and massive gold jewelry, the Monoctopus, an oil black octopus with a monocle, and the Law Claw, an eagle claw covered in blood holding a gavel, fight each other over money that grows out of the ground and off of trees. This does not represent my or probably anyone’s politico-economic views.
The Lord of Toilet Paper
2020 | Puzzle Adventure | Mobile (unavailable)
After publishing a couple of mobile games, I challenged myself to make a game in one week. The pandemic just started and people were arguing about how much toilet paper any one person or household could stockpile. This inspired the Lord of Toilet Paper. The crux of the game was the Haa(fromthegameHaa) chased down and collected humanoid rolls of toilet paper in levels made of giant rolls of toilet paper floating through space. The goal was to hoard all of the toilet paper in the galaxy. I was pretty excited to share the game after succeeding in creating something I thought was really cool in under a week. I imagined someone sitting on the toilet, next to their toilet paper alternatives, holding their phone, and happily playing their copy of The Lord of Toilet Paper, but the concept was simply too controversial for major platforms.
Spiritual Successors
While these games are probably gone forever, they have spiritual relatives in Insolent Cool’s current games library. The recently released space shooter, Peregrine Omega, spreads from the dragon’s fire of Wicked & Brutal. Primates Are Real, about a space alien searching for the truth between rows of human infested space corn mazes, owes a lot to the unnamed turkey, who fought bravely through the aisles of Gobble Squabble. While the Labor Elf toils forever in obscurity, you can toil in zero gravity in the space-faring text adventure XE78. The fiercely silly and competitive spirit of Ha$$a and The Lord of Toilet Paper still lives on in the arenas of Spartacrab, who to this day, fights for freedom on Google Play and the App Store.
Thanks,
Michael David Marshall
Founder/Director/Game Developer