If you delve back deep enough into the history of the site, before the Klik of the Month Klub was conceived of, before we were even sure what the fuck a glorious trainwreck was, you will discover the pre-announcement in 2007 of a game called "Hatworld: World of Hats". Hatworld: World of Hats was, sadly, never made; no code was ever written, no art assets ever drawn besides the animated gif, no design document ever created.

Well, wait. Actually, we did write a design document. Sort of.

You see, Six had intended the post as just a silly gag; he had no concrete ideas about what Hatworld: World of Hats would be, and no intention of actually making it, really. But I immediately fell in love with this mythical game, and I wanted desperately for it to exist so that I could play it. Every few months, I would post somewhere about it, just to remind everyone that I had not forgotten and that I expected Six to make the game one day. I even wrote a theme song.

Finally, in late 2009, I decided that I needed to get directly involved. Google Wave was out, and it seemed the perfect tool to do some hardcore collaboratin'. And so I convinced Six to flesh out his ideas with me for what Hatworld: World of Hats would be, and together, we would build it, and it would be glorious.

Well, we never built it, but it's glorious anyway. Please enjoy HATWORLD BRAINPOOPING WAVE: The Official Hatworld: World of Hats Design Document. Converted to a publicly-viewable Google Doc because who knows when they're going to shut Google Wave down.

So, I've finally reached the point where my FlashPunk tinkering may be of interest/use to others!

KlikPunk is a tool for quickly composing "scenes" for games. You simply drag graphics from the bin at the left to the stage in the middle, arrange them as you please, and click the save icon to store a friendly XML file, ready for importing directly into your game.

To ease the process of creation, the bin full of graphics at the left-hand side of the screen is constantly updated with whatever you have dumped into the directory (and subdirectories) where the scene is to be saved. No irritating import step! Just save your graphics and use 'em.

If you're interested in using this, feel free to let me know what other features you might like to see. Custom properties I think are next on my list, so you could specify, eg, how things move, if they should collide, etc.

Controls:
Tab - show/hide overlays
PgUp / PgDn - move selected graphic forward / back
Arrow keys - nudge selected graphic 1 pixel
Scroll wheel - scroll sidebar bin / zoom in or out

It's an Adobe AIR app, so you may need to grab the AIR runtime to install and run it.

Have you ever really seen a rainbow?
Have you ever really touched the blue, blue sky?

A hack of the Gargoyle interpreter to add a "Techno Kitten" mode. I've bundled up just the Frotz interpreter alongside the Z-machine port of Colossal Cave Adventure.

You should just be able to drop libgarglk.dll and technokitten.mp3 in with any of Gargoyle's interpreter binaries, and add "technokitten 1" to garglk.ini, to enable Techno Kitten Text Adventure mode with basically any piece of interactive fiction.

I decided to upload it now because I'm going to be without high speed internet for a while. Have a fun Klik of the Month and a merry Klikmas if I don't see you then!

So, for the past couple of months, I've been poking at the idea of interactive fiction without a parser. I had a grand idea, years ago, for a graphic adventure game with a comics-based interface. My idea is essentially that the entire story is always available at all times, and that you can make the protagonist do things, or, undo things, at any point in the story. I realized recently that I could bring many of the same ideas to text, which is much quicker to write than comics are to draw.

So I began to build it.

So today, I'm ready to release a little tech demo, for people who might be interested in such things. It doesn't even really demo the tech that well -- I don't use any world state, though the capability is there to do so, and there's not even any branching like Choose Your Own Adventure. The interface is still kind of rough; I definitely haven't worked out all the kinks in deciding when to show which options to the user. I don't even know whether I should be showing or hiding clickable words. (Right now they're hidden because that's the last thing I tried.) Basically, I'm still exploring the idea, but I'm interested in your comments.

Anyway, if you like, you can try it out and tell me what you think. Click on words that are clickable to get a menu of things you can do. Once you've seen everything in the game, maybe you'd be interested in peeking at the story's source code (not the engine's source code) to get a feel for what writing IF in this sort of system might be like.

I attended PAX this year! As part of my devious plan to spread the Glorious Trainwrecks way of game-makering, I put aside an hour to set up a laptop in a vaguely low-traffic area with an attractive sign promising people that I would make games for them. I quickly got a taker, who sat down and chatted with me for about an hour as I made PAX Quest In Glorious Klik-O-Vision! Many other people looked and smiled -- one guy even stopped to say he liked my sign -- but no one else stopped to see what I was doing. It may or may not have had something to do that I was mostly looking at my computer and there was a dude sitting beside me, presumably getting a game made. (Turned out he was a Mac user so he won't be able to play it.)

In conclusion: Fun experiment! Mixed results. Afterwards my legs hurt.

Oh, the game? PAX Quest is a fairly accurate representation of some of the more annoying portions of PAX. I resisted the temptation to make waiting in line real-time.

Now that the Pirate Kart II is finally out in the world, I've been able to find time once again for MarMOTS; the greatest telnet-based collaborative ANSI art editor and game engine EVER WRITTEN!

I'm still super-excited about MarMOTS even though there are so few people using it (basically me and qrleon, and I don't ever draw anything). And I've decided it's high time to start letting people make stuff besides pictures. Thus I have begun the implementation and design of the scripting language* and its editor! No screenshots yet, unfortunately, but rest assured I'm plugging away. If you have any ideas for textmode games that you might be interested in building in MarMOTS, please feel free to talk about them in the comments and I can make sure that the language comfortably supports your use.

In the meantime, I've deployed a new version of MarMOTS that features line wrapping in more places, like text entry, and "buttons". No more typing off the edge of the screen when chatting, or worrying about making a picture whose name is too long!

* possible names for the scripting language (please vote or supply more suggestions in the comments):

1. MarMOTScript (tm)
2. Marmota (the proper name of the genus of Marmots)
3. Groundhog (the groundhog being a type of marmot, also makes me think of the movie Groundhog Day, which is a plus)
4. Monax (the groundhog's proper name is Marmota Monax, kind of sounds like "monad", but way more metal -- maybe "Monäx"?)

OK, it's about time I released this stuff!

KNPUtil is a collection of 3 utilities for fiddling with Klik & Play games:

1. knpextract: a tool for extracting resources from Klik & Play games
2. knpgen: a tool for generating random "screenshots" from resources extracted from Klik & Play games
3. knpmangle: a tool for generating new Klik & Play games from old Klik & Play games by messing with their resources

KNPExtract and KNPGen have been released before. This release brings much improved image loading times to both tools, as well as support for 16-bit images. KNPExtract also now can generate animated GIFs from animations, extract sounds and music, and provide meaningful filenames to everything it extracts.

Detailed usage instructions are in the readme. The tools are all designed to do something cool if you drag Klik & Play games onto the EXEs from Windows, but KNPMangle especially rewards a deeper understanding of its commandline options.

If you're getting error messages when you try to run the EXE, you may need to install the Visual C++ 2008 Runtime from Microsoft.

Enjoy!

Just deployed a great big delicious update!

1. Edit pictures with layers!
2. Fast cursor movement with Home/End/PgUp/PgDn!
3. ANSI algorithms rewritten using Cython for MASSIVE SPEED BOOST!
4. See when pictures were last modified!
5. I think saved ANSI might not look like shit under OS X anymore?
6. Probably some other little nice things!
7. Bullet points!

I just moved a week ago, and I have a good hour every day on the bus to work on MarMOTS now. I cannot stress enough how awesome that is, and how much more progress you're all going to see because of it.

So, MarMOTS has been live for a little over a week now, and you guys have cranked out some phenomenal stuff. It makes me very excited and pleased to see people enjoying my dinky little creation and building cool stuff with it.

My TODO list looks like this:

1. Fix horrible crashing bug that happens when you type a single character
2. notification on chat update
3. Rename, delete picture
4. Display last modified date
5. version control (being able to snapshot a version of a drawing such that you can always come back to it)
6. ANSI Gallery should show drawing name
7. Who's Online (this could even be shown live on the website without logging in)
8. Better HTML generation (either homebrewn or using Ansilove)
9. Keyboard shortcut for switching special characters / colours
10. block select
11. Eyedropper tool
12. Layer support

I'm interested to hear all of your thoughts on what I should work on next. (Obviously the crash bug needs to get fixed ASAP.) What items on that list are important to you? What items could you do without? What items would you add?