Great Opinion and Speculation also Introspection, no Questions are Answered, only Asked:

So, I have been making, like, 3-4 games for the past few months and haven't really released anything because I'm not using the "gusto" that is required to be a glorioustrainwrecker. But, is gusto related to speed? I think it is. Speed shows confidence. It seems ironic or coincidental (lol) that I am nervous about making a trainwreck. Is this going to be a so good it's bad trainwreck or a so bad it's good one or is it going to be a it's a bad BAD trainwreck. What is good and bad?

"It's all in the eye of the beholder", lol, what a cliche, but (let's get back to the point) we all know what is culturally "good" and culturally "bad". Because I am making games on this site, you the reader is probably making games on this site, we are aware, yes, this is where bad/good things should be, this is the house in which trainwrecks sleep, this is the context of the things we are making and the house gives us that context. This context is what separates "genuine failure" from what happens here. Does this box limit us? It is freeing and limiting at the same time. One side says everything bad that you do will be in the context of "it's supposed to be bad", so nothing is bad. On another side if you do something good will it be good? Depends on the context, what is good? Will genuine good weaken intended bad? Will unintended bad weaken intended bad? What is good on www.theglorioustrainwrecks.com and what is good outside of www.theglorioustrainwrecks.com? Are they the same good? Is good outside of www.theglorioustrainwrecks.com good on www.theglorioustrainwrecks.com?

It seems "good" on www.theglorioustrainwrecks.com is usually "bad". "Bad" comes in several different forms. One form is a self aware "stupid" (when the game is disguised as if the person making the game is not aware of the cultural mainstream of what "good" games are) I.E. games in the Mr. Cat series. Another form is a clear parody of a mainstream trope I.E. games by sylvie and jams like the Flappy Bird Jam. The third kind is an "I don't care attitude" I.E. Klik of the Month Klub games. These different perspectives for the makers of "good" on www.theglorioustrainwrecks.com can and usually are mixed at different levels to create interest.

Do "bad" games have to be jokes to be good. Are "bad" games with "intended badness" automatically jokes. Should everything that is "bad" be laughed at? Are there "serious" and "bad" games on this site or elsewhere? Why don't my hotlinks to www.theglorioustrainwrecks.com work?

http://mrcatthegame.neocities.org/

Behold mates, Mr. Cat's games has its own site now!

Hello everybody.

It has been half a year since my last information on my game in progress, "Poor Thing". Since then I have maintained a fairly steady pace in development and added a lot to the game, however there is a looot of work still in front of me. I have calculated that I still have more or less 100 levels to add. I have 178 levels in my game so far, but some of them are placeholders and some more can be cut out. If no other obstacles emerge, I should be able to fit my game within the planned maximum of 255 levels.

While still adding new levels, I alternate it with either fleshing out already existing locations or finally adding some action sequences. I worked out a way to make objects standing in the middle that can be either walked in front of or behind, which adds a lot of 3d feeling to the game.

At the same time I am working on the story and characters, because I really mean it to be a complete tale, with beginning, middle and an end. Things are constantly falling into place, or switched around if they do not work.

I think I am rambling, but I am really excited that I have kept at it so long and do not feel bored or intend to stop. I calculate it will take about a year to complete and add details to all the levels, then probably another year to interconnect everything, hunt bugs, beta test and add sound effects and probably some music. A long, long way... but almost every other day I keep developing it further.

I hope 6 months is an enough long pause not to be pushy with my project. Truly said, I often have to fight the urge to share every new detail that I am proud of, with you lot!

I go back to working on the game now. As always, lots of love to you lovely people, and keep creating!

Jan Strach

What's up people?!

Today i just beaten Teh Forum Game without closing the game and beating in one single setting, and that was fast, due to mashing keys, concentration with my brother going out to play his ball and glorious skills. Before i beaten this game, i was stuck at the 1st Half of the 7th Level, due that i accidentaly avoided the notes all the time, but now, i had to never avoid, and so i beaten level 7...oh the joy. In the end, i have beaten all levels and shockingly saw the ending, i felt so happy that he was free from the scientists. TOTY. Trainwreck of the Year.
In the Extras there was nothing more but just a image gallery and a boring bonus level that i didn't interested right now to play a megaman-esque game. Anyways, you can see above the screenshot showing the stage select screen after beating the game (sorry if i spoiled)

And now onto Mr. Cat's future.
Yes, the setting for Mr. Cat III will be THE SAME THAN THE REST OF THE MR. CAT SERIES, because the game is going to have suckish grammar like always but with intense action, even more glorious levels, etc. And there may have more bad antagonists and not just only ONE (Like Arthur from Mr. Cat 1 or Sanic from Mr. Cat 2), but more, more and more, along with a evil organization that will appear in this upcoming 3rd chapter of the Mr. Cat trilogy. Btw, Mr. Cat's Scary Halloween Holiday isn't part of the trilogy, it's just a short spin-off with only 5 levels and few bosses. And yes, if you believe that he was JUSTICE MUSTACHE, probably, it's because i was addicted of Smedis2's games and that's why i wanted more fun based on that. Anyways, i don't have ideas for more games i should do but i can just listen to music i might put for the 3rd chapter of Mr. Cat.

Since i found back my klik projects i made, i decided to start working back to the Mr. Cat Halloween Special named Mr. Cat's Scary Halloween Holiday.

There will be more lacky cutscenes, levels and more stupid stuff pretending to be poorly made, and maybe failing to make a halloween special.
(Yes, i'm still in the habit of poorly made games)

But i might not release in halloween because i might be afraid of going through the new year of school.

Hi everybody, i decided to come back again here because i feel like having nostalgia of these awesome klik games, but the bad news is i entirely lost the source codes of my games since i accidentaly deleted my klik n play folder.

Also, i've been thinking to make a 3rd Mr. Cat, which is gonna be the most longer than the other 2.

And by the way, remember that i love you guys even if i was gone, i'll try to never be gone at this time.

Five years have passed since I joined this site and posted my first game, a spontaneous collaboration with Mark Gobbin. Doing so drew responses from SpindleyQ (who I also have to thank for founding this glorious site) and anna anthropy (whose inspirational KotM entries posted on her blog led me here in the first place).

It surprises me how much these comments meant to me at the time (and evidently still do), especially considering one was just "BAM". As a belated display of gratitude, I made two WarioWare D.I.Y. microgames inspired by games SpindleyQ and anna have posted here: in the dark and Xmastime!

I definitely wouldn't be the game maker I am today (i.e. an adequate one) without GT. My heartfelt thanks go out to everyone who's come here, past and present. I have another five year anniversary relating to this site coming up in a few months, which I aim to celebrate in a similar fashion. Hopefully by stating this now I'll be less likely to weasel out of it.

i got bored and drew these.
not entirely sure if I'd actually make a game because I'm working on a bigger project, but whatever.
it would be amusing if somebody would actually make a game using these sprites.

During a Twitter conversation about the current state of Glorious Trainwrecks, an idea suddenly dawned on me: if the site, as it is, is badly designed, and this is hurting site participation, why not just go ahead and do a rewrite?

While we could just upgrade to the latest Drupal, there are several reasons why that is a terrible idea:

- Drupal is written in PHP. PHP is a terrible language.
- Drupal has too much complexity, and this bleeds into both the user experience and site maintenance. A lot of Drupal's abstractions are aimed at trying to be useful for many different configurations, but makes managing all of them more confusing.
- Despite these abstractions, Drupal doesn't provide what we need out of the box. There's already a significant amount of hackery in this place to incorporate a list of registered games, and it took multiple attempts to get it working with events. This would have to be done all over again if we were to upgrade to a newer Drupal, and this is made harder by the fact that, again, PHP is a terrible language.

Instead, I would like to focus on creating what I'd like to call a "creative content system". This will be a CMS-like system where everyone can participate by default. While typical CMSs like Drupal allow for this, it seems like they are primarily aimed at things like organizational websites rather than open participation communities. This will be software that anyone can install on their web server, especially since SpindleyQ has always wanted something in the form of a "Glorious Trainwrecks kit" for other gamedev groups to set up and host their own Klik of the Month Klubs or whatever. However, I would also like to design this around Glorious Trainwrecks and its needs.

Additionally, when I refer to "creating content", I mean all kinds of media, including art, music, games, or whatever. Hence when I talk of functionality you'll see me refer to "creations" rather than, say, "games". I want to make something that artists working in other mediums can use, too.

For the sake of ease of use and cleanliness, I am going for a simpler design. I can always add more bells and whistles later, but this way we can start off on a clean slate. Here is what I currently have in mind:

- The main page will be the Activity Stream, even when browsing as a guest. This will be similar in function to the "Recent changes" page already on this site (for those who prefer "Recent posts", I might add a "new content only" toggle or something to that effect). Only here, it would be much richer, since it would provide image previews and a synopsis of each post inline. In fact, think of it as a combination of "Recent changes" and the Newest Games list currently in GT's sidebar, or a combination of a community hub and a social network (except not really). You will be able to filter by different types of content, or switch to an index list view for archive viewing purposes.
- All content is created in the form of a "Post". A Post may either be a "Communication" (which I need a better name for) which serves as a blog/journal post, a "Creation", or an "Event".
- A "Creation" can be media of any type that the site provides. For example, a site might choose to support both "Music" and "Game" type Creations, and the user would select which one to use. While I am not aiming for a very pluggable/customizable system for version 1.0, I would at least like to make the Creation types customizable.
- Events are displayed at the top of the main page, above the Activity Stream, to draw attention to upcoming and current Events. In the case of lots of Events, the system will select a few at random, and provide an "All Events" link to view the rest.
- Site staff can "pin" posts to the top of the Activity Stream for site announcements and the likes.
- All Posts can be assigned to one or more tags/categories. The site configuration can define one or more "categories" for each post type, which are like "official" tags that are always presented to the user during post creation.
- Users get basic profiles including username, avatar, homepage link, and a list of all of their posts.
- Users can also send private messages to one another.

Because I am aiming for a relatively simple system, there are some features that won't appear. Namely:

- There is no wiki, or at least there probably won't be a wiki in the initial version. If at all. I just think a lot of CMSs try to do everything and end up only doing a few of these things well. This project is not like that. I'm not even sure how a wiki would fit in with the user experience I have in mind.
- There are no forums. If you think about it, Communication (blog) posts are basically the same thing: a user can post something to start a topic, and assign it to a tag/category and it will show up if filtering activity by tag/category. Users can comment on it like one would reply to a forum topic. So really, I think it makes all the sense in the world to not have forums. It would just be pointless duplication.

The project itself will be a webapp written in Python. I think I should be able to handle it - I'll be using a "microframework" with extensions for things like SQLAlchemy for DB access (I kind of doubt this project will see any deployment on sites large enough to need something as scalable as a NoSQL-type DB), and OAuth (so that users can log in with Twitter).

Also, I really enjoy designing things and I think this is a pretty good design so far, but I'm worried the UX might be too radically different from what GT currently has. Also, I might have missed a thing or two. Please provide some feedback, if you can. Again, I want to base a lot of the design off of GT's needs, so it's important that I get to hear some opinions from other GTers. I do not currently have any UI mockups, but I'd like to make some soon so that I can better illustrate the design I'm going for.

One last thing: Since this is software that I don't intend to be limited exclusively to Glorious Trainwrecks, we'll have to think about other sites as well. GT has a super great community full of nice people, but not all communities are like this. Much of the design revolves around assuming good faith instead of expecting people to misbehave. I have been thinking of adding in admin-configurable limitations (such as each user only being able to host three events at a time, etc.) as well as the ability to remove EG. posting permissions from problematic users. Right now I feel like I'm trying to straddle the line between creating something aimed at super nice communities like GT vs increased adoption elsewhere in not-so-happy climates. Thoughts?

Tiny Cave was originally started for a short Twine jam, in both senses of that phrase. You couldn't use more than 1,000 words, which is why everything's so laconic. Anyway, I didn't even get started on this before the jam-thing ended, so this is mostly for my own benefit than anything else. I hope folks enjoy this!