Hi! So, last week, I announced that I was releasing a collection of my “other” games, on Steam and Itch. It’s gonna be out in less than a month! I figured I should start talking about it a bit more.
I saw some people on Bluesky speculating about exactly what’s in it – I, uh, didn’t really mean to be vague about this, but I guess I was, sorry! So, here’s a nice clear answer:
There are 21 games in the collection.
So what are they? Humor me for a minute, and let me be slightly vague about that.
Honestly, I’ve made a lot of rubbish over the years; there are all sorts of little things I could have considered including in this. Once I’d decided that it couldn’t be and shouldn’t be “everything I’ve made”, it’s been a very interesting task to figure out what should make the cut.
I could go on about this for a while, so let me just give you a buzzfeed style top five: five games that you might have expected me to include that I haven’t, and five that you might not have expected that I have! And then at the end of this blog post, I’ll just tell you exactly what’s in it.
Not included #5: Climb the Giant Man Obby
Right, well, I guess it’s probably not be a huge surprise that my Roblox game didn’t make the collection – but I gave it more consideration than you might expect! I like this game a lot, and loved making it, and I’ve gotta admit that there was something very tempting about including something that nobody would reasonably expect.
From a technical perspective, while it’d have been extremely difficult, it is sorta possible, since Roblox lets you export your scenes as .obj files. I probably couldn’t have done the multiplayer part of it, though, so it would have been a weird single-player version.
Ultimately, I figured it wasn’t worth seriously considering – too much is lost when you remove this from its Roblox context.
Included #5: A Proper Cup of Tea
I never got around to posting them here, but last year I made a couple of games in Downpour, which is a fun tool for making collage games on your phone. I really like these games, but hadn’t originally planned on porting them. However, whenever I would tell friends what I’ve been working on recently, a surprising question I kept getting was “are you going to port your tea game”? So eventually, I did! Both the Tea game and the Boardgame game are in the collection.
Now that I’m wrapping things up, I’m really glad these games are included – they go well with the kind of personal and messy vibe I’m hoping comes across with the collection. And Downpour made it pretty easy to port them – you can just export a downpour project as a simple json file that contains all the image and hyperlink information.
(Fun fact, adding these games to the collection almost doubled my localisation costs, lol)
Not included #4: Judith
Something I had to decide early on was if I was going to include design collaborations or not. I decided against it, which I think is correct; I feel like the collection is a more personal, cohesive thing if it’s mainly stuff I did solo. So that ruled out American Dream, Xoldiers, my Experiment 12 chapter, among other things. Judith is definitely the one that made me most unsure about that decision, though.
Included #4: Bullfist
…then for some reason, I made an exception for this little jam game that I made with the other people at my table at BIGJam 2009. Yeah, I dunno! I know it’s inconsistent, but it made sense to me at the time!
Not included #3: Pathways
This was an important game to me back when I made it, but replaying it last year, I really just don’t vibe with it anymore. I feel like it doesn’t succeed at what it’s trying to do, and I find the writing excruciating. So I didn’t bother porting it. Sorry if you liked this one, I guess!
Included #3: The Hunt
…not that I necessarily have a problem with excruciating writing. Case in point! Here’s a game I made when I was a teenager.
This was a very last-minute addition – originally I considered anything from before I “went Indie” to be out of scope. But I randomly came across it again late last year and the muscle memory came back to me immediately, and I decided I really wanted it to be in here.
Not included #2: Halting Problem
I took a good long look at some of my abandoned projects for this! In particular, I considered the early jam version of State Machine, my Pico8 raycaster Dr. Monstershooter, Wild Selma, my survival RPG It’s Very Cold, and Halting Problem.
Halting Problem was a puzzle game I worked on for about six months in 2014, and it seemed like the one to give serious consideration to. I properly announced it and everything! I really regret never figuring out how to finish it.
Unfortunately, all of my unfinished games basically have the same problem – I just never really got any of them to a point where they were ready to show to people. Halting Problem, in particular, is a mess of half finished puzzles with no tutorialisation or structure, and it doesn’t work unless I’m literally standing over your shoulder to talk you through it. (ignore that bit, don’t go that way, oh wait let me load a different level for you, etc)
Included #2: Four Letter Word
There was one exception, though: Four Letter Word. Unlike the others, I submitted a demo of this unfinished game to a competition, so I had a build ready to go that had been designed to give people an idea of what the game is like.
It was really nice revisiting this game for the collection. I wish I’d stuck with it and finished it up back in the day, because I think its moment has passed and it sorta feels like plenty other people have done similar things since, but much better. Some cool stuff in there, though. Excited to finally be sharing it.
Not included #1: Constellation
Honestly, I could have gone either way on this, but I eventually decided not to include Constellation because it requires a keyboard. I just really wanted the whole collection to be something you could comfortably play on a telly with a controller.
Also! This game is *weirdly tricky* to localise, because the word list is really particular and built about what words prompt you to think of other words, and those connections don’t quite seem to translate from one language to another.
Included #1: At a Distance
The original version of At a Distance is an absolute pain to get up and running. To even start, you need two computers, set up side by side. Then, they need to be connected on a local area network. There’s no clever server/client auto-configuration code, because I didn’t know how to do that back in the day. So you’ve gotta open a terminal on each machine and figure out the IP addresses and type them manually into a in-game console. This was hard enough to do on Windows 7 back in 2011, and with firewall changes and so on, it’s only gotten harder.
I think, reasonably enough, not many people bothered to do any of that.
At a Distance was not an easy game to port – I’ll spare you the technical details for the moment. But it was pretty important to me that it be in this collection – actually, it was one of the big motivations for doing the project in the first place.
The final list:
Alright, so here’s the final list: the collection is arranged in a slightly weird way, with 5 A-Sides and 5 B-Sides:
But one of the B-Sides is itself another collection, which contains another 12 games. Some of these are extremely slight:
(also, no promises, but I might try to sneak another game in there if I get time before launch lol.)
Right, just a couple of weeks left to go. Wish me luck! You can find my store page up on steam here (itch coming soon): https://store.steampowered.com/app/2824580/Terrys_Other_Games/
Terry
(thanks to Keith Shetler for the launch trailer!)
