A new experiment is up: Radial Lines.

Me and the rest of the guys at GameMold have just released SpaceTrace, our entry for the MochiAds and Dictionary.com word game contest.

It was a bit of a struggle nailing down the game play for this one. Our original idea was to integrate word play into Fat Slice, but after many prototypes which had some fatal flaw or just plain sucked, we grudgingly threw most of that concept away. Fortunately, Jeff came up with a way to use part of the mechanics from Fat Slice, but with a unique concept that actually worked as a word game. We still have the balls bouncing around a shape, but the shape itself is hidden, and the player has to guess the what it is.

Theres a few other wrinkles to it, but you can see what they are for yourself.

I've just uploaded a new version of Swirls, mysteriously named Swirls 2. You can now change the color of your line, toggle fullscreen mode and download your swirl as an image. Here's a sample of the eyesores I've created with it:

And the grand finale (click for the full retina-scorching glory):

Also, I've moved a bunch of the flash things which were not really games from the Games section to the new Experiments section.

I just released my new game, Fat Slice. Play it on Kongregate to save your high score. Also, GameMold has just revealed its new look, along with the completed version of SnowLemmings.

Over the January 30th weekend, I participated in the Global Game Jam. On Friday, I drove down to Waikato University in Hamilton. After the keynote from World of Goo creator Kyle Gabler (starts at about the 1:35 mark), we split into groups. A guy named Andy (who has started a game company called GameMold) grabbed me and we went off and came up with a pretty decent concept in about 20 minutes. A few other guys joined us and we brainstormed for another hour or so. Eventually, though, we came back to our original idea and began prototyping it. A couple of the other guys split off and created Wardance, so me and Andy worked by ourselves and created SnowLemmings over the next 48 hours. I wrote the not-entirely-stable code while Andy created all the art, selected the sounds and music and designed the level.

It turned out quite well, and was definitely one of the most polished-looking games at the Jam. We are continuing to work on it, to polish it up and expand the game play after we recover from the lack of sleep and hygiene.