[abandoned] Throw it away

The theme I used as inspiration at the May 2012 Berlin Mini Game Jam was “Stuff you can throw”. I started this game, called, unimaginatively, “Throw it away”, using Stencyl.

Many years ago, as I was moving from a flat I was living in to another country, I took the opportunity to throw away almost all my possessions, except what I could fit in a big suitcase, one laptop, and a box full of books that I sent to my parents, asking them to store it until I would go and take it (I am unable to throw away books). It was a very liberating experience. I had not been aware until that point about how attached I got to all the cruft that I had been accumulating in that flat, piles of stuff that I never used, the only purpose of it was to accumulate dust.

After the jam, I tried to work on this game. I wanted the boxes to be procedurally generated, but I had serious problems with the performance, and worst of it, I could never figure out how the physics engine is supposed to work. There were glitches, uncontrollable behaviours of the moving objects, and no possible way to design the game as I wanted it to be. Worst of all, every change I introduced was destroying the fun part of the game even more. I wanted more elaborated graphics, and I wanted to introduce this feeling of freedom when you get rid of stuff. None of it was possible because of poor choice of tool.

At the end, I lost motivation to continue. Not only that, but this is the last Stencyl game I tried to make, from then I’ve moved on to other tools. I just can’t tame that beast. Instead of just deleting it, I have spend a couple of afternoons this week trying to undo all the changes I had introduced over the weeks when I was trying to finish the game, and leave it moreless in the same state as it was at the end of the jam. Yes, Stencyl does not have source control, you can’t just undo changes as you do with git, you have to do it manually.

Although this is nowhere near to where I wanted it to be, I still hope you enjoy playing the game. There is no proper beginning, nor proper ending. At some point you don’t have more stuff to throw away, although the game doesn’t tell you that you reached the end.

The graphics were made by Qubodup, big thanks to him for his help!