Gnome Oppressor Archives - Reality is a Game

Gnomes are wonderful little creatures who are always up to something. In my recently released game, Gnome Oppressor, you can play as a flying gnome who just loves to fly.

This game is released under the Prototype banner of Wero Creative. The Prototype banner is how we’re going to distinguish our experimental games from our polished games. We believe that it’s better to have our games out there being played than to have them stagnate on our computers.

The best part of game design is that I’ve already found some major bugs post-release and will be submitting an update to the App Store by the end of the day.

It’s an endless flying game in which the difficulty ramps up the longer you play. You can read about the design behind the game in an earlier post: #1GAM January: Gnome Oppressor

Gnome Oppressor is a game about a gnome flying and dealing with enemies. I created it for the Game a Month challenge and it’s the first game of (ideally) 12 that I’ll be a part of creating this year. As a personal challenge I’ve also decided to give myself design constraints on each game.

For January I decided the following:

Make it in GameSalad
Use only art from CatLifter or creative commons licensed material
Only use open sourced audio
Incorporate procedural generation
Have the game entirely played in one scene
Use the Video Game Name Generator for the title

The rationale behind some of the above is to show people who don’t have artists on their team that games can be made using the creative commons. Only two art assets from previous work were used in Gnome Oppressor (the plane and bomb button) which was done by the very talented Krys Chiem.

Most of the visual art game from the platform pack made by Kenny.nl and the amazing people at the now defunct Glitch. The team at Glitch decided to toss all of their beautiful art into the commons, which is awesome of them. If you’re an art director you’d be screaming at me for all this mismatched art.

By far, it was the easiest to find audio for this game. Audio was also from Kenny.nl and some sound effects from OpenGameArt.

Procedurally generating content in GameSalad isn’t the easiest thing to do for a variety of reasons that are boring to go into. However, it is possible; additionally, I wanted to see if I could make an endless runner style game. When making CatLifter one of the bottlenecks in release was level design which is why I opted for procedural generation.

You can play Gnome Oppressor soon, I’m submitting it to the App Store and the game will be available for free.

Disconcertingly, mid-month I discovered that one the mechanics I wanted to use nearly impossible to build in GameSalad. This meant that in order to have semblance of fun I need to rethink a mechanic and that led me to add the bombing mechanic.The game could use more love and attention from me, it’s still not fun enough. So be it, I need to keep moving along with my game a month goal.

This is my second game that uses gnomes because gnomes are awesome. If you want to know more about gnomes then you should get the definitive resource on gnomes.

Thanks again to all the people who play tested this game!