WIPER WIPER

This game does not exist, yet.

How come? First things first: I’m sorry. You likely came here expecting a game and there’s none. It’s mostly just my fault: bad planning, misplaced optimism, absurd work hours. I have two things in its stead: a description of the game and a big sale of my older games. (And then there’s a special link at the end.)

 (I’ll transform this page into a devlog later, but for now, it’s all there is.)

What’s WIPER WIPER?

The idea of WW was to make Stars of the Screen’s version of Desert Bus but fun and rainy. This version has a crank-controlled windshield wiper but there’s nothing to wipe, because there’s no rain in that desert (at least at the time of gameplay :)).

I also love rain animation, here’s one I made for my another yet-unreleased game, Gotta Bounce:

Those two came together in a tech prototype I made more than two years ago — it looks gorgeous (to me) and it runs at 50 fps on Playdate. How? It was my first work that uses code written in C for Playdate.

I always wanted to make something out of it, but only this Summer I decided that it’s time to make it real. My work project was soon to wrap and I expected a lot of fun during the Fall months. (I still work on that project five months later.)

Development

WW would be a small project that I want to develop openly. Working on BKTY, I developed the core game quickly and then finalized it in a few months. This time I wanted to focus on feedback — getting the prototype ready asap, releasing it in its rough shape and then just watching the players reaction.

Gameplay

The gameplay is something between 2D arcade racing game like Outrun with obstacles you need to avoid or hit. The obstacles are animals and the players need to differentiate between the good ones (avoid) and evil ones (hit!). The rain is the main gimmick, making you optimize your windshield cleaning as you go so that you can see the animals clearly. The game should be a pick up and play little thing, with a game session about one to two minutes.

I have a lot of notes I took back during the Summer but without the prototype, it’s not apparent what will be fun — hiding stuff in the periphery, designing the evil animals, making the animals animate in a silly way, etc.

Interested?

If you’re interested, please follow me — I’ll post a devlog once the game is back in the pipeline. I worked on making my life more stable for a year and while it’s not perfect, my hopes are now better substantiated, so hopefully you won’t wait for too long. You’ll also get a ping when the chill mode arrives in BKTY :)

Sale

Finally, there’s the sale! I have put my games on sale with the deepest discounts ever seen. You can get Be Kind To Yourself for $4 (Catalog, Itch.io)  and Stars of the Screen for $3 (Catalog, Itch.io). The sale begins on 24th at 1am Pacific and runs through January 5th. 

(The itch.io sale prices are set by percentage, so the exact prices are a bit wonky.)

The special link

I have a kinda random thing I wanna end up here — it’s a non-Playdate, non-Mouflon thing. I had a rough year and it wasn’t a good year for lot of game devs, too. There’s a ton of bad news coming every week, big studios, small devs, game journalism. The year started with the cancellation of Earthblade; after I returned from a walk on May 1st Polygon was gone; and I was so sad about the layoffs at Heart Machine, a studio I love thanks to noclip docs despite never having played their games (yet). 

(These bummers are of course easily eclipsed by layoffs at bigger studios, capitalist consolidation, general move away from human rights and inclusivity, deplatforming of art, union busting, complicity in genocide and so on, but these are often too big to feel at a personal level. The fallout from these is easy to see anytime when I check my timeline on Bluesky.)

Another thing that hit me was the cancellation of Dreamsettler, Jay Tholen’s follow up to Hypnospace Outlaw. Just a few days before, I listened to his album New Active Object for the first time, after saving it for some special moment for months. And then I discovered his video about the cancellation of the game. His sadness and also his concern for his collaborators was heartbreaking.

A Playdate link: One of the programmers of Dreamsettler was Mark LaCroix, the author of Noble Engine that is used in many Playdate games (including Stars of the Screen) and the programmer of the colorful version of Blippo+.

So, if you’ve never played Hypnospace Outlaw (currently on sale for just a few bucks)  or Dropsy (an amazing adventure game, also on sale now) or never heard his nerdy game dev album, check these out! You can also follow Jay Tholen here on itch.