A very small game for the MAGS contest, adopting the theme of 'hole' quite literally as the player is tasked with descending into a deep chasm to perform scientifiy study in the bowels of the Earth, while accompanied by the distant voice of a colleague over the radio. Yet something feels a little off...
This game was created in a very brief period of time and was primarily an experiment to see if I could create a visually interesting experience within the optional contest limitation of using no more than 4 colours in the game. The minimal time investment led to the game being quite compromised in design and thus it is very short and rather unrewarding to play, but the project was still valuable as a reminder of how quickly a simple game can be developed with the AGS engine.
Release date: 30 June 2025
Engine: AGS
Dev time: 4 weeks
Budget: 0 €
Features: Fully bilingual in Finnish and English
The theme of the MAGS contest was to create a game about your home country, and so I couldn't help but create this character that I feel perfectly encompasses several key aspects of being Finnish. Tauno is our alcoholic protagonist, jobless, struggling and about as far from flourishing as one can be, and yet he never surrenders and keeps going with a single minded objective: to get himself a nice pot of coffee.
The game is all about Finnish dry humor, crude jokes and is also the first WHAMGAMES release to include fart sounds provided by the Finnish taxpayer, as the game incorporates some of the royalty free sounds provided by the Finnish national broadcaster YLE.
The game was purposefully designed to be somewhat frustrating to play, aiming to place the player directly in the mindset of the hungover protagonist, but understandably this also meant that many players felt the game was too unpleasant to play. A perfectly understandable stance and Tauno is certainly not a game that would have mass market appeal as it is. The game did, however, find its way to the pages of the Finnish retro magazine Skrolli where it was positively reviewed as part of a retro games special!
Tuulipuku-Tauno will definitely be back and you can even find him on his own dedicated social media page on Facebook, so make sure to give him a follow!
Not having finished an AGS project in a long time, A Place of Significance was my attempt to return to form as the MAGS contest was announced with the theme of 'diverse perspectives'. I chose to finally use the dialogue systems in AGS, along with the functionality to control multiple characters, to create a narrative that takes place across thousands of years, from prehistory to the far future.
The game boasts the widest variety of characters in any WHAMGAMES production so far, with over a dozen unique characters drawn for the game. It also mark the fourth lifetime win in the MAGS contest!
Release date: 30.July.2024
Engine: Godot
Dev time: 2 weeks
Budget: 0 €
Features: Light and shadow management, immersive user interface, 100% homemade sound effects
In collaboration with: Jani Luoti
Something very different, ShadowBrew was developed in the Godot engine for the Pirate Software game jam under the theme of 'Alchemy and Shadows'. Recruiting a talented programmer, one Jani Luoti, to work on the practical development side of things while I focused on game design, documentation, graphics and sounds, allowed us to accomplish a massively extensive game in the course of just two weeks.
Making use of the Godot engines built in physics, lights and shadows, the game has the player moving around scaffolds to manipulate shadows in order to protect their precious mushroom patches, which serve to produce the ingredients for brewing the potions required to advance in the game. Time, as usual, plays a key part in the game as the movement of sun and the cycle of sunny and rainy days need to be considered.
The game is also an experiment in designing mouse driven user interface elements that feel integral to the setting of the game. These features never ended up working quite right, suffering from overtly ambitious design for the short time to develop and test. Unfortunately there was only so much Jani could do to salvage the overtly complicate designs.
Release date: 28 February 2021
Engine: AGS
Dev time: 4 weeks
Budget: 0 €
Features: Roguelite push-your-luck gameplay
A MAGS contest entry under the theme of 'Greed', One More Fathom adapts idea from slot machines and push-your-luck games to try and coax the player to take on just a little more risk, push themselves a little deeper beneath the waves in search of treasure, despite the mounting risk. The game is my first attempt to touch on the at-the-time trendy theme of roguelites, games which risk permanent progression loss and randomize the journey the player has to take each time.
This game is also a sort of spiritual sequel to the Cold Hand Reef, sharing a plotline revolving around a lost treasure map leading to the infamous reef, which might come to play a part in a future WHAMGAMES project.
Release date: 26 July 2019
Engine: AGS
Dev time: 3 months
Budget: 500 €
Features: Original soundtrack, fully voiced, multiple endings
GNRBLEX, thus named in an effort to create the least pronounceable name for a videogame possible, was yet another MAGS contest entry under the theme of 'extinction'. The player is given responsibility over an oddly cute but utterly terrifying critter, tasked with ensuring its species avoid extinction no matter what it takes. The first version of the game was developed over the course of just 4 weeks in February of 2016, but I chose to continue work on the game later on and eventually created the final 2019 version, which came with full voice acting, an original soundtrack by the talented Joth, as well as overhauled puzzles and visuals to complete the experience.
With GNRBLEX I also accomplished a long term dream of finally publishing a game of mine on the venerable online platform Steam, although by this time the glory of that accomplishment had been rather diminished by the coming and going of the Steam Greenlight program, which was finally replaced by a flat fee to publish a game. Still, it felt great to see my creation up on Steam after all these years!
Oh, and the game won its MAGS contest as well, making that three lifetime wins!
Release date: 2 September 2015
Engine: AGS
Dev time: 4 weeks
Budget: 0 €
Features: pictographic storytelling with no written language
After a bit of a break I returned to the MAGS contest with a new game in 2015. Cold Hand Reef tells the story of a young girl and her father sailing out to the infamous and possibly cursed Cold Hand Reef, a place where the mother of the family went missing under mysterious circumstances, out of a desperate hope to find enough fish to sustain their struggling family business. Inspired by the Sims games, the game uses no written language of any kind, making it a game that requires no translation to play and understand. Though in hindsight the pictograms I drew were not always clear and some players reported feeling confused as to who the creepy older man was and why he had such a young wife.
Other than that the game contains many of the standard features for my adventure gmes. A traditional point'n'click user interface, puzzles to solve and a slowly building time pressure that applies a bit of stress to the player as they try to repair their damaged ship to escape the cursed reef before terrible things come out at night.
Release date: 18 July 2013
Engine: AGS
Dev time: 1 week
Budget: 0 €
Features: 2D platforming and physics
Sinking was developed for the One Room One Week contest on the AGS forums, in which the challenge is to develop a game within the timespan of just one week, with the game fully taking place inside one virtual room. I chose the interior of an unusually spacious submarine as the setting for my game and a side-scrolling platformer as the genre, since I'd never done anything like it in AGS. The player can run, jump, climb and fall while trying to put out fires, aid NPC companions and steer the ship to avoid dangers outside.
The strict time limit meant that the game was anything but polished, but it was an experience well worth sacrificing a week out of my summer vacation for!
Release date: 4 March 2012
Engine: AGS
Dev time: 4 weeks
Budget: 100 €
Features: Dynamically generated missions and character profiles
Inspired in great part by my recent attempts to play X-Com: Terror From the Deep, Big Blue World Domination was to be a game in which the player builds out their base, hires agents and sends them out on missions in order to become a world dominating evil superpower. This game was also developed for the MAGS contest and scored a win exactly one year after La Sol managed the same feat!
This game received some incredibly valuable assistance in the form of an original theme music created by Guney Oszan, as well as a set of character portraits and event cards drawn by the German AGS forumite Ghost.
Release date: 4 May 2011
Engine: AGS
Dev time: 4 weeks
Budget: 0 €
Features: Keyboard controls
Of The Essence was my seconds MAGS game and established a pattern in my games, in which I strive for each new project to do something new and different, allowing me to learn something new about game design or the AGS engine in the process. For this game I chose to focus on controlling the game with the keyboard instead of a mouse, which was not something I had ever done before with the AGS engine. Dealing with the various keyboard interactions and overlapping inputs was an interesting challenge, but I simply ran out of time on this project and managed only about a third of my planned content within the deadline.
Fun fact: the classic avatar I use on most of my online profiles was designed for this game, with the AGS forumite Khris providing invaluable assistance in finalizing the design and inspiring my own art for the future!
Release date: 26 February 2011
Engine: AGS
Dev time: 4 weeks
Budget: 0 €
Features: Time-based puzzles and story flow
La Sol, named after a brand of windshield cleaning fluid, was my first foray into the Monthly Adventure Game Studio contest, in which a theme is announced at the start of a month and contestants have until end of the month to create a brand new game to match that theme. With the theme of 'Submerged' I envisioned a game about surviving inside a submerged room, trying to escape as water slowly fills the available space, thus providing the experience with an easily understood time limit.
The game was an attempt to expand from my earlier game by doubling the resolution of the graphics and adding little visual features like dimming lights and water splashes animated around the character as they move around. La Sol was fairly well received, winning the MAGS contest it was created for, and the experience of developing a game from start to finish in such a short time was both highly encouraging and educational!
Release date: 7 May 2008
Engine: AGS
Dev time: 6 months
Budget: 100 €
Features: Full voice acting, real time combat interactions
Infection started life as a distraction from school work, a small private project I worked on in class when I wasn't paying attention. One day a teacher noticed my little project and asked about it. After explaining that I was making a game he asked me if I was planning to turn it into my thesis work. I'd had no idea that was an option, but as of that moment it was.
The game started off as a crude MSPaint scribble and evolved over the course of several months into a slightly more coherent whole. A story of a spaceship mechanic rudely awakened by a disturbance on board, leading to a survival horror experience that tries to mimic all the genre hallmarks from a relentless pursuing enemy to ammo scarcity, while retaining the traditional point'n'click puzzle elements to go with it all.
I wrote the story and script, drew all the graphics and animations and coded everything in large part using the visual editor components of the old AGS engine version 2.7. To complete the vision a good friend of mine, Toni 'Ferrara' Caven, volunteered to create an original soundtrack, while other friends were recruited to perform additional voice acting. There was even a german translation released to try and make the game as available as possible for a wider audience.
While not necessarily a great game, Infection was a great learning experience and served to provide basis for all future WHAMGAMES projects. A sequel was planned and development started, with even a playable demo released, but hard drive failures and mistakes in planning backups led to such disastrous data loss that the project was eventually abandoned in favor of focusing on my day job instead.
