KMG

My wife (Ashley) and I developed KMG as a Christmas gift for my sister and brother-in-law (Mollie and Gus). You can try it out on itch.io!

KMV Level 1

KMG is a platformer made with PICO-8 heavily inspired by Celeste. Ashley created the sprites and maps and I contributed the code, music and sfx. The gist of the game is that my sister’s house cats have escaped and need finding, but will only show themselves if lured out with snacks. You can play as Mollie or Gus :)

KMG Level 2

Development

I’ve always been inspired by Hackernews posts about the value of finishing a game. While the concept of a “finished” game is subjective, picking a small and well-defined enough scope, sticking to a deadline and actually releasing are indeed helpful motivators and quite satisfying.

KMG Level 3

Publishing our first PICO-8 game on itch.io gave us a sufficient confidence boost to try and tackle a more complex game and Christmas provided a natural deadline. Seeing our incremental progress over the course of the holiday season build day-by-day into a playable game was incredibly exciting and motivating and we met our target date comfortably :D

While this codebase admittedly showcases a number of programming antipatterns I normally pride myself on avoiding (magic numbers! duplication! super-long functions! no tests! one file?!), this was by far the most rewarding personal project I’ve ever worked on. Collaborating with Ashley was a delight, the quality of her sprites and maps surpassed my wildest expectaions and we had a ton of fun bringing the concepts to life. As an extra Christmas touch, we bought a Powkiddy RGB-30 (cool!) so that Mol and Gus could play the game on a physical console. While I would point to other personal projects for examples of perhaps more elegant software patterns, KMG will always have a special place in my heart as it brought the family together.

XMas morning - Release Day It was a hit!

On Game Dev

If you’re working in another industry (like web dev) and are interested in building games, go for it! Chances are you’ll get a chance to flex your data structures and algorithms chops, find creative solutions to unique problems and have a blast playing with something you made yourself. While there are several great game engine options, I can’t recommend PICO-8 enough: Lua is a delightfully minimal programming language, the built-in sprite, map and music editors are a ton of fun, the community is inspiring and helpful, plus the inherent limitations of the engine can help to keep the scope manageable. Give it a shot - best $15 I ever spent!