Fall Damage Games

Over the past year, I’ve been iterating on the Specter prototype. It’s very much a casual hobby for me so it’ll be a while before I release a new build. Thanks to everyone who has sent me feedback. It’s all been very helpful.

My goal with this project is to give players experiences that dramatically warp their consciousness. I want players to discover and hone mental faculties they didn’t know they possessed. I want to give players a game world that introduces them to spacial-temporal abstractions that tell them things about the real world.

A guy sent me this piece of feedback about the first prototype. It’s exactly what I’m aiming at.

“Wow, that game touches some areas of the game-mechanic part of my brain I didn’t even knew existed. I need a cigarette…”

By the way, if you’re interested in other stuff I’m working on you can hit up my personal website: http://about.me/kengrafals

The last few days have been wild. Specter Spelunker Shrinks was really just supposed to be a prototype. I just wanted to experiment and get some feedback about the design. Boy, did I get feedback! Here’s some of the press and what people are saying:

• The Escapist: Alt+Escape
• David Sirlin
• Jay Is Games
• IndieGames.com
• Rock Paper Shotgun
• CrudePixel Podcast

EDIT: Also on Bytejacker!

The message is very clear: people like the concept. I have a ton of ideas for the full game but I have yet to decide what platform I’m going with or what exactly the scope will be. There are also many possibilities for how the gameplay might grow. Scaling works well when it’s put beside almost any other spacially related gameplay mechanic.

If you have any ideas, lemme know. I’m very open right now to new ideas. It’s also just a very fun thing to talk about! So don’t be shy to drop me a line

For the record, guys at CrudePixel, it’s “Grafals” like “Niagara Falls”. Only without the Nia-. So it’s just -Gara Falls. But without the extra ‘a’ and the ‘r’ is right after the ‘g’… Oh forget it!

I might have found a home in GameJolt. I dig this indie gaming portal. It’s a perfect place for the type of stuff I work on. I recently put up my new game, Specter Spelunker Shrinks, and I’ve been ecstatic with the feedback I’ve been getting. The game immediately got a bunch of attention.

I got to talk to lot of indie devs about my new release through the GameJolt chat. On the release day I casually replied to a “Hello”. He asked me what was up. I told him I had just put up my game on the site a few minutes ago. He told me he was going to give it a try. After checking out his profile I found out that he’s actually Aski from Tower of Heaven — one of my favorite indie platformers of last year. He came back and told me he really liked the game and gave it the highest rating on GameJolt. Only about 30 minutes into submitting my game I felt like my little experimental project was worth it.

Since then I’ve been getting a bunch of positive feedback from the community. They’ve got me hooked so I’ll be participating for sure in trying out some of the cool stuff on that portal and talking to more people about their stuff. The last few days have been a ton of fun.