This page contains prototypes of games that are experiments in game design.  You can download and play the prototypes, but they require a Win32-based system with DirectX 9.0c.

 

Painter

(Posted 23 January 2006; updated 12 May 2011 to version 0.04)



One day I was thinking about what kind of game I would make for Nintendo's upcoming Revolution console, and I thought it might be neat to use the controller as a paintbrush to paint pictures on the screen.  That idea by itself is not enough to make a game.  (Why are you painting pitcures?)  So I plugged in an old idea I had floating around, which is that there are different critics with contradictory aesthetics who judge your painting, and you try to construct things that please enough of them to get by.

You can download the full game (7 megabytes), or else just look at the Read Me.

 

 

Raspberry

(Posted 9 January 2006; updated 28 January 2006 to version 0.03)

The goal of this game was to explore gameplay modeled as a time-based composition (the way music is).  The in-game tutorial and the Readme explain the concept pretty thoroughly.

You can download the full game (14 megabytes), or else just look at the Read Me, which contains some interesting gameplay philosophy from the playtesters.

 

 

Oracle Billiards

(Posted 15 January 2007; originally made in 2003 or so.)

This is about what it might be like to see the future, and how that might change a game like billiards.

You can download the prototype (300k), or just read the Instructions and overall description of the game.

 

[Back to Jonathan Blow's home page]

 

 

Nicewrench

(Posted 5 July 2008; originally made in February 2008.)

This is a design riff on messhof's game FLYWRENCH. What happens when you take this game that is all about brutally killing the player, and change it so that the player cannot die?

You can download the prototype (5MB), or just read the README and overall description of the game.

 

[Back to Jonathan Blow's home page]