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Bennett Foddy

A spiritual successor of sorts to the developer's earlier QWOP, this one takes the physical feats out of the realm of organized sport and instead puts the player in control of a man desperately clinging to a rocky oceanside cliff at sea level. Numerous handholds are available with which to pull himself up, helpfully labeled with keyboard letters, and if a handhold proves out of reach the player can activate a muscle-tensing big push, really striving to get close enough to the handhold to grab it. The player's body is governed by ragdoll physics, meaning that sometimes some rocking or swinging motions are needed in order to get close enough to make use of a handhold. Additional challenge is provided by shore birds who have made their nests in the handholds, obscuring the relevant letter with their feathery little bodies, plus of course the gradually-rising tide.

Bennett Foddy, Panic

Zipper is a tactics puzzle that recalls 8-bit isometric classics on the ZX Spectrum and MSX. A ridiculously swift swordsman seeks revenge on a castle full of enemies.

Bennett Foddy, Ryan Chisholm

Evacuation is a puzzle game where you try to rescue as many astronauts, so without letting them in a room with aliens or into outerspace. You do this by clicking on the colored doors, on which all doors of the corresponding color also open or close.

Bennett Foddy

Winner vs. Loser is a two-player, one-button athletics game in the mold of ‘Track ‘N Field’. Press your button rhythmically to build up speed, and hold it down to jump the hurdles. I wrote this for Kokoromi’s Gamma 4 event, which called for games that could be played with one button, but they didn’t go for it. Maybe if I had pressed my button more rhythmically… A training mode is included for people with no friends, but really it’s designed to be played with one or more people standing by.

Bennett Foddy, AP Thomson

Multibowl is a two-player challenge of skill and knowledge, across exciting moments in over 300 historical games across dozens of hardware platforms. It’s the first video game collage, maybe.

Bennett Foddy

This is a little experiment Bennett Foddy made in Pico-8 a while ago on a flight. It uses a control method they hadn’t seen before, where the movement is damped according to the rate of change in the acceleration (the ‘jerk’) which creates a strange oscillating movement.

Bennett Foddy

Little Master Cricket is Bennett Foddy's attempt to make a cricket game that focuses on compelling gameplay rather than realism or verisimilitude. The real pleasure of cricket is to swing a bat and hit a ball, something that’s missing from every commercial game and most free ones as well.

Bennett Foddy

Too Many Ninjas was the first game Bennett Foddy ever finished. It is a reinterpretation of the excellent and elegant bouncing ball minigame from Archer Maclean’s incredible IK+. Swing your sword to defend yourself against the horde of ninjas and their flying shurikens.

Bennett Foddy

Pole Riders is a pole-vaulting polo game for two players only. Vault up to kick the ball into the opposing player’s goal, or kick your opponent off their pole. I made an updated, much better version of this game called Super Pole Riders, which is part of the Sportsfriends compilation for computers and Playstations. If you like this one, you should check that out – I feel like I fixed a lot of the design flaws in the original game. It’s a bit silly, this game.

Bennett Foddy

Bennett Foddy’s Speed Chess is the fastest game of chess in the world. Designed for sixteen players to play simultaneously, it lets players move their piece instantly, without waiting for their turn. They can change which piece they control at will. The game proceeds at the speed of thought. This game was commissioned for NYU GameCenter‘s essential No Quarter event, and it is built for public festivals. It doesn’t have a UI and it definitely has bugs, and it might even fail to work on your computer. To enjoy it to the fullest, you’ll need 16 USB controllers and 16 friends, although you can play it with as few as 2.

Bennett Foddy

It’s been my view for a while that it’s a worthwhile exercise for any game designer to make a chess variant, a dice variant and a Pong variant. Speed Chess is my take on Chess, and this is my take on Pong. I originally built it as a secret mode for Sportsfriends, but people keep asking to show it at events, so I decided to put out a standalone build. FLOP was designed to work with two gamepads, using both analog sticks, but I’ve rigged this up so it can also use two or four arcade spinners, which is more fun if you have them.

Bennett Foddy

For 2017 I made Last Word, a little action word game where the difficulty increases as your words get longer. There’s a proper videogame version (with no prompt hidden inside it) here. Made in Terry’s Haxegon engine, a nice ultra-minimal Haxe library which is perfect for small prototypes. I love using engines that build to the web as well as native targets – makes it very easy to share prototypes without asking the player to do anything more annoying than play the actual game (which might already be quite annoying, honestly). I made this little game as a way of learning Terry Cavanagh’s work-in-progress game engine, Haxegon. It’s a bullet-hell game where you are always trying to eat a particular bullet… you try to build unique words to gain points, but it’s game over if you form a series of letters that cannot be a word. I think this is a new idea? But I’m not totally sure.

Bennett Foddy

This short maze game is inspired by Op-Art pioneers like Reginald Neal. It combines two ideas: first, your brain can easily segment areas of an image based on the direction of shading, without any color or tone information to help… making the game quite playable. Second, this kind of image causes conflict as your eyeball moves, making it really annoying to play. I used it as a talking point in my microtalk on optical effects in games, from GDC 2016. This is the second time I hid an assignment for my prototypes in a game. See if you can find the secret prompt.

Bennett Foddy

The game is a simple physics game, a reinterpretation of the speed-skating from Epyx’s C64 classic Winter Games. Downward pressure from the skates on the ice is converted into forward momentum, which would be easy enough were it not for the hazards of the ice rink. Made in the old version of Ruby Bergstrom’s Luxe, which used to be a rather lovely Haxe library and is now on the way to becoming a rather lovely Wren library. I don’t mind either way; I’m not a good enough programmer to have opinions about languages. Whatever library or language I use, it seems to lend its own flavor to the work you make with it. I don’t want a single tool that I can use for any game… I want a digital toolshed that looks like Depeche Mode’s synth collection.

Bennett Foddy

This is 2018’s assignment, a diabolical puzzle. You’re a monk who has forgotten where his cell is in the monastery, and who must walk the labyrinth in order to remember it. If you can find his room, you’ll find out what the assignment prompt is. I was a bit worried the students would be unable to find the prompt hidden in this one, but about half of them got there eventually. (The rest were expelled from the university.) 2018’s class was 100% Pico-8 so it seemed appropriate that the prompt game should be in Pico-8 too. Pico-8 is so great for prototyping — as a case in point, it builds to a single JS and HTML file which loads quite happily in the browser from a local file, so you don’t get annoying permissions or crossdomain problems.

Bennett Foddy

For 2019 I ran two prototyping classes – one in Pico-8 for the undergraduates and a graduate version with no platform constraint (which generally means they work in Unity). So this year I hid the same prompt in two different interpretations of the same idea. I tuned the Pico-8 game for the youthful reflexes of the undergraduate class, but I did not count on the fact that none of them would have ever played a bullet-hell game, and as a result, only one of them was able to reach the end and find out what the assignment was. I instructed that person that they could keep it a secret if they wanted to.

Bennett Foddy

For 2019 I ran two prototyping classes – one in Pico-8 for the undergraduates and a graduate version with no platform constraint (which generally means they work in Unity). So this year I hid the same prompt in two different interpretations of the same idea. I tuned the Pico-8 game for the youthful reflexes of the undergraduate class, but I did not count on the fact that none of them would have ever played a bullet-hell game, and as a result, only one of them was able to reach the end and find out what the assignment was. I instructed that person that they could keep it a secret if they wanted to.

Bennett Foddy

The second hidden-homework prompt for this year is this 3D Maze game, similar to the ‘Zebra’ game. Visually speaking, it’s an homage to Paul Woakes’ Commodore 64 classic, Mercenary.

Bennett Foddy

In 2021, the last time I taught the class, I didn’t want to hide the homework in the games. Instead I used the games as ways of presenting ideas. I made several, but I like this one, a reinterpretation of the fortune-telling minigame from Ultima IV.

Bennett Foddy

For my very final prompt, I wanted to leave the students with one lasting idea: that I make games for enjoyment and want to do it as much as I can, even when I’m limited to a day or two’s work and 8192 Pico8 tokens. I hope that came across in this little game.

Bennett Foddy

Pacman with conservation of mass.

Bennett Foddy

Get further to the right than your twin, and enjoy the benefits of a well-placed death!

Bennett Foddy

A pole-vaulting polo game, part of the Sportsfriends collection.

Bennett Foddy

A spiritual successor to QWOP where Players control the individual limbs of a unicorn.