The blind speedrunning community (i.e. people who speedrun games they haven’t seen before, prima vista) had a showcase of their Mystery Tournament last weekend on the Games Done Quick Twitch channel, and as a special thing I made a small game for them to speedrun. The game I made is called Oh! My Roommate Is a Lasergun?!, and it’s essentially a remake of GENERIC Platformer, which I made in 2009. The game utilizes old things in other ways, too; the background art was originally made for… Timerocketxby? Or maybe GENERIC itself? It’s hard to remember. Anyway, I recycled the assets here. The music was also originally made as little Shovel Knight -inspired test tunes in 2016, but with a little touching-up they made for very fine in-game tracks.
I’m a huge fan of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, and have recently been leafing through his book, Thud!, again. The story didn’t grip me all that much the first time around, but now I’ve grown to appreciate it quite a bit more.
Anyhoo, the book features a fictitious boardgame called Thud. The book lays out some basic rules and features of the game, but leaves out a lot. I had noticed years ago that some people on boardgamegeek (iirc) had tried to construct rules for Thud. I was now struck by the urge to try to do the same, and to help with the testing (& because it felt like a cool and fun thing to do) I decided to build myself a Thud board & the necessary pieces.
I bought two cheap chess sets and repainted one of the boards from 8×8 to 13×13, as seen above. I also combined the rooks & pawns from both sets to get myself enough troll & dwarf units, respectively. A queen was transformed into the central rock structure. Since the cheat chesspieces were quite light, I glued coins under them to give them some nice weight and then glued pieces of an old sock under the coins for padding. The result might be a bit less sturdy than I’d like but it feels nice so far. Also I found an use for a black sock with a hole in it, so that’s extra good.
I’ll post the rules here once I’m happy with them!
