Back in November I flew to San Diego to meet up with the rest of the Urbansquall team for our annual get together. This year’s theme was a game in a week. We rented out two hotel rooms, opened the connecting door in the middle, and spent five days doing non-stop game making. The fruit of our labor was a demo for a little game we called Bloody Fun Day. After another couple weeks of updating the game in my free time, we were ready to release it into the wild. And what happened then?
Success! It turns out people really like the game. In Bloody Fun Day, you play the grim reaper who has somehow managed to find himself on an island full of really, really cute creatures. Wanting to make the best of the situation, Death begins cleaving the creatures left and right in a horribly gratuitous fashion. The end result is an addicting puzzle strategy game. I won’t spend any more time describing the game, because you can just head over to Kongregate and play it yourself!
Play Bloody Fun Day at Kongregate
What I would like to take time for, is to talk a bit about the inspiration for the game and hand out some links people have been asking for. This is the part where I pretend people actually read my blog that I post in twice a year. Bloody Fun Day’s theme is inspired almost entirely by a book called Everything Can Be Beaten. The book is about a monster called It who lives his life in a single room. He spends all day in front of a chute waiting for kittens to slide down so that he can bash them with his hammer. One day he decides to leave his room and this is when he discovers that he lives in a world full of cute animals. Doing the only thing he knows how to do, It makes friends by utilizing the blunt end of his hammer.
Bloody Fun Day’s art came from Urbansquall’s amazing artist Tim Wendorf. Tim and I share a similar sense of humor, so aligning our vision for the reaper family and the cuties came almost automatically. The gory death animations for the cuties were his doing. I’m pretty sure Urbansquall would have died long ago were it not for Tim’s art.
I’m also pretty sure that I would be committing a felony if I made no mention of how significant Tim was in the development of Bloody Fun Day. To everyone who thinks the game is well balanced, that’s because Tim became addicted to the game during its development and gave me constant feedback on power costs. Without Tim’s input, Fire Blast would still take out a hex-shaped adjacent group of cuties instead of the awesome distance snipe power it is now.
The music is from one of my good friends, Nick Esposito. We got together in his studio one night and not only created the music track for the game, but also recorded a bunch of screams and squishes for the cutie death noises. Yes, all those noises were done by my mouth. The game itself contains a link to his studio. But what I’d really like to share is a link to his band’s music, because they rock. If you’re a fan of Bloody Fun Day’s music, you should really give Nick’s band, The Title, a listen.
Listen to The Title on Bandcamp
That’s really all I’ve been wanting to say. I’ll be updating this post from time to time with links to reviews for the game.