Daniel Benmergui

(image courtesy of Desirae Brink)

I am very happy with the repercussions of the publication of Today I Die… as with I Wish I Were the Moon, I had no idea how would everyone react to the game beforehand.

The reaction was beyond expected… I keep getting mails each day from people who found the experience of playing it important to them. Even though I can’t answer every single mail, or comment in every blog that talked about the game, I think I read pretty much everything that google could find out there, even on very foreign languages!

I kinda distrust the stats of my hosting, but apparently the game got more than 400,000 gameplays, and counting.

The game is self-published in an serene, clean website, and it can be played for free.

But in order to fund my next game, I decided to accept donations and allow regular people to become my sponsors. They will have the chance to know about my next game before everyone else, and will be listed in the game credits.

So far there’s enough for me to live for a couple more months working exclusively on my own games, so huge thanks to all of you!

The game was positively covered by Kotaku, JayIsGames (apparently it’s one of the best rated games there), RockPaperShotgun, Destructoid, TIGSource, Offworld, AV Club, and Jeff Vogel himself (I play his games).

There’s a walkthrough, thanks to Tasselfoot.

I’ve just updated the game to version 1.1:

• Game translated to Spanish, Portuguese (Janos Biro), Czech (Jarnik), German (Kirill Gettmann), French (David Callé and Guillaume Patrux) and Italian (Elisa Di Fiore). If you want to help by translating the game to your language, read the first comment below!
• Some small changes to improve on the meaning of the game objects.
• I installed a bot that helps me collect statistics on how many times the game is played, since I don’t trust the logging of my hosting very much…

In the future I will make another version of this game with deeper changes I already know will make the game much better, but I’ll let some time go by so I can have a perspective on it.

And now, back to work…

Finally, Today I Die is now released and you can play it here.

You might notice it’s actually self-hosted. I built a package including I Wish I Were the Moon, Storyteller, Today I Die and its soundtrack, which you can download from the downloads page, where you can help me by donating!

This was not an easy game to make, and I involved a lot of people I want to thank. I’m sure I’ll forget someone… remind me at daniel@ludomancy.com!

Tembac for the initial idea of playing with poem words is his. Him, Egar Almeida and Patrick Dugan for the initial feedback. Edmund McMillen for his obsession with helping me out, Jason Rohrer, Terry Cavanagh, Ian Bogost, John Sharp, Martín Sebastián Wain, Heather Kelley, Darius Kazemi, Anthony Burch, Juan Becerril, Jonathan Blow, Nick Montfort, Gregory Weir, Chris Hecker, Stephen Lavelle, Mike Treanor, PixelJam, Marco Mustapic, Rod Humble, Anna Anthropy for their critical feedback.

Guadalupe, whose handwriting you can see in the game.

And very special thanks to the “sponsor” of this game, who went out of his way to make it possible for me release the game in a quiet, ad-free website.

Enjoy!

This week I start the process of looking for a sponsor to “Today I Die”, my current game. It will be released as soon as that happens.

It’s about the daily choice of waking up in the morning.

The music track being made by Hernán Rozenwasser (Night Raveler) is wonderful, and you can Download it.

Click screenshot to play

Gregory from Ludus Novus made a vignette Game called I Fell in Love With the Majesty of Colors. It’s a dramatization (or should I say gamification) of a dream he had, and so it has that oniric taste that I think is severely underexplored in games.

You control a cthulhu-esque tentacle in the bottom of Gregory’s unconscious sea and you can grab stuff in an attempt to discover every ending that you can reach, like Moon does. And that similarity in format made some people treat him a little scornfully, and that’s why I’m writing this.

Not only I feel personally very flattered by Gregory’s open acceptance of the influence of Moon, but I am also surprised by the game he came up with. It made me consider exploring dreams a bit more, and I think he took the vignette concept a little further. Also, controlling a huge tentacle to grab things is a very clever and effective idea.

I am not trying to build a trademark. I’m trying to make games that affect people. And if something I make inspires something new that I myself find surprising, there’s no media award that could match that success. So thanks for your work, Gregory.

Since I wanted to be a contender in this year’s IGF, I worked a bit on I wish I were the Moon and submitted it.

This new version has more endings, some tweaks and fixes all over the place, and a secret ending. You can play it in Kongregate.

I will link to the most beautiful video walkthrough I get, so if you make one, let me know!

On other news:

• There is a video for my presentation at Japan’s Sense of Wonder Night
• EVA, the argentinian GDC is on this weekend. I’ll be presenting CODEAR, our indie contest, including the Banner Games Contest, Single Screen RPG and the results of Project 2008!