Steve Landey

gw0rp

Screenshot

Build your ship out of spare parts and blast your enemies into oblivion. Solve simple puzzles to reach your destination.

Most top-down shooters put you in a vehicle that moves in one or two dimensions and can have health and weapon upgrades that do not affect the physical vehicle. In gw0rp, you can improve your ship’s physical characteristics by adding physical objects such as guns, thrusters, and repair units to it. If you’re in the middle of a firefight, you can ram a stationary turret, and if it doesn’t explode, you can make it a part of your ship.

The game is named after the main character, a cybernetic being who is exploring distant planets for strip mining purposes. When he finds an inhabited planet, he must defend himself against hostile forces while finding suitable mining strategies. Excitement! Astoundment! Stickiness! Cybernetic beings!

Gw0rp was an entry in the uDevGames 2009 contest. It took second place in Story and third in Originality. Calvin Eiber and I executed the concept with reasonable competency, but the game design is significantly flawed and there are a handful of major bugs. I hope to eventually revisit this concept in another form. For now, here’s a video I made about why it’s so bad!

If you want more details about the development process and my opinion of the game, you can read the postmortem, with the caveat that I was really burned out when I wrote it. I hope to get around to writing a more balanced version.

A few months after uDG ended, I started work on a rewrite called Gluball (source), which is far from complete but would be easier to fork.

Download for OS X