The Quixotic Engineer

Only ten months after promising that they were “coming soon”, the folks of No Fun Games (Kira, Renaud and myself) have finally finished porting our one-button real-time strategy game Pax Britannica to OSX and Linux. You can check them out at our fancy new website, or download them directly here:

Mac Download / Linux Download

Unfortunately, the OSX version of the game is currently lacking gamepad support due to a platform-specific issue with GLFW. We’ll be sure to release an updated version of the game if that’s ever patched!

I’m tremendously grateful for all the positive feedback we’ve received about Pax Britannica. In particular, this video review by Joe Larson and his son Andrew reminded me why I started making video games in the first place. (UPDATE: The video is no longer available.)

Back in late April, the No Fun Games gang (Renaud Bédard, Kira Boom, and I) took the train down to Toronto to participate in TOJam. Over three days, we hacked together a silly game called Tea Time Quarrel. Since then we’ve had the opportunity to present the game publicly at TOJam Arcade and the Mount Royal Game Society. However, we never got around to officially releasing it… until now!

Download Tea Time Quarrel (Windows)

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Back in January, Kira, Thomas and I presented two games we were working on (Norwegian Wood and an alpha build of Pax Britannica) to the DemoCamp at CUSEC 2010. DemoCamp is a really cool informal event where programmers can show off what they’ve been hacking on. The rules are simple: 15 minutes maximum, no powerpoint, show working code!

I think the talk went really well, we got by with some laughs and a little bit of casual swearing. Big thanks to the CUSEC organizers, host Joey DeVilla and A/V tech Guillaume Theoret for giving us a chance to show off our games!

No Fun Games is proud to present Pax Britannica, a one-button real-time strategy game we made for the GAMMA4 design competition. Our team includes designers/programmers Kira Boom, Renaud Bédard and me, artist Daniel Burton and composer Ben Abraham. Unfortunately we were not selected and will not be showing off our game at GDC. However, we had a great time making the game and I’m glad we finally get to release it to the public!

Windows Download

Mac Download

Linux Download

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The project that became Norwegian Wood began in late April of this year. With school winding down and the weather heating up, I felt the itch to tackle something new. By chance I had met a number of like-minded people over the winter; students with big ideas and aspirations of working in the game industry. Inspired by this collective potential, I decided to reach out to my local friends and colleagues about coming together to make a game over the summer.

The response was overwhelming; of the nine people I had e-mailed, seven of them were interested in participating. The project was suddenly much larger than I had anticipated, but I didn’t have the heart to turn anyone away. The eight of us (Kira Boom, Thomas Hibbert, Phil Jones, Renaud Bédard, Alex Charlton, William Mitchell, Kyle Sama and I¹) formed the facetiously titled collective No Fun Games.

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