Jonathan Field - Maker of Random Stuff

South Africa Motor Tour

In the spring of 2010 Eric Wong and I were doing some volunteer work in rural South African schools - fixing computers and such. At some point I got the idea that it would be fun to make a game for the kids to practice their lessons. With some guidance from the teachers, Eric and I put together this simple game.

The game is done entirely in JavaScript and can run with no internet connection, a must in the area we were working. It was designed so that teachers could add new tests to the game by creating relatively simple text files. The kids at that school had no other access to computer games, so they seemed quite excited to play it. I plan to develop the idea further on my next visit.

If you play it here you'll find "A Very Easy Test" installed for your convenience. If you want to see what the high school kids are actually doing I've left a few of the real tests in as well. I bet you get stumped on the questions that those kids were acing.

Celebrity Guess Who

For a few years The Rev. Brendan Powell Smith had been organizing a party game where he would show interestingly distorted images of celebrities and have the group try to guess who they were. I thought it would work well online and he agreed, so we put it together.

It was a fun project, and my first to use Ajax techniques. By the time I was done I had finally got over my JavaScript ambivalence. And I learned a few new Photoshop tricks to boot.

Invasion of the Quadropus

I tried to learn Java a few times by reading and doing lessons, but I would always forget everything a few weeks later. Eventually I decided I needed a fun project to really engage my mind, so I brushed off my ancient game coding skills and Invasion of the Quadropus was the result.

Nearly one month in the making, this game brought all of the fun of 1980 into the 21st century. After completing it I used my new Java knowledge on one contract job and then started making a more advanced game. I switched to C++ when I realized that client-side Java is really only good enough for recreating the 80's.

Commodore 64

Oh man I loved my Commodore 64. I spent at least 36% of my teenage years glued in front of that thing. I played games, but the majority of that time was actually spent attempting to make games. Mainly I used Garry Kitchen's GameMaker, though I also dabbled with Commodore BASIC and Arcade Game Construction Kit.

I must have started some 30 projects over the years, few of which got to the point of being playable. Only three were actually "released" - which simply meant I gave copies of them to friends after school.

To play you'll need a C64 emulator and the patience to load the games from a virtual C64 disk. For your trouble you'll be rewarded with poor gameplay, crude graphics, and spotty sound. However the games were well ahead of their time with regard to violence.

• Slaughterhouse
  A nihilistic fantasy adventure game. Some might call it a predecessor to DOOM. It features five different blood-spraying animations and the inability to stop firing your gun as you move around. From the title screen:
  You are having a bad day and a clerk at the mall gives you some trouble. Your mind snaps. You decide to viciously pay back the world for its errors. You pull out an uzi and in your adrenaline pumped rage attempt to kill the world. This is... THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE.
• Splat!
  You and your monster truck take on the pedestrians of a small town. The "fire" button punches the gas, and there are no brakes. You can steer a bit, but you won't proceed to the next pedestrian until you can hit them without swerving.
• Suicidal Nazis from Mars
  It's the year 3001 and the Earth is invaded by kamikaze spaceships from Mars emblazoned with a swastika. Of course it is your job to eliminate every last one of them and take on the mothership.

I seem to have been born a sort of free software advocate. The end of each game included the following message along with my then address:

I don't think I ever got any contributions, but I went right on working on games anyway.

© 2011 Jonathan Field