Presskit

Fact Sheet

Developer

Chao Hsu Lin

Publisher

Chao

Release Date

November 17, 2021

Platforms

Steam

Social

twitter.com/SpectralHarp

Website

games.bychao.com

Price

$3.99

Description

It's a collection of games I've made in game jams! Buy one game, and you get 9 games (of varying quality)!

History

I'm not sure who's even going to read this, but if you're here, hi.

I'm also not sure what to write here, uh, this collection of games is made by me, Chao Hsu Lin (friends just call me Chao). Programming is done by Chao, art is also done by Chao, and the music is made by the very talented Chao.

The first game in this collection is Hyperrealistic Baseball 2, it's a 2D pinball platformer, a genre I made up. In this game you play as a batter who seeks to liberate themselves from the flow of time through achieving what is called the homerun. Despite the name of the game, it is more surreal than it is hyperrealistic. The original game mechanic of the game came from a combination of another joke game I made in the past, which involves in vertical platforming, and an accidental bug I had during the jam. Usually, when you are making a game, you want to make the camera follow the character that you are controlling, so you can actually see what is happening. During the jam, I attached the camera to the ball instead of the player on accident, but it turned out to be kinda fun so it was kept that way.

Hyperrealistic Baseball 3 is the spiritual successor of Hyperrealistic Baseball 2. It was mostly made because I want to learn about the 3D part of the Unity Engine. I will confess that I often just come up with weird bugs and try to sell them as games. The core platforming mechanic in this game, the dash jump, was a weird bug I encountered when I was prototyping a dash where the player dash towards the ball. Since both the ball and the player has colliders, whenever the player clips into the ball, the ball will kinda add a weird upwards velocity that allows you to move higher than I originally planned. It ended up being kind of a fun manouver so I ended up building the game around that mechanic.

Wipts, or Work in Progress Title Screen, is a tower defense where you make cannons to defeat incoming enemies, the catch of this game is that you have a limited number of cannons, so you have to push them to position in order to protect different lanes. When enemies die, they sometimes drop parts that you can push into the lab located on the left of the screen to make new cannons. Most of the things in this game is pushable, this includes the enemies as well. Attempting to create a cannon out of an enemy is possible, but not advised.

Devoid is a 2D puzzle platformer, when your character is in the white zone, you can move and jump like in your usual platformer. However, in the black zone, you float around freely, and different objects behave differently in different zones as well. I learned a lot from making this game, and my key take away is that puzzle games are about the most difficult games to create.

Flourish! is a turn based RPG, to be honest, though, there isn't much role playing in this game, and it's more of just turn based combat. Every turn, your fleower can perform one of four (sometimes six) types of actions - attack, magic, guard, and water. Attack is self explanatory, you can attack an enemy, your party member, or even yourself. Now, why would you want to attack youself, you ask? Whenever any floewer dies, they drop two seeds. Using the water action on these seeds will grow them back to life, increasing your party size. Watering fully grown party members will heal them instead. Magic deals magical damage to the enemy, when you use magic on a party member, their next action will be enhanced. Finally, guarding lures the enemies to attack you, this will can prevent enemies from hitting seeds or character classes with less hit points.

Flourish!! Regrowth puts the concept of seeds in a real-time strategy game. You start out with a small number of floewers, who slowly decay as they take actions and leave behind seeds. As your population grows, you gain access to buildings and structures that will defend you from incoming enemies. The goal of the game is to build the Endgate, which will end the game when it is built.

Cats, Explosions and Extra Cheese is a ultra short visual novel explosion nibbler game thing. You play as Rita, who works at the beach house on Sunny Rat Island. In the game,you help the beach house owner Alice fend off the cats that are invading the island. If you are not Austin (hi) and somehow like the game enough to be reading through all of this you might be wondering if these games are all somehow sharing the same universe given that the cats are using cannons that shoots out the same projectile as in Wipts. Here I will detail how these games are canonically connected. First of all, the Mother in the Hyperrealistic Baseball franchise is the same entity that the floewers worship in Flourish Regrowth. Wipts is not canonically connected to other games in the collection, but the enemies and cats are recurring characters in later games. Devoid is set in the spiritual world. Flourish glosses over a minor conflict in the great war. Cats, Explosions and Extra Cheese is set in present day. Priklepal is a sci-fi novel I think.

And that's pretty much it.

Features

  • Over 8 games (may depend on the definition of "game")
  • Hyperrealistic Baseball II, a 2D pinball platformer where you fight gloves/umpire/pitcher in space
  • Hyperrealistic Baseball III, Hyperrealistic Baseball II but 3D but also you can fire sword... bat beams?
  • Wipts, a tower defense game where you make and move around cannons (and non-cannons)
  • ...actually you can like move around the enemies too, though please don't do that?
  • Devoid, a 2D puzzle platformer idk how to describe it like in the white space you move normally but in the black space you go swoosh?
  • Flourish, a generic turn based RPG with generic gameplay
  • Flourish Regrowth, supposedly the sequel of Flourish but it's a real time strategy game?
  • Cats, Explosion and Extra Cheese, a game with a lot of (more than one) mice, and has an anime girl
  • ...oh and also everything explodes
  • Priklepal, a top down shooter, except you can only shoot at yourself, so you have to try to not get hit by yourself

Videos

Images

Logo

screenshot of priklepal

Other

Assets

Just a bunch of assets from the game (Including the screenshots above)!