Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Five-in-One Press Kit

It’s pushing! It’s running! It’s reaching! It’s suffering! It’s five ancient greek punishments for the effort of one! It’s everything!

Play Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Five-in-One

The basics

Who is this Pippin Barr guy?

Pippin is an experimental game developer who has made games about everything from Eurovision to performance art to dystopian post-work futures. He’s an Assistant Professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montréal. He is also the associate director of the Technoculture, Art, and Games (TAG) Research Centre, which is part of the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology.

Description

Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Five-in-One is the eleventh edition in the Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment series begun in 2011 and comprising: Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment (2011), Art Edition Edition (2015), Limited Edition (2016), CPU Edition (2017), Inversion Edition (2019), UI Edition (2019), Teaches Typing (2019), Chess Edition (2019), The Twine (2019), and the Bitsy Demake (2019). In Five-in-One the punishments are presented all at once on the same screen, allowing the player to experience five times the torment for the price of one!

History

Five-in-One is part of my ongoing idea of essentially spending 2019 making variations on the base Ancient Greek Punishment set of minigames as a way to remain “productive” while in transition to a life with a new baby. In fact, I’ve ended up making a few other games this year as well, but the punishment series has been my chief focus.

In this case, I wanted to explore the extremely simple concept of making all the games playable simultaneously. I’ve been interested in this sort of “multi-input” experience for a while, but hadn’t had a vehicle to explore it with previously - the punishment games make a nice foil. As such, it’s a pretty uninteresting technical project - it just slaps all five scenes into one and uses transparency to make every sprite visible at the same time. The actual experience of playing, though, is quite interesting I think, there’s a since of the collected punishments forming a kind of “machine” that you’re driving forward with your input. The movements of the characters seem like pistons performing endless work. As such, I feel like this particular game fits well with my instinct that it’s important to actually make these sorts of conceptual games rather than just to hypothesise them and assume you know what the meaning or outcome would be. I think the experience of this game is more than just the core concept of “all at once”, there’s a gestalt effect I’m glad I didn’t miss.

Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Five-in-One is also another reference point in the ultra-detailed process documentation approach called MDMA. In this case, because the game is so simple, there’s less documentation that I usually produce. Nonetheless, you can read a little about the game’s development by reading its process documentation or by going through its commit history.

Technology

Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Five-in-One was created using Phaser 3, my favourite 2D games library for JavaScript.

License

Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Five-in-One is an open source game licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. You can obtain the source code from its code repository on GitHub.

Features

Trailer

Honestly it’s probably faster to just play actual game.

Images

Everything
It’s everything.

Credits

Contact