Game Credits
All these games were created by Scott Hot unless otherwise noted. But there were tons of resources and inspirations that I found to be helpful while making these online offerings.
As they say, it takes a village to raise an idiot and so here are some contributing factors that aided me in my miscreant efforts.
Hacker 89
- VT323 Font: Hacker 89 uses this great terminal style font by Peter Hull and Jacques Le Bailly.
- CSS Typing Animation: If I remember correctly, this is the CodePen I used to "figure out" the typing effect. If you're looking for something that spans many paragraphs and is responsive then you'll have to use javascript to get that done. Otherwise for a short line of text, pure CSS will do the job.
- Text Based Games: I wanted this game to be, in part, a text based adventure. I think the first time I encountered this concept was in a book by Steve Jackson. It was the kind of book where you would flip to specific pages depending on the action you choose at the bottom of a page. Very fun! More recentlyish I've heard about people using Twine to create these kinds of interactive stories online so check that out if you're interested.
- Hollywood Movies: this was very much inspired by portrayals of hackers in various movies and numerous tv shows.
- Early Web Design: I love the slick clumsiness of early web design and did my best to emulate it for the interactive segments of this game.
- Puzzles and Mysteries: this is just a general kind of influence that permeates interactive parts of the game. Having something to solve is deeply appealing to our DNA.
Evil Clown Generator
- html2canvas: this handy little plug-in was indispensable. It basically copies the contents of a div to a canvas. I then pushed the duplicate canvas off screen and leveraged "canvas.toDataURL" to create a downloadable image. The image creation is completely done client side for this game. Pretty cool.
- Mad Magazine: the inspiration for this was in part planted in my head from a Mad magazine I saw as a child. It had faces on every page but if you made two horizontal cuts on the pages, you could then make different faces by flipping one of the three new sections. The random joy of it really struck me and has powered a lot of my creative thinking for this game.
- Poltergeist, the Joker, and Stephen King: my fixation with clowns probably starts with that bedroom scene in Poltergeist where the clown doll attacks the kid. It was further cemented by the visual appeal of the Joker as rendered by many talented artists and the sheer terror of Pennywise as envisioned by Stephen King and portrayed by Tim Curry.
QUACK & MEOW
- Meow Meow Meow: this one was inspired by that meow mix song, that keyboard playing cat and... Daffy, Donald, and Howard.
- Howler.js: a very handy javascript plugin for handling audio events. Pretty useful for relatively simple stuff like this online musical toy.
- JavaScript Drumkit: this tutorial series was critical in bringing multi-touch to this musical app. I was on the verge of throwing in the towel when this made everything clear.
B-Movie Cinema
- Prophecy (1979): a podcast was talking about a 1979 horror movie called Prophecy and it sounded like the right kind of bad to me so I went to YouTube and found it there. This made me curious about how many other B-Movies might be on YouTube for free which, of course, eventually lead to the creation of this B-Movie Cinema thing.
- Unsplash Royalty Free Photo: a great little site that I used to find the background image for the B-Movie Cinema page.