Dan Zen is a peaceful person so tends towards social games and tools. He has made some action games but usually with a twist - let's twist!Gobstop ▲ is a mobile and desktop game where you lick (click) the gobstoppers before they leave the screen. Each time you lick you get a ring and the gobstopper changes direction. Lick 10 times to score the points and dissolve the gobstopper. Lick too quickly and the ring goes away. Avoid the black balls and try and clear two balls at the same time to get bounce walls. The background acts as a timer and there are fun sounds. A very addictive and fun game.PLAY GOBSTOP
MotoGami ▲ Motion Gaming. ChooFu has your karate character jump and duck under puffs of smoke to keep your guy clean as the train travels through China. KiteKilt has a Scottish fellow flying his kilt. In ConGon you try and catch a growing number of cons but for each one you catch, the spotlight gets smaller and it is harder to click on their balls. Infizoom lets you zoom forever. VISIT MOTOGAMI
A Million Clouds ▲ fly your JetPack around in the sky and have a seat on the clouds - strangely therapeutic - but is there a darker message. Fly around for a while to find out. Made with a custom jet physics engine. FLY JETPACK
▲ NANO 2030 - was the first major multiuser action game (Gorgolon was the first multiuser game) but unfortunately, it crashed the servers with the PHP backend when 40 people were playing. Zen reprogrammed the server in NodeJS but has not rebuilt Nano 2030. It was a great game where you would build a bot and then go into a swirling soup representing bodily fluids. You try to stay in the light to gain energy and you release exhaust pellets - you try and move over other bots' pellets to also gain energy. Nano 2030 featured a system where you would point to where you wanted to go and the bot would curve towards but also past that position. This reduced the amount of data sent to the servers and then out to all players. Zen expects to make more multiuser games with the launch of ZIM Socket - a JavaScript system extending SocketIO.▲ DotBot - a simple multiuser game to test the second iteration of the Robin multiuser server. You are a filter bot and you go into the fluid and try and catch either good particles or bad particles before others get in the way and take them. PLAY DOTBOT▲ Nanora - a motion puzzle game to move the Meta Monks past the Nano Bots without them noticing. A first interactive media game done in JavaScript to honor the 48 Hour Sci-fi Challenge in which I entered Nanora. PLAY NANORAWATCH NANORA
▲ SplatKing (learning exercise) a simple game to hit the good targets with your paint gun (aim with mouse, shoot with spacebar) and avoid the bad targets. Way more fun when you play with friends in the same room - like at school! Uses polling as opposed to multiuser techniques. A new game every two minutes. PLAY SPLAT KING▲ Atomic Escape (learning exercise) a bit of a Simon-like game where you need to figure out the pattern to escape - or have very good reflexes. Sort of fun if you like this sort of thing. ESCAPE!
▲ Collective Control. In 2003, Dan Zen created an early collective control game where any number of people would move a square over four circles. People would guide the square with their arrows and the arrows would be polled to determining the direction. The more you went in the same direction as the crowd the more points you got. This video of the Masked Map shows a more advanced game in collective control. Finally this type of technology is coming to play in theatres - called TimePlay - although they have not realized the potential.
Action Games
