It has been almost 24 hours since I have uploaded my first two games, MORE DAMN KITTIES and NOUN NOUN SHOWDOWN, and I am thrilled that I had anyone look at the projects and even download them as well to try for themselves! I view any reach of more than a few people in a short amount of time a "win" in my book, especially for two games that were made over the span of a few days.

NOUN NOUN SHOWDOWN was the first game I created, and I was more focused on the concept that I was unsure that it would work. In fact, I feel that the game is one of those few casual and light games that it would be a perfect gift for any book lover. My wife, who at this moment is working on several books that she would like to have published, was part of the main inspiration for the game. Another inspiration was my mother who spent many years teaching high school English.

However, the larger part of the inspiration for the game came from a book by Jonathan Safran Foer called TREE OF CODES.

From the book blurb on Amazon's website:

Tree of Codes is a haunting new story by best-selling American writer, Jonathan Safran Foer. With a different die-cut on every page, Tree of Codes explores previously unchartered literary territory. Initially deemed impossible to make, the book is a first — as much a sculptural object as it is a work of masterful storytelling. Tree of Codes is the story of an enormous last day of life — as one character's life is chased to extinction, Foer multi-layers the story with immense, anxious, at times disorientating imagery, crossing both a sense of time and place, making the story of one person’s last day everyone’s story. Inspired to exhume a new story from an existing text, Jonathan Safran Foer has taken his "favorite" book, The Street of Crocodiles by Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz, and used it as a canvas, cutting into and out of the pages, to arrive at an original new story told in Jonathan Safran Foer's own acclaimed voice.

I have not had the pleasure of reading this book (it currently sells for WAY OVER $200 for a physical copy, but the concept stuck with me -- these pages would form with each having a different layout of cuts, creating an amazing and artistic way of reading. It was when I found another video on YouTube discussing the book in a list of "ergodic literature" that I felt a need to try to make a game where you would have to align the card to find words of text that would essentially be your downfall.

I spent part of last week researching words -- verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs -- and their frequency in English literature. Verbs were the highest number of words that appear in the English language. Nouns were much less, and I felt that it would be more comfortable for me to try to make a game using nouns instead of any other forms of words.

Initially, the nouns were not as vague and were actually separated into common nouns (words like bucket, skull, hammer) and not any other form as I thought it would be much easier to find those type of nouns in any given text. However, during a few playthroughs, I realized quickly that common nouns don't appear as often, and I would need to just make the enemy all nouns of any form. Additionally, the starting health point for players was much higher (50 HP) and the empty boxes that did not have a noun appear during play were healing players at 10 HP a box. The game was dragging on and was more frustrating the more pages I went through of some of the books I tested it with (Philip K. Dick's DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP and Marvel's Midnight Suns prequel story by S.D. Perry called MIDNIGHT SUNS: INFERNAL RISING). This was how I changed the values to 30 HP for the player starting and half that amount divided by three (so 5 HP healing per box) whenever a box did not have a noun appear. That slight adjustment allowed for a number of playthroughs and allowed for me to feel comfortable uploading to Itch.io to share with the world.

I hope that this longform blog will grant you some insight into how NOUN NOUN SHOWDOWN came to be. I also hope that those of you that have downloaded it are having fun attempting to remain alive against the evil that is the noun.

Please feel free to comment on the game on its game page, and also check out MORE DAMN KITTIES, also created by me.

Until next time!