DISCLAIMER: Opinions shared in this article are strictly those of the author alone. The creator of these games, Ben James, does not have any personal affiliation with the article, or with the author.
This article is going to be completely different from anything else on the blog. Instead of talking about a single game, or product, I’m going to talk about an entire creator. Ben James is an itch.io creator whom I give a lot of respect to. I don’t know the guy on a personal level, I’m simply just a massive fan of his work, and I feel his work has inspired a lot of what I’m doing with this blog right now. This article is going to take a look at how I found Ben James, his work as a whole, and a few notable games from him.
In 2018, I had a project in school where we had to make a product that represented our passion. At the time, I thought I could simply learn how to make a video game, and create a small video game. That ended up not happening due to a variety of factors, but I’ll save the full story for another day. I will mention that I did find the coding process to be boring, and I didn’t want to do it after I began learning about it. That’s a reason why I have a lot more respect towards indie developers now than I did back then. I used a game engine known as Defold for this project. I would recommend this engine for first-time developers, especially for people who want to make more retro-styled games, and it had some great starting games built-in for users to mess with, and alter their code. The website used to have games made by users on it, but I believe this feature is gone. This feature is how I found Ben James. A few of his games were on there, including Word Worm, the first game I played made by him. After that, I found his itch.io profile and began playing a lot of his games. Even today, I still go back to some of his games.
It’s very hard to describe all of his games in one, specific way. His games all have similarities, but they also all have differences. The two things that are similar with almost every Ben James game are the art style and audio composition. Most of his games use 8-bit graphics, but he has his own style to them. The quality of the sprites is something unique to his games. I don’t know exactly what it is, but the sprites seem to have textures to them. What I mean by that is that the visuals don’t feel entirely flat, they have detail, texture, and some cases, maybe even depth as well. The audio in almost every game also sounds similar. I can even note a few instances of sounds being used in multiple games. I wouldn’t call that lazy, I think it shows a similarity between his works, and besides, I would reuse a sound if it worked perfectly in another project. There's where the similarities end however because Ben James makes a lot of different types of games. Although some of them can be labeled into certain genres such as a platformer, a shoot-em-up, or a puzzle game, they are all mostly unique, and different from one another. There are games from him that I’m not into, because I’m not into that genre, but there are some games that I love to play when I’m bored on Google Chrome. I feel it's normal for people to not enjoy all of his games, and that’s okay, everyone’s different, so everyone will have their preferences. Every game is different, so don’t judge Ben James based on one game.
Now let’s mentions a few of my favorite games from Ben James. The first game I want to mention is called Bomb Frog. Bomb Frog is a game about finding treasure. You play as a frog and have to destroy the floor to find treasure. There are also ghosts to avoid. You have 5 hearts, and if a ghost hits you, you lose one heart. Losing all of your hearts means death. Killing ghosts with your bombs can result in them dropping a heart, but be mindful that black ghosts introduced halfway through the game can’t be killed. There are 8 levels in the game, making it short. I enjoy Bomb Frog for its challenge and simple gameplay. It’s a game I can easily pick up, and enjoy. The game also has a concept that I can’t name any other game having, there are not many games like Bomb Frog. The next game I want to mention is Nanowar. Ben James has made a lot of shoot-em-ups, but Nanowar is a bit special. Unlike most shoot-em-ups, you control your ship around a circle. And have to destroy simple walls and enemies, that resemble nano-machinery. There are only a few enemy types, but this is fine. Eventually, you will reach a boss to fight as well. There are shoot-em-ups that use a lanes system to move the ship around. Tempest is one of them, but unlike Tempest, you’re not moving around to certain lanes divided among each other, you are moving freely in this circle. I’m normally not very good at shoot-em-ups., and I’m not good at this one, but I find this one notable because it’s very unique. The game is called Nanowar, so it should feel you are fighting nano-sized enemies, and it does. I enjoy this game its style and its creative idea. The last game I want to mention is the first game I ever played from Ben James, Word Worm. Word Worm is a puzzle game that uses Words. You guide a worm through a path to get to the bottom. You make your path spelling words to get the worm further down. If you take too long, and the worm goes too far up to the point where the worm off screens, then it's game over. If you spell a word that is longer than three letters, the platform moves down a bit, and it moves down per extra letter used in the word. Now, I got to mention that I have a fondness for word-based video games. There’s a game on Nintendo Switch called Letter Quest Remastered, which I am considering covering in the future. However, I would consider Word Worm to be the game that developed this fondness. I feel that using letters, and words helps make it still accessible to many people, while still keeping the gameplay in-depth. You could simply spell words to get to the end, or if you feel like being a word master, you can make long words to get a better score. You can make your own challenge, and I enjoy it when a game does that. There's one more small detail I should add as well. Word Worm is also available on the Google Play Store if you wanted to play it on an Android device and I would recommend doing that. The touch screen controls work great, and in my opinion, the browser version on itch.io isn’t the best, because the screen doesn’t fit into full view, and there’s no full-screen mode on Word Worm.
Ben James is a great example of what indie developers can do on the itch.io platform. When I think of the possibilities of future great developers, I think of Ben James. I truly think Ben James has a future in the gaming industry if he wanted to. I recommend anyone, even if they are active on itch.io, just getting into it, or never used it to check out the amazing works of Ben James.
LINKS
Profile::https://benjames171.itch.io/
Bomb Frog: https://benjames171.itch.io/bomb-frog
Nanowar: https://benjames171.itch.io/nanowar
Word Worm on PC: https://benjames171.itch.io/word-worm
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