Kaverini

Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit

April 1st is a holy day on which forces of springtime bring auspicious inspiration spirits to creative people. So today is as good as any to announce a new game!

Back in 2014 when I was in grad school, I had the reputation for being a polyglot. Whenever I played Bananagrams it was always "English words only, no Icelandic or Finnish, please".

Frustrated by this narrow design 2023 me would like to announce a NEW word game that evens the playing field for hyperpolyglots, linguists and nerds, oh my!

Proudly presenting "Xłp̓χʷłtłpłłskʷc̓", a word tile game where players can use ANY word in ANY language! The English 26-letter alphabet can only go so far, so a c tile can represent a c, a ć, a č and many more! ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES!

And if the Latin alphabet is too limiting, the game will also be released with Arabic alphabet and Cyrillic alphabet expansion packs to add to the fun!But even if expansion packs aren't your thing...transliterations of words in languages like Mandarin or Hebrew are ALSO valid! The game begins with 500 tiles in the pot. Whoever makes a crossword with at least 100 tiles first wins! Opponents are free to challenge the validity of any words but all dictionaries in all languages are valid! So better get on that new year's resolution of finally inventing that constructed language!

Available wherever there is mischief.

Happy National Day DR Congo!

Here's a sneak peak about what's coming later this year...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miqBPdRcBT4

Happy Kaverini Day! Here are the twenty pre-set playable characters you can choose from in Kaverini: Uvira. As these are 64x64 pixels, all playable character sprites from Kaverini: Nuuk Adventures and Kaverini: Uvira are mutually compatible! 

With a new trailer as well!

https://kaverini.itch.io/kaverini-nuuk-adventures

Hurray, hurray, the first of May! And that's not all...

Another store page for my game is opened!

I drew, designed, programmed and wrote this whole game. Every character, every dialogue line, and every level. 

The game takes place in a colorful imagining of Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, and is inspired by my own trip there in October 2017. In it you play as a tourist, which can be one of twenty pre-made characters or you can go into the game files and draw in your own if you're feeling creative. 

https://kaverini.wordpress.com/buy-kaverini-nuuk-adventures/

Here it is. At long last. 

The 1st edition of Kaverini: Nuuk Adventures. My very first video game is finally OUT! What a happy day!

The Steam edition will be made available soon. 

Hello again wonderful people!

Presenting this new collectible card game that is very budget friendly, very user friendly and very balanced!

“AfTzuLakhes: the Takeover”!

One complaint many people have about CCG’s is that they are big money investments and tend to have complicated rules as well. Never fear, AfTzuLakhes is here! AfTzuLakhes is an ancient Yiddish adverb that refers to doing something precisely because people don’t want you to do it.

No Yiddish or Hebrew knowledge required to play this game, however…because all of the cards are generated by YOU! The players!

All you need to do is use the blank template provided (see image no. 2) and make a deck of however many cards you like.

What are the rules? Well, the rules are exactly whatever you want them to be! That said, the general spirit behind AfTzuLakhes was to create a “Last Player Standing” gaming environment, in which everyone else leaves the game as a result of time constraints, sheer frustration or anything else you can think of (plus a lot more!)

– No turns!

– No phases!

– Your deck is EXACTLY what you want it to be! You want to be a lord of dragons? Great! You want to make a deck based on getting other players to give you the nuclear codes or credit card information? Wonderful!

– Make your own win condition! That’s not my department!

– Make cards with the official card back (see Image no. 1) or otherwise have fun making as many card backs as you’d like!

There is a community-generated banned list that is honored in some circles, however. Cards that don’t receive enough downvotes in the first year of their being posted may be eligible for the banned list. Yes. You need sufficient downvotes to be considered ineligible for being banned. You read that correctly.

Find more about AfTzuLakhes: the Takeover from your local game store* on April 29th! Get ready to CAUSE CHAOS!

Happy April 1st everyone!

The widely anticipated game HAPPY SEALS, absolutely not a parody of any well-known 2010's browser games as far as I can tell. 

In it, you can play as a number of cute roly-poly animals or machines in user-generated courses. Because NOTHING brings out the best in people better than having them make their own stuff and post it online under anonymous identities for the whole world to see! (Consider this my gift to the world to help fight against all that negativity out there, yeech!) 

The game will be free but for a small fee of 5 USD, you can get the premium version: Happy Seals Diamond Platinum Definitive Edition  3.5 Remastered Remake!

So how does the game work? Simple. Your goal in any level is to reach the end, but the physics work differently in comparison to, let's say, your ordinary Mario Game. When your character gets injured or hurt in any way, be it with obstacles or falls or whatever, well...we decided to take a more realistic approach to physics and injuries than most games. In order to ensure that the game is friendly for the younger folks, however, the usage of the censorship screen will be liberally applied in such cases, as in, blotting out the whole screen. Don't worry, you can always restart the level.

Happy Seals launches April 29th*!

* Offer available only in certain in-game universes.

In honor of Frederik Elsner's birthday today (one of the lead singers of Nanook, the solo mastermind behind "F" [another musical act] and a Badminton player to boot), I'll let you have this one screenshot from Nuuk Adventures (gameplay footage not final).

On June 10th, 2013, I put pen to paper in a small village near Heidelberg and started sketching an "unnamed secret project" that I would name "Kaverini" in August 2013, inspired by my Finnish studies (November 2013 I travelled there for the first time). 

So every year on this day I celebrate the seed of creation. 

Eight years later, I now have a completely playable version of my first video game in the series. "Kaverini: Nuuk Adventures", set in Greenland, isn't ready for the public quite yet, but to celebrate how far I've come, I'll devote today to playing as much as I can of it to celebrate the fact that the seed has bloomed into a flower at last. (I'm also going to be recording it and sending the playthrough to my Greenlandic friends).

Always remember to err on the side of doing things rather than not doing them. May today and every day be one of creative redemption for us all!