#alpha games

Wild Games 🌹

Savage Games 🌹

Rogue Games 🌹

Bloc Party – Silent Alarm

A couple of weeks ago, I started getting into a bunch of 00s music, but I started with the 00s post-punk revival, where I talked about some albums from The Bravery, The Killers, We Are Scientists, and a few other bands, but one of my favorite albums from that era (that I only discovered a handful of years ago, unfortunately, but it’s awesome) is Bloc Party’s debut album, Silent Alarm. Released in 2005, this record turns 20 this year, and it’s an important album for both indie-rock and the post-punk revival. It was one of the biggest albums of that scene, but it’s also one of my favorites. There’s so much to love within this record, and it holds up so well today. I picked up a copy of it a couple of weeks back, so I wanted to go down memory lane and talk about this record a bit. I’m a bit late to the, well, Bloc Party, but I got into them a few years ago when their last album came out. I picked up a copy of 2022’s Alpha Games, because I wanted to get into them, since Hayley Williams from Paramore talked about being influenced by Silent Alarm when Paramore’s latest LP, This Is Why, came out. She talked a lot about how they were influenced by that record, and it makes sense, since they went into a post-punk sound with that record. Alpha Games isn’t half bad, but I got bored of it when I finally heard Silent Alarm. I had already heard their 2007 album, A Weekend In The City, but I guess I never reviewed it or talked about it publicly. The album was okay, from what I remember, but I really wanted to hear Silent Alarm.

I did hear it a few years back, but I put it on the backburner, so I could focus on other things at that time. Now that I’m getting back into the post-punk revival, I made sure to pick up a copy, so I could spend some time with it. If you had to make a Mount Rushmore of post-punk revival albums, Silent Alarm would be on that list. I’d say it’s right up there with Hot Fuss, frankly; Hot Fuss is the king of post-punk revival albums, but Silent Alarm is number two. I absolutely adore this record, but I do have one small issue with it, and it’s a problem that I’ve had with a lot of albums that I’ve been talking about recently – it’s too damn long. This album is almost an hour long, and for what? The album does justify it, because the album is super weird, unique, catchy, fun, energetic, and vibrant, along with being unpredictable and off the wall, but it does wear on me by the end. It also doesn’t help when my two favorite songs are in the first half, so by the second half, I’m just checking my watch a few times, but still having a great time. This thing has a lot going for it, and the first thing we need to talk about is its sound. These guys were unique in that space, because instead of just being a post-punk revival band down to a tee, or being a generic garage-rock band, they took elements of electronic, house music, new wave, and stuff like that, versus the standard post-punk and garage-rock sounds of the time. They have some cool experimentation on this record, and maybe that’s why it’s a bit longer, so they can flesh out that experimentation, but it’s really unique and fun.

This won 3rd place in the Jame Gam jam and I'm so proud of the work we did over 4 days!

I learned a lot about UI design and CSS, most proudly the skill of creating an image map. Mouse over the images, if you're on PC, to see descriptive text and click for (slightly buggy) links.

We worked great as a team, with creative contributions coming from each of us to collaboratively create our concept. The jam themes were "unintentional side effects" and "butter chicken" so we brainstormed up the idea of memories lurking everywhere, even in unexpected places like a takeout menu.

Our artist's art inspired our writing and helped give me ideas for gameplay based on the art they were making - for example, the main room of the apartment was an early concept sketch. I realized we could base the game navigation around images like this to give us a lot of clickable elements with limited art resources. This meant our artist could focus their limited time on [spoiler].

Our writer helped bring [spoiler] to life while also fleshing out the sad little world with extra flourishes, which were easy to implement due to the ease of twine!

For code, I used a lot of <include>, <replace> and <div>s to display game elements and .random() to create variety. (Sugarcube)

This is the jam release version. I will be eventually updating the game with more interactive elements and an extra demon eventually.