Normal sized announcement: I have a discord server.

It's a place where you can discuss Shambles Software's long history of occasionally making strange things. Click here if you want to join. Click here if you do not want to join (nothing happens).

A sliding puzzle game, where you do sliding puzzles. Kind of open world, but really just sliding. I made this from November 2024 to March 2025.

I made the soundtrack too, and I think it turned out okay despite having no music training or experience.

Eclipse: Wooden Dawn

At some point I decided to make a custom version of the board game Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy, constructed out of wood and natural materials, and rethemed to be nautical. This took a long time.

The hexagons are all individually designed and veneered wood, with inset sections for the lozenges, which are glass. All the tokens, upgrades, and so on are veneered wood too. The ships are 3d printed resin miniatures (thanks to this fellow). The kraken in the middle of the sea is a glass ornament hand-made by a Ukranian glass blower. The player sheets are canvas. There's a lot to it: in total around 1300 individual pieces, though many of them were 'small cube'.

If you want to play it, you have to come to my house and bring a large table. I'll provide snacks.

Better Terrain

A Godot engine plugin that fixes the broken autotiling system in Godot 4. It was based on ideas in my very popular proposal, Rework the Tilemap terrain system to improve its usability.

Whilst there was a lot of push-back regarding actually fixing the built-in system, the value of open source software is that you can always fix it yourself.

My Funny Valet Time

A one to six player local co-op driving (parking) game. This was developed as part of a week-long game jam with Sneezy McGlassface and Senny. It turned out surprisingly good.

Local co-op games are so fun to develop and play, it's such a shame that there is a low interest for them due to the high barrier to entry (having friends).

Mobile Crime Lab

This is a procedurally generated multiplayer crime solving puzzle game which I made as a collaboration with SoBad. One player is a detective, and the other players are Forensic Analysts who feed clues to the detective. Work together to solve the crime. Essentially, it's two games, one of which is nine games.

As a month-long jam, this turned out pretty good, but I really think it could have been so much more with better proc-gen behind it. Another one on the 'To Return To' pile.

Discovery Jigsaw

Another discovery puzzle game that you can play in your browser. It's a jigsaw assembly puzzle, but not all assemblies are correct.

I probably could have taken this idea further, so maybe one day I'll remake this into an enormous jigsaw puzzle game. Probably not, though.

Null Hypothesis

A discovery puzzle game that you can play in your browser. Built whilst learning Godot game engine. There's a few other similar games on my itch page if you want to have a poke around there.

Overall, I really enjoyed learning Godot engine and will probably use it for most game projects going forward. Update: I did.

Puzzle Tracks

This is a physical puzzle where you fit eleven train track tiles on top of a 5x5 design. There are sixty puzzles in the puzzle booklet that comes with it.

I refined the prototype more after what is shown in the video, but never really managed to get it out into the world in any way.

Wolftown

A classic Werewolf (aka Mafia) game built out of a Discord server and an agitated bot running on gasoline fumes and pitchfork juice. Highly entertaining if you have nothing better to do. Games used to run at 2200 UTC, but they stopped a long while ago.

I am frequently tempted to remake this in a more deployable manner, as nowadays people only play the very mediocre werewolf variant, "Boring On The Clocktower", which never really hit the spot for me.

Hypersurface

This is a 4.5 dimensional game called Hypersurface. It is set in the three dimensional surface of a four dimensional hypercube (or tesseract). The game features a bizarre rendering engine that can view the same object from multiple angles at once due to the folding in 4D space.

Meet me in real life and I will show you the tech demo. I don't work on this any more because it's extremely complex and annoying.

Ikebana

A flower arranging puzzle game where you move flowers around and observe their locations.

I made this game to test if my laptop works (it did). It's kind of similar to a logic puzzle, but it's not exactly a logic puzzle. It probably should have just been a logic puzzle.

Cornered

This is a 25 piece jigsaw which I designed. It's tricky, and you need to use your noggin to complete it. You can sometimes get it from my etsy store. There's also some laser cutting designs there, if you want that sort of thing.

Pavel Curtis also sells it on his store, and he said he'd give me roaylties for the sales, but never did. Hey Pavel, that wasn't cool! But if you want to actually buy it, he probably has it in stock. Crying face emoji.

A bizarre reality-bending puzzle platformer where the concept of space and position are examined. I worked on this February-September 2016. It was written in C++ with SFML and Lua. Music is by Dustin van Wyk with the voice talents of Richard Taylor.

Too Many Chefs

This is a two vs. two social deduction card microgame. Check out the print-n-play cards, the rules and you can even purchase a printed copy.

I made this as an experiment in minimising a hidden role game down to the very fewest elements I could think of. The cards were designed and tested with the aid of a computer simulation.

A twisty puzzle game where you have to restore a group of marbles in to their original state. Much like a 2D version of the popular Rubiks style puzzles. Written in C++ with Qt.

I wrote this during lunch breaks at my office job. It was mostly just for my amusement, but due to a couple of people asking it ended up on Steam, where it now resides. I'm not sure if it even works these days, and it probably isn't worth playing. I keep thinking I should remove it, but why bother?

Stellar Extractor

A retro puzzle action game. Adventure through space, fight robots, aliens and dangerous machinery, extract the loot and get out alive. This game is only for the most daring of space-adventurers.

This was something I threw together in my spare time in 2011, after I had a vivid dream about it. It was written in C++ with SDL. Music is by AnEnemy productions. It's horribly complicated, difficult, and unforgiving, which is everything one should look for in a space adventure.