Humans and nonhumans alike who follow me on twitter know that Smash the Patriarchy! has been done for a few days now and I have just been playing through it and beta testing and doing all the things that you should probably do when you put a game together over a few weeks.

But now it has been officially released so GO PLAY IT!

As you will notice, that link doesn’t take you to a game proper. Instead, it takes you to www.heylookatmygames.com, which is the new place that I have created from the nothing so I can host weird game stuff that I make. It is cool. You should love it, read it, and add it to your RSS. You will notice that you can play Or, What Is It Like To Be A Thing? there as well. I encourage you to do so if you haven’t–I am still really proud of it.

I don’t like artist statements about games. I think you should figure it out on your own. What I will say about the game, if you need a hook, is:

Smash the Patriarchy! is about a robot who frees feminist ghosts from their patriarchal robot captors.

Other than that, I can only say that you should play it.

The game is Super Mario Brothers-esque in that it does require a lot of platform jumping. A death takes you back to the beginning of the level. A single, perfect playthrough with no deaths takes +/- 20 minutes. A normal playthrough, with an average of 20 deaths or so, takes about 45 minutes. The game is significantly easier in this iteration than in previous ones, so beta testers should go ahead and give it a playthrough again.

In any case, I have enjoyed making Smash the Patriarchy!. It took roughly 40 hours over the past couple weeks, which really only turns out to a couple hours here and there and three or four five-hour sessions. I made the game in Construct 2, which I can’t recommend enough. I have quite a bit of experience tooling around with Gamemaker and the like, and I can honestly say that Construct has been a breeze of an experience compared to that–it is both simple to use/learn and very efficient-feeling (I don’t know if it is actually efficient.)

I made all of the visual and audio pieces of the game. You can blame me for their bad quality. I am not good at making art, but I try really hard, and I think that’s where it counts. The music for the game was made in musagi. The sound effects were made with Bfxr and Audacity. The sprites/backgrounds/everything visual was made in Photoshop. I wanted to use VoiceBand to make the music for the game, but I couldn’t get it to do what I needed it to. That said, you can make some really strange, haunting stuff with it.

And that is all I have to say. In a few weeks, I will probably write about the game and talk about why the game is like it is. Some people like to know those things.

In any case, get to it: Smash the Patriarchy!