Creeping Angels

This blog serves as the homepage for the Doctor-Who-themed puzzle game Creeping Angels, which I devised in 2007. It features simplified versions of the Weeping Angels from the new Who, and is an elaboration on the games Theseus and the Minotaur and Mummy Maze. I programmed it in PlayBasic, an excellent language created specifically for 2D video game development.

It is a turn-based bird's-eye-view game set on a chequered board, where your objective is to reach an escape tile. There will also be one or more Angels on the board, who for every move you make, can make two of their own. In order to win, you must take advantage of the layout of the board and manipulate the Angels via their deterministic movement algorithm.

Here's a picture of some example levels, drawn from the 25 that make up the prototype version of the game:

And here are the download links:

Creeping Angels at GameJolt (recommended)

Creeping Angels from Mediafire (alternative)

I'm aware that it would be preferable to have an online version and/or an app (I say this as an intermittent visitor to sites such as Kongregate and Miniclip) and truth be told, I'm patiently waiting for PlayBasic to give me this option, so I don't have to learn any new languages and redo something I've already done!

I will conclude by saying that at the time of (first) publishing this post, Creeping Angels has been available in several places for a full year, and that the scraps of feedback I've had have generally been positive. My hope is that it will become better known - catching up with Theseus and Mummy Maze - and that at least one enthusiast will design some new levels for it, like people do with Sokoban and LaserTank, for example.

The level editor (2014) can be downloaded at GameJolt, or alternatively, from Mediafire. Creative people may also be interested in speculating about enhancements to the game, about which I've made a separate post in the present blog.

PS, I've heard that the Weeping Angels may have been inspired by a British TV series from 1972 called Escape into Night, itself based on the 1958 novel Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr.

PPS, I've found a couple of games on iTunes that seem to belong to the same group as Creeping Angels, although I'm yet to play them. They're called Seek Out and Escape Out 2 and they were created by Zhang Zhi Bin.

The Pulmis Alphabet (old vowels)

Click here for the version with updated vowels 

In 2008/9, I invented an alphabet for English (or rather for my own dialect of British English) which I called Pulmis. Here's an updated version of the schematic that can be found on the Omniglot website.

Pulmis is a simple alphabet (hence the name, a rearrangement of the word simple) and it is also supposed to be quasi-phonetic in the shape of the letters. The following image illustrates this featural character, as well as presenting the lowercase letters.

And here's the uppercase sample from omniglot (reproducing part of Nelson's prayer before the Battle of Trafalgar) and below it, a lowercase-inclusive version of the same text.

I have produced an accents-free version of Pulmis, whose additional letters (Y,W,H) which I'm not really satisfied with, are thus:

Finally, here are the numerals, which I'd neglected before. They're derived from the existing ones, so in a sense they're plugging the gap until a proper a priori set is created...

Eleven years after releasing Pulmis, I want to mention some possible variations. (1) Support for rhoticism by inserting the letter R where it occurs and where it is silent in non-rhotic dialects. (2) Interpretation of unaccented vowels (in multisyllabic words) as schwas, with non-schwa simple vowels denoted by a new dot accent. This is essentially how SoundSpel handles the schwa. (3a) Have two "short U" vowels, as per dictionary-English, instead of one. (3b) Have two "long O/U" vowels instead of one, probably achieved by reinterpreting the current "long back A" as the "long mid O", and making the unused "long front A" into the "long back A".

 

Update. A streamlined vowel system that only needs one accent (for length), implementing the aforementioned idea 3 – and compatible with idea 2.