The recent demise of Adobe Flash got me reminiscing about the golden age of Flash games that many of us grew up with. Some of my favourites were Ragdoll Avalanche, Line Racer, The Impossible Quiz, Powder Game and to lesser extent Planet Simulator – there was also Tanks and many others. It seemed the game we would waste our computer time on would change each week. One of them stuck with me for a little bit longer and was a site that not only let you play games but create them as well.
Sploder is still around today – the website was one in which you could create and play your own games using a toolbox of game mechanics, obstacles, and enemies to build your own experiences. It was super simple. Back when it started you played a small spaceship like character that could fire different projectiles, but there were also new game modes featuring robots that were introduced over time.
I don’t know what drew me to Sploder so much, but I have a feeling that it was mainly the metagame that hooked me in – the exposure of your creations and seeing the play counter tally up more and more, knowing that a few hundred other people have played something you made and put thought into. My username back then was Xlr856. I originally tried to have Xlr8 since I was in a Ben 10 phase the time and one of his original aliens was called that, but it was taken so I added the 56. I must have just looked down and saw those numbers first on the top of the keyboard.
Here’s the creator page for xlr856.
It was thrilling to be honest – Sploder’s creator leader board had a histogram chart of how popular creators were, and I remember being super surprised and pleased with the chunk that Xlr856 was taking up.
Over time however, I grew up and ended up getting a bit bored of Sploder – I remember a few instances were I ended up trolling the site by filling a game name with profanities, which were instantly censored to *Splode* *Sploder* (I remember it having the corresponding case to the swear words, which in hindsight is great detail, but that might be my memory playing up).
A short while after I had given it up, there was a report on BBC News that I was very envious of which featured a game maker from Sploder and went into detail about the website. I remember telling my mum that I used to make games like that too but had given it up. Who knows, maybe I would have been the next Hideo Kojima?
Every couple of years since then, I’ve gone back to check on my Sploder account, and lo and behold, it remains there. So, before something happens to Sploder akin to the downfall of Vine or Flash, I’m going to do some directors commentary on my entire Sploder gameography. Prepare yourself for some fascinating inside into the mind of a creative genius.
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Here’s an update, Flash has been removed from most computers now meaning that I can’t actually play any of my old games. This is actually kind of sad. I can still view the thumbnails for the games but if I try and play them they simply won’t be playable or compatible with the version of Flash I have. Looking at the search results for Flash on Sploder, I found a few games wishing the website goodbye, which has hit a nostalgic twinge in my heart.
Nonetheless, I can probably have a go at remembering some of my games I made.
04.03.08 – ha! ha!ha!
Okay, from the looks of it, this one seems like a very early test from me. I am almost certain that I just slapped a few difficult enemies around the player and published this one. I don’t think Sploder had a feature which meant you could only publish it after beating it yourself? Not sure, but either way, this beginning doesn’t bode well for my creative excellence.
1 vote for 5 stars and 8 views. Humble beginnings I suppose.
04.03.08 – Dangerous run
Some might consider this to the spiritual successor of ha! ha!ha! except this time it’s definitely a lot more linear. I believe one of the win conditions for a Sploder game is the collection of yellow gems or the defeat of all enemies. This one was a tricky collection objective with one of them at the end of the gauntlet.
0 votes and 8 views
04.04.08 – orange and apple
This is where things start to get a bit conceptual. The thinking behind orange and apple was not necessarily fun but one of aesthetics. In the game maker there were two types of canisters – green for acid which spilled out when destroyed and caused damage over time, and orange for nitro which exploded when breached. The goal of this one was to reach the end of the stage without igniting the nitro blocks, and with careful manoeuvring and weapon control. Of course, named after its use of colour and therefore adding a lovely flavour to the level.
Saw quite a bit of success with this one – 2 votes with 5 stars and 26 views!
04.04.08 – teleporter madness
The thumbnail for teleporter madness shows the player character in the middle of a blank space, so I’m presuming that this is a level purely with teleporters and an associated search for the right one. I would most likely have made some sort of homage to the teleportation puzzles in the early Pokémon games.
1 rating at 5 stars and 10 views!
04.04.08 – the chains.
‘the chains.’ was the beginning of the chains franchise, which meant business. The full stop at the end really showed it was serious. This was essentially a gauntlet that you had to rush to the end of super quick, with the risk of taking too long and the chain reaction set off at the beginning killing you. I remember near the end this being one of the games which I started to throw everything at, and placed a few ‘key’ enemies which you had to kill in order to progress past a door. These took the form of some creepy crawly bug like designs which creeped me out, so I never actually defeated them myself.
Critical reception was the best yet, with 50 views and 3 ratings at 5 stars!
04.04.08 – War of the worlds
I have never seen an adaptation of HG Wells’ book and didn’t read the book either. I just found the title captivating. I set up this large scale battle with a destructible wall in the middle. I also provided the player with a few allies, although my memory may be betraying me and it might have been a case of the player just being slap bang in the middle of the battle.
The people seemed to have liked it however, with 3 five star ratings and 15 views!
04.04.08 – layers of dread
I was really churning them out that day wasn’t I?
Layers of dread was a similar gauntlet to the chains., albeit a bit more stacked and difficult. I think there must have been some challenge to myself to make the stupidest and most difficult levels – so I was in the middle of a sadistic streak about this time.
04.04.08 – push it to the limit
From what I can recall, push it to the limit relied heavily on a sadistic use of these arrows, which when the player ship met, pushed them to the direction they were pointing in.
The objective was to get one crystal which was just on the other side of the arrows – again my difficulty design was dangling the carrot in front of them. I think it was possible to get it on first try but you needed a bit of a run up to counter-act the force of the arrow pushing you away.
04.04.08 – I’m sorry your dead!or are you
As a reader of my blog, you can probably tell that I’m a masterful painter with the English language. You can see some of that early craftsmanship with the use of the possessive ‘your’ in the title of this game.
The thumbnail of this game shows a locked box surrounded with enemies and explosives. I was experimenting with false sense of panic and difficulty here, so the challenge was to keep playing as I believe I put either enough protection to have the player, stuck at the centre, survive and win in the end or there was a teleporter hidden in one of the closest blocks, so they could easily escape.
This was by far my most critically acclaimed game to date with 8 votes averaging out at 4 stars and 20 views!.
04.07.08 – sploder challenge
Sploder challenge was a bit of a lazy one. From the thumbnail I can just about recognise an assortment of enemies in the shape of a really bad ‘P’ which reminded me that this was my attempt at following the joue de jour trend of creating challenges which spell out unique words. So, I dedicated this one to sploder itself!
04.07.08 – leaking labyrinth
The concept of this game was simple. It was just a plain labyrinth, looking kind of similar to a reverse Viridian Forest from Pokemon, but each block was chock full of acid tanks which when shot would slowly leak for a few seconds and cause damage to anyone in the spilled acid. It definitely delivered on its title.
04.07.08 – claustrophobia!
I decided to take a foray into psychological horror with my next title: claustrophobia! It’s a really shitty game where I just locked off one of the objectives from the player and trapped them in a really snug box. I think that Sploder had a trick where you could squeeze off the map slightly and get past tight spaces, but I also have strong memories of you not needing to validate victory of the game before publishing it, so this was more or less a bad troll attempt.
04.07.08 – the chains 2.
The sequel nobody asked for! This iteration was fixing the most glaring issue with the first version of ‘the chains’ in that you could skip the most difficult bits by just walking around it. This time there were walls preventing people from doing that, which made the difficulty rating much higher. Again, those big bug enemies that I put it prevented me from completing it myself.
04.07.08 – claustrophobia 2
I hadn’t quite given up on the claustrophobia idea, evidently. This sequel seemed to be a lot more visual appealing than the first, focusing on the claustrophobia of being surrounded by many people. Little did I know that I would eventually be living the same experience one day: surrounding myself with enemies in a cramped space on the Central Line.
04.08.08 – Hidden Labyrinth
I’m going to go ahead and say I was inspired by Theseus and the Minotaur here but that would be an outright lie. However, Hidden Labyrinth was experimenting with these blocks which you would have to destroyed to get past them, so the solution to this one was blasting your way through until you got your path. Honestly, not a very fun game to play if I recall.
04.08.08 – Claustrophobia 3
The long awaited (1 day) end to the Claustrophobia trilogy! I would consider this one to be one of my most aesthetically pleasing games- as it uses many bright pink magnets which pull or repel the player in different directions, all neatly layered within a hexagon.
Again, the player is dead in the centre, putting them right into the action whilst also unable to do anything at all.
04.09.08 – Minesweeper
I liked the idea of adapting pre-existing games into Sploder’s game creation engine, so I decided to give Minesweeper a go. I don’t think I knew how to play Minesweeper at the time, but we had it on the family computer in the early 2000s alongside this killer screensaver.
Anyways, I knew you had to uncover objects whilst dealing with the risk of one of the spaces blowing up in your face, so I used those destructible blocks from Hidden Labyrinth and placed an explosive pattern underneath most of them and hid an objective gem in another.
The game was a huge success! 356 views and an average rating of 4 stars on the voting system.
04.10.08 – Frozen glass of coke
You can consider this to be the prequel to another one of my most successful games, but for some reason I just decided to make a cup shaped game using those destructible stone blocks in the shape of a frozen glass of Coca-Cola. Who the hell freezes Coca-Cola?
04.10.08 – liquid nitro-gen
For some reason I had an amateur knowledge of explosives thanks to show’s like Braniac, where they often blew up caravans. (I think each week was a different explosive, so that helped my demolitions knowledge quite a bit).
One time they used nitro-glycerin, and the interesting thing about this explosive was that it was an unstable liquid that was very sensitive to external stimuli. Therefore, the pun in using the ‘nitro’ canisters as liquid nitrogen made a lot of sense. Do not drink liquid nitrogen though.
04.10.08 – tank of tanks
I was really going through a phase of ‘it is what it says on the tin’ type games at this point. There were some enemies called ‘tanks’ so I just made a box full of tanks. That’s it!
27 views and one 5 star vote. Jackpot.
04.11.08 – prison break.
Why was my use of punctuation so inconsistent in these titles? Maybe it was for dramatic tension. Now for the record, I have never ever watched an episode of Prison Break. Maybe it was from people in school talking about it, maybe it was from seeing lots of adverts for it on TV, but I suppose I was inspired by it. From what I recall this game relied on you using a clever glitch to escape from rooms by tucking your player character into a tight corner and ending up on the other side. I really hoped that people were wise enough on Sploder to be able to do this but apparently not, as I only got 4 views and no votes.
04.11.08 – the illusion !
The first of a critically acclaimed trilogy. ‘the illusion !’ was a simple piece, with a cube of nitro explosives in the shape of a cube. I think I was going through a cube phase at the time as I realised the best way to start drawing one was to do two squares intersecting at a corner and then match up the lines. I recall there being many doodles in my books of these in school.
The aim of the game was to get the objective gem without dying, so you had to set off the explosives and survive.
With 71 views and 5 star votes, this was a hit in my eyes!
04.11.08 – The illusion 2
I had to start work on the sequel to ‘the illusion !’ post haste, and thus The illusion 2 came out. This was more of a work of art than a game, as it was the cool S symbol illustrated in green acid tanks. There wasn’t a challenge at all for this one but it definitely had a style factor despite the critical lack of substance it had.
23 views and an average 4 and a half star rating. Not too bad.
04.11.08 – the labyrinth that screwed you
Now I can’t tell if this was meant to be a play on words with ‘the spy who loved me’ or not but either way it’s down right bizarre. The point was that there were some enemies called screws that fired mortars at you and I made a maze similar to viridian forest out of them, so you had to keep moving to get to the end. It seemed to be quite challenging as it ended up with an average 1 and a half star rating with 24 views. So I must have made my audience feel something at least.
04.11.08 – Hold down x to DETONATE!!!!!!!
This was a simple game, for simple people. I essentially locked the player character in a box of explosives arranged in neat pattern and encouraged players to blow themselves up. Fun, right?
3 star rating and 21 views.
04.11.08 – the illusion 3
With a clear disregard for consistency in my title formatting, I pooped out the illusion 3. Returning to the series’ roots with this one I attempted to make a shape out of explosives again – this time a cuboid. Except this was a really shitty cuboid.
Average of 0 stars and 6 views.
04.11.08 – race the nitro
I must have wanted to see what it was like to try and do a racing game in Sploder, so I created a map where when you spawn enemies would accidentally set off a line of explosives next to you to set off a chain reaction which you had to beat to the end. I think I stopped bothering to try and add more racing mechanics to it, such as a penalty for not winning the race, but the thought was there, and that’s what counts.
5 star average rating with 16 views
04.11.08 – The dark dimension
I believe my first foray into the world of cosmic horror was this game, where I was playing around with the floor colours you could have for maps on sploder. The dark dimension saw you navigating a dark maze of sorts with teleporters, and you had to find your way to the objective without much visual aid.
5 star average rating (1 vote) and 7 views
04.13.08 – Buried crystal’s
This one must have come from a discovery that I could hide objective crystals underneath enemies, hence the title. So that’s exactly what I did! I’m retroactively making the title a reference to Billy Crystal.
0 votes, 1 view. Piss poor.
04.14.08 – Don’t move!Oh you can’t!
It’s clear that my use of punctuation and capitalisation was improving, however my use of basic spaces wasn’t. This game was part of the sadistic side of my gaming portfolio, made to intentionally troll the player by cramming them into the centre of a square of enemies, so they couldn’t possibly move nor survive.
3 and a half star average rating with 19 views.
04.14.08 – Deadly Current
You know, I think this might have been my first properly formatted title for a game! Deadly current uses the arrows which push your player around with force, so the main puzzle for this one was to carefully navigate your way to the objective crystal without ending up stuck.
0 stars and 10 views.
04.14.08 – Escape the super Magnet!!!!!!!
This game primarily focused on movement and sheer will of the player. It’s main provocation was that you had to get away from this huge chunk of magnets in the centre of the map which would pull you in and damage you. The solution was simple in that you had to just go on the far outside of the range of the magnet and you could get the objective.
One vote at 5 stars and 14 views.
04.14.08 – INCOMING!!!!!!!
INCOMING!!!!!!! was a an aesthetically pleasing game which focused on surrounding the player with enemies that had time delayed impact weapons. So, with the player at the centre and within their range they would all fire and create a semi-decent pattern in the air before your impending doom.
Average 4 star rating with 19 views.
04.14.08 – Destroy the mega-MAGNET
The sequel to Escape the super Magnet!!!!!!!, this game sees you taking the fight back to the eponymous magnets, which have grown since the previous entry in the franchise. In an almost David vs Goliath, Luke vs the Death Star-esque battle you’re given everything you need to take the fight back and destroy the magnet.
2 votes and 24 views.
04.15.08 – Mr nitro
In this game we get to see the appearance of potentially my most famous character – Mr nitro. Mr nitro was a simple man, with a simple stick figure form made of nitro explosive boxes. From the thumbnail I can only gleam the magnificent radiance of his arm and leg. I think most people who saw his full body went mad.
4 and a half stars average rating with 23 views.
04.17.08 – Claustrophobia 4
There’s always one more isn’t there? Claustrophobia 4 found the possibility of tapping into the success of the original trilogy too good to pass up – however my effort into development of the game was quite lazy, as it depending on the user knowing and using the same trick of hopping through corners that was used in prison break.Claustrophobia 4 got too caught up in it’s own simplicity, and this was ultimately it’s downfall.
0 votes with 5 views.
04.18.08 – Ignition!
From what I could tell with Ignition!, it seems to have had a rather intricate design relying on chain reactions, similar to race the nitro. However there are some blocks of stone above where the player spawns so my theory is that the player had too survive the initial explosion and make their way to the ‘bunker’ before it came back around to finish them off. Although I’m doubtful this would actually work.
04.20.08 – Tribute to Lepsun
I remember looking at the general slate of community games that were going round and saw some people on the site creating tributes for each other – often taking the first letter of someone’s username and filling it with items. I decided to do the same for my friend who got me into Sploder – Jay, who went by the name of Lepsun on the site. I hope he saw it, I do vaguely remember telling him about it.
Funny side story about Jay, is that we both had lunch together a lot of the time. It was strange because he was in the year below and you normally stick to your year group. I went through a phase where I both had Haribo Starmix and a Fruit Winder in my lunchbox, so we had this habit of wrapping up the humanoid sweets in the Fruit Winder to ‘mummify’ it and sacrifice it. Good times.
Not like it matters for a tribute, but I only got 2 stars average with 13 views.
04.20.08 – It’s rude to point!!!!!!!!!!!!
The main provocation from this game’s title came from the arrow mechanic which pushed you in a certain direction. I don’t know why I thought it was clever, but I somehow decided to make a whole game about it. Again, it’s the similar schtick of gems, arrows…not much else.
0 votes and 4 views, deservedly.
04.20.08 – heaven!!!!!!!!!!!!
A real fucking mess of a game, if I recall correctly. Its main gimmick had a white background and lots of enemies scattered around. I think I was getting tired at this point.
0 stars and 1 view.
04.20.08 – Beam out
All I can recall from seeing this thumbnail is a box full of purple…teleporters? It links well with it’s title too so I suppose it’s got something to do with sending the player to a different corner of the map and letting them try to figure out how to win.
4 star votes and 22 views
05.20.08 – Robot Warz
After taking a long hiatus from Sploder, I returned when I heard they had a new type of game you could make. Previously you could only use elements in the toolkit based around the spaceship games, but now they had introduced a game type around controlling robots! I always liked the idea of being caught in huge, chaotic battles of equal forces that go on for a while with one final victor, so I figured that I would build a symmetrical robot battle. I’m just looking at the thumbnail and I’m quite impressed with the troop arrangements I organised, so I’m surprised with the low ratings and views.
0 stars and 12 views.
05.21.08 – The TERMINATOR
Another entry in my licensed film/tv adaptations series. The TERMINATOR was an adaptation of the police station scene from that film, which immediately came to mind when thinking of killer robots. I had first seen that film when I was too young to have seen it but I really did love it. I tried to make it as faithful to the narrow hallways and singular enemies the T-800 gunned down in the first film, and think I did a pretty good job…
The audience however clearly had no understanding of its greatness, with 0 votes and 5 views I’m still disappointed with its performance to this day.
05.21.08 – BIG mid small
BIG mid small dealt with player choice – you had three enemies to defeat in the order you preferred. One BIG robot, one medium sized and one small. The choice was enabled by the range in which they started to fight you and them being placed in three separate corridors, so you had to pick and choose who you fought first.
0 votes and 1 view. Clearly ahead of its time.
05.21.08 – 400th view celebration !
To celebrate my 400th view on my Sploder account, I drew out the number ‘400!’ in crystals and published the game.
0 stars and 2 views, so slightly better than the previous game.
05.22.08 – Ally control
I’m quite pleased with this one from what I can remember. With the new robot minigame I discovered you could have allies to help you complete the objective and fight alongside you, so I had used this concept in Robot Warz in it’s big battle of attrition. For ally control, I took this a step further with locking the player robot in a box and needing them to goad the ally into walking into the objective crystals which they would pick up.
Sadly nobody appreciated this and it ended up with 0 votes and 4 views.
05.22.08 – Agent smith fight
I will probably end up doing a piece on it in the future, but I really loved the action sequences in the first two Matrix films when I was younger. One of the most iconic set pieces from the series was the burly brawl in The Matrix Reloaded, where all the Agent Smith clones fought Neo. Paying another homage to a film sequence I liked I just slapped loads of enemies around with just one player character to go up against them.
A 5 star rating and 19 views! Kaching!
05.22.08 – One shot!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
One shot!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! was my attempt at a gauntlet style movement based game. The arrows that I had used so prominently earlier were employed again here, with them pushing in one direction. The trick to beat it was to enter the path at the right angle and hold down the movement keys so that you could just get within reach of the objective crystals, laid in very specific path down the gauntlet.
A 4 star vote and 17 views!
05.23.08 – Sploder force
As far as I can tell this wasn’t inspired by Power Rangers, but it was meant to emulate the feeling of fighting along side an elite squad of allies against multiple enemies. To help manage the opposition a bit better you would slowly drag them out one by one to take them out effectively.
3 star vote and 2 views.
05.23.08 – Stupid guards
Stupid guards was a simple little entertaining game which played itself. It consisted of enemy robots locked inside a box of nitro cells so that when they saw the player character they started firing blindly, setting off the explosives and killing both themselves and their allies.
Easy win. One 5 star vote and 19 views.
05.23.08 – nitro wave
Not much I can remember from this game, but it seemed to lack some purpose as I can imagine it being a purely aesthetic game. The arrangement of nitro cells in the thumbnail indicate that it was just meant to be a pleasant looking chain reaction of explosives.
2 stars and 4 views.
05.31.08 – LifeSucker!
LifeSucker! Was another simple game, for simple people. Again, the player was trapped in the middle of a full box of items which sapped your health away steadily, making it near impossible to reach all 4 objective crystals and complete it.
One 5 star vote and 17 views!
08.15.08 – splode sploder
I think this was the game and day when I decided I clearly didn’t give a shit anymore. The ‘splode’ in the title was a replaced censored version of the word ‘fuck’, so this game’s true title is ‘fuck sploder’.
I can also tell this because I can clearly see the word ‘fuck’ spelled out with blocks in the thumbnail to the game, so at this point I was at full on troll mode.
12.17.08 – Capture the flag
It’s quite interesting, as with the dates on these games it’s clear that I had started secondary school by this point and clearly had something change in me. I think that maybe Capture the flag was inspired by all the talk of game modes on Halo which I hadn’t ever had a chance to play myself – but I decided to recreate it in Sploder. Can’t remember the particulars of this too much but remembering coming up with some watered-down idea to have as the flag.
One 5 star vote and 13 views.
03.20.09 – Pit of Enemys
This is it! The last ever game I made on Sploder. Pit of Enemys was an experiment in the new side-scrolling game type they had introduced to the site, and it was true to my style of creating something stupidly difficult – it depended on there being a big pit of AI enemies that you had to come out on top in.
Final Thoughts
So that’s all of them. I’m quite impressed with how much I remember of the specific games from just seeing the visual reference in the thumbnail. It’s quite funny, because I never realised how much fun I was having making something and having it be seen by other, likeminded people until now. I suppose we all do this in a way now with social media, but there was something quite charming with a website like Sploder. It also reminds me of a time in the 2000s when people thought you could do absolutely anything with the rise of the internet, and that’s still true I suppose, but having a kid feel that and enabling them to do so was quite magical. I really hope that the site doesn’t disappear completely.
minutiae+musings 