Developer Highlight: Connor Kimbrough

By: fuzz

On: January 26th, 2010

Connor Kimbrough, more commonly known as Beef or Professor Dead, is a quirky and little known game developer. A member of The Poppenkast, his games often consist of innovative or strange gameplay ideas coupled with silhouette-based, stylistic graphics. He describes himself as “a cute man with ten fingers, ten toes. lives in tulsa, oklahoma. he once had to have 5 shots for rabies.” I’d like to highlight a few of his games here so that a few more people will be able to enjoy them.

All of Connor’s games use a Z+X+ENTER control scheme unless otherwise specified within the game.

Botulism, named after a disease causing paralysis through the infection of a wound, is a platformer that is frustrating not so much in being technically difficult, but in its refusal to allow for human error. They player acts as a man with a machine gun, jumping on a series of platforms to reach the end of each level. On the way he encounters many running figures, who can easily be shot, but do not fight back. The background music is a dissonant drone, reinforcing the image of a cold, calculating killer. The gameplay is essential to the theme; the hero is a robot, an unemotional being of rationality who kills because he must. Therefore, the main character’s deaths must be the result of the player not being robotic enough, not carefully examining the data before them and moving based on prior experience. Through seven levels and a number of hidden counterparts to these levels, the man with the machine gun jumps through a world of silhouettes and toxicity, culminating in an enemy too strong to defeat and thus a fearful thing to run from. You become the runners that you have shot, and the post-game stats screen displays only one attribute of the playthrough: the number of deaths that you have caused.

More games after the jump:

In Hot Ninja Moon Moon, you play as a ninja slaughtering the enemies of the Motherland and preventing a peasant revolt. What makes this game stand out is its method of portraying player deaths; upon reset, all dead bodies from the player’s losses remain. The graphics are decent, although nowhere near as good as in some of Beef’s other games. The design works, but there are far too many spikes and not enough of anything else. The sound design is minimalist and atmospheric, making the frustrating portions bearable. Overall, a somewhat average platformer, with a graphical display of death similar to that in Jesse Venbrux’s Deaths. Connor is currently working on an update to this game, entitled “Hot Ninja Moon Black”, which looks like it will be a great improvement on the original.

Blazing Sadholes was made for The Poppenkast’s 2 hour “Western” competition. Unabashedly inspired by The Mighty Jill Off, Sadholes features Beef’s distinctive silhouette pixel art and a great deal of difficult, spike-laden platforming. The succinct story is communicated primarily through gameplay, although there is a short cutscene at the beginning showing the cowboy falling into a pit, horse and all. Having lost his hat, his horse, and his way, he does his best to retrieve his possessions and find his way out. The discovery of these items along the way carries the story effectively in a way that doesn’t require words; Beef tends to tell wordless stories quite well in his games and this is no exception. The game never finishes; there is a point where you can progress no further, but this is really a non-ending. The cowboy becomes stuck indefinitely in the pit and the final jump is too high for him. Likely a case of laziness, this design decision is fairly unimportant to the game. Sadholes suffers from unevenly spaced platforms, resulting in the player being forced to wait for the cowboy, who often jumps too high, to return to the ground. A well done little distraction, but there’s not much more to this one.

TimmyTimmyTimmy is a short form experimental platformer. In other words, it’s a game where you walk from one side of the screen to the other without anything notable happening. Still, it’s interesting to try to comprehend whatever obscure meaning it’s intended to have, and the art style is fairly unique. Three sentences are all that’s required to describe the entire experience:

“MONDAY” reads the game, with yellow text on a black screen. A formless white silhouette, controlled by the player, chases a black silhouette over a cliff made up of a patchwork of textures. “TUESDAY” says Timmy, and the game is over.

Saqrifize utilizes a unique gameplay mechanic, involving switching between two parallel planes that have a direct influence over each other. The two planes are viewed by either jumping or standing. Some obstacles will only appear in one plane rather than the other, so this creates some interesting challenges, although unfortunately the concept is explored very little. The graphics are again in Beef’s characteristic silhouette style. The story is vague, something about Hannibal Lecter and souls being stolen, but the real point of the game is its fascinating plane-switching mechanic.

Doom Mantra is a platform shooter entered into The Poppenkast’s No Words competition. Strange and compelling, the game utilizes its graphics as the sole means of communication with the player. A three colour scheme for the graphics ensures the clarity and precision of the art, so that a vague story is fairly easily understood even as you are bombarded with enemies.

Sad Torino Girly Harry is a collaboration between Beef and a fellow Poppenkast member, Cow. A cosmonaut’s adventure in an alien land, STGH does a great job of emulating the strangeness of an unknown planet via objects that act in ways that they aren’t expected to. Fire rotates your position on the screen rather than hurting you, eggs are teleporters, and leaving the first screen changes the cosmonaut into a pink man with a watering can. These inversions of traditional game values, as well as several others within the game, add to the general oddity of the experience. Extremely short, but a novel adventure into the mind of a lunatic.

Fuck Punishment is a tribute to Messhof‘s Punishment. Basically it’s just a two player version of Punishment, although with more of a focus on horizontal than vertical platforming. Fun for a couple of minutes, but it stops being interesting quickly as it can’t match Punishment and doesn’t introduce many original ideas of its own.

European Hand Love With Boy and its sequel were entered into increpare’s informal Love Letter contest a while back. The essential storyline is that the character’s hand has AIDS and must be saved so that he can masturbate once more. Elegant, minimalist graphics mixed with scrawled penises make for an interesting mix, and the music is really catchy and aurally interesting. The main issue with the game is that the player is forced to restart upon death, making for a limited desire to continue play until the ending.