NAL Is Alive

Over 13 years, and over 130 games. All made by one hobbyist-turned-full-time developer. And now, for the first time, available in one cohesive package in the form of NAL Is Alive!

NAL Is Alive is a compendium containing everything by NAL, released under the NALGames pseudonym between 2003 and today, wrapped up in a launcher that also universally tracks your statistics and highscores for each game*, the latter being compared against the world in Steam-exclusive online leaderboards*.

Containing the good - Maddening Relapse 2! Hi Me Ro Me! Innoquous 4! Ne Touchez Pas! Prisnhax! Frankenfirearm! Lab Wagon!

And the bad - Aardvark Cwm! Gemocide! Clickfire!

...and almost everything inbetween! Ever wanted to work it on a pogo stick? SohoPogoHo hears you! Fancy going around peeing on people? Signal Failure! You can assume the role of a redhead killing your opposers of the world in Infidels, or become a little robot fixing the big robot it resides in with Titan Tighten.

Need a rhythm game fix while also improving your touch typing proficiency? Bullet Hills sees you typing to the music! Need a music game that has instead has no rhythm? Melodika gets you to suck a stream of icons into a recepticle to any track of your choosing! Need to inject yourself to help forget the nightmarous legion of female stalkers planning on kissing you to death? Yeah, that's in here too with Overly Attracted Stalkers. So's the one where you're a dog in a ball unloading clips of everything from water pistols to rocket shotguns at mutant bags of blood - Lyssandra and the Amplegores. And the one where you get to play an interactive advert for a fictional Japanese dish cleaner while a man touts its superior viscosity to you, Japanese Infomercial.

All of these and more, being taken through an ongoing process to bring them up to spec* - dropping the MIDI music from the really old stuff in favour of more listenable MP3s, knocking every game's resolution and FPS up to 1080p/60 (potentially again up to 4K in the future), improving their gameplay and their graphics, adding the aforementioned Steam leaderboards... you name it.

It's presented in a somewhat light-hearted way, and many of the games are pretty silly, but this pack truly does represent a huge chunk of my life - everything I made independently from being an 11 year old kid that had to download Game Maker 5.0 onto a school computer and bring it home on 3.5" floppy discs thanks to the speed of my home internet, to a currently 25 year old making games and other stuff full-time.

*Please note: not all games will support the update features during NAL Is Alive's Early Access development. As of writing, approx 80 games contain Steam Leaderboards, and approx 40 are completely upscaled to 1080p/60.

Information

System: Windows
Price: £7.19
Music: Various (see in-launcher)
Fonts: Various (see in-launcher)

Play

Reviews

“A really electic selection of games crossing over almost every single gaming genre imaginable with fun platformers, weird FPS experiments, music and rythm bonanzas and psychodelic puzzles all combining to create an amazing collection full of surprises.” - jamesbuc
”Very interesting archive. I love collections like this and I wish more independent developers would publish their own variations.” - Bez
”Peek into the creative soul of NAL.” - Feared Alien Voodoo
”Over 130 games but most of them are garbage... Better play Neo Geo” - goribVirus

Screenshots

Soundproof Cell

Live a life in the day of Em - their job, their interactions with their colleagues, a work party in the evening and the pain they feel.

Information

System: Windows
Price: Free
Music: Joel Steudler
Fonts: Allison James

Play

Reviews

“This game feels like it's in a different league compared to most games in the jam.” - The M
“Great art, great presentation, just overall great.” - johnwo
”This is so deep and takes the "hero" theme to another level.” - McWolke
“This one gave me goosebumps.” - Lemth

Screenshots

Won't You Be My Laser?

It's a beautiful day in this laserhood.
A beautiful day for a laser.
Won't you be my laser?

In Won't You Be My Laser, storm your way through 25 varied levels! Radical!

Race to the finish, avoiding sentient dystopian gun turrets that are, quite literally, loose cannons! Way past cool!

Push conveniently-sized crates filled with hovering skateboards, new formulas of your favourite colas and synthetic mullet wigs into the line of sight of those turrets to sneak past undetected! Killer!

Grab the pick-up sticks in each level, because entertainment doesn't get much better than that! Tubular!

And win as speedily as your fluorescent running shoes can take you to beat each star rating and win up to 5 stars in each level, because there's no such thing as 3 star ratings in the 80s - mobile phones, as you all well know, are only for telephoning your home landline and making your pants fall down when you forget your belt! So bad!

It's all there for you in Won't You Be My Laser, the fun, inexpensive little diversion set in the distant year 2000.

So pick up Won't You Be My Laser for just 99 of your American cents today!

Or buy it off of this weird internet thing that everyone's talking about. I'm not sure what it is, DOS doesn't think "cd internet" is a valid function.

Information

System: Windows
Price: £0.99
Music: Pond5
Fonts: Broadway, Allison James (Digital Display)

Play

Reviews

“At $0.99 the game is a definite buy.” - Sam Radley
”Simplistic and very cheap, and gives a good hour or two of achievement-hunting gameplay.” - King Bee
”Level 18 was my vice for the longest time! Arg!” - Poyzo
”No.” - kijb

Screenshots

Four Versus The World

Turns out war changes.

In Four Versus The World, each adventure is unique. Travel from city to city with "The Four", the sole survivors of one of many possible catastrophes that took place shortly before the game's events.

Hunt for food, energy, health packs, skill points and car parts to keep yourselves, and your beloved vehicle, on the road.

Search scenery and dungeons and do your best not to die in the face of continuous, sometimes arbitrary dilemmas - each character only has one life; once they're dead, they're dead forever.

Make it to the final destination, the glorious British city of... well, it's different every time, just like everything else.

It's all tongue in cheek and profoundly British. Made in 72 hours for the July 2016 GMC Jam.

Information

System: Windows
Price: Free
Music: Doctor Vox, Nameless Warning
Fonts: Impact

Play

Reviews

“Awesome. Polished. Lots of content. Perfect.” - Tselmek
“Fun game! Liked the graphics style.” - Coder Joe
”I love the concept of this game and it was super fascinating.” - Misu

Screenshots

FKR10

Every year since the dawn of time, assuming the dawn of time occurred in October 2007, Fantastic Kinetic Reflexes has reared its head and jumped into the world. Each instalment brings negligible improvements and sometimes even stupid graphical "enhancements".

And just because NAL Is Dead doesn't mean it's not happening again.

FKR10 sees you progress through time and each yearly instalment of the FKR virus, raiding computers as antivirus programs attempt to take you down.

The mouse moves the FKR virus. Attached to it, and continuously orbiting it, are a number of trojan horses - swing these into the defending antivirus programs to defeat them.

But don't be datablasted too much, or you'll be erased from the computer quicker than your browsing history when you think someone might gain access to it.

Features music by Inaki/Futch & Slore, used under a CC-BY 3.0 license courtesy of Argofox Creative Commons.

Information

System: Windows
Price: Free
Music: Inaki/Futch & Slore
Fonts: Various

Play

Reviews

“Review” - Reviewer

Screenshots

NAL Is Dead

12 years. 130 games. 90 WIPs. 220 fonts. 50 pages of info. Four e-magazines and even a goddamn LP. All made by one person. All in one pack.

NAL Is Dead is a retrospective pack containing everything by me released under the NAL/NALGames pseudonym between 2003 and the July 2015 formation of Chequered Ink Ltd, of which I am one of two founders.

Containing the good - Maddening Relapse! Hi Me Ro Me! Innoquous 4! Ne Touchez Pas! Prisnhax! Frankenfirearm!

And the bad - Aardvark Cwm! Gemocide! ExecutioNAL! Clickfire!

And everything inbetween! Ever wanted to be a prostitute on a pogo stick? SohoPogoHo hears you! Fancy going around peeing on people? Signal Failure! You can assume the role of a ginger killing the anti-gingers of the world in Infidels, or become a little robot fixing the big robot it resides in with Titan Tighten.

Need a rhythm game fix? Bullet Hills! Need a music game that has no rhythm? Melodika! Need to inject yourself to help forget the nightmarous legion of female stalkers planning on kissing you to death? Yeah, that's in here too. So's the one where you're a dog in a ball unloading clips of everything from water pistols to rocket shotguns at mutant bags of blood. And the one where you get to play an interactive advert for a fictional Japanese dish cleaner while a man touts its superior viscosity to you.

NAL Is Dead also contains every single completed/published font I ever made - that's over 220 fonts that have been downloaded across various sites over 10,000,000 times total, and used by and in various worldwide brands including WWE, NBA and Purina, and by notable musicians such as Flo Rida, KARA and Excision.

You can use them commercially if you're that way inclined, or just install them all and pretend you're the lord of fonts.

There are nearly 20 terrible, terrible music tracks I've made along the way too, along with four issues of my short-lived GameMaker-centric Rekame Mag e-magazine. And some of the games also contain WIP versions for your curiosity - if you've ever wanted to see the pre-final builds of games like madnessMADNESSmadness, Innoquous 4, or Infidels, they're all here for the first time ever.

And to cap it all, there's a chronologically-ordered PDF densely packed with information on each of the 130-ish games included in the pack, along with back-story, and information on the other stuff I made or did, including my five-year stint at YoYo Games, that time I got broadband, and that time I did over 200 fonts.

It's presented in a light hearted way, but this pack truly does represent a huge chunk of my life - everything I made independently from being an 11 year old kid that had to download GM onto a school computer and bring it home on 3.5" floppy discs thanks to the speed of my home internet, to a 24 year old jumping into the world of full-time indie.

Thank-you if you have been any part of it across those 12 years, and thank-you if you support this pack by throwing a little money at Chequered Ink - do note that every game included has been free before, you're paying for the retrospective, and the hundreds of hours it took me to compile this git, get old games working, and even remove blatant copyright infringement from a few of them! If you like fonts, this is an economic way of getting those all for commercial use as well.

Information

System: Windows
Price: Free
Music: Various
Fonts: Various

Play