You’re The Boss Lives!

Back in 2005, while I was working on Second Life in Nottingham, before Linden Lab Brighton existed, I ran a workshop as part of the Screenplay “Boss Frenzy!” day at the Radiator Festival which allowed children to collaboratively create a computer game by drawing or making bosses with collage.

Dozens of people came to the Broadway in Nottingham and got busy with pens, pencils, paper, scissors, glue and magazines to design bosses for our “You’re The Boss!” shmup. We had an amazing time and created a charming and delightful game which I talked about on the original Second Life blog.

I immediately thought of it when we started planning the Brighton Maker Faire a couple of months ago and was delighted when the project was accepted. Unfortunately 6 years of bit rot had taken it’s toll and disaster loomed after discovering that I’d hosted the Game Maker files on the web space provided by an old ISP account and didn’t have them on my patchy backups. Luckily the ever amazing Torley had a copy of the executable and with the help of a decompiler I was able to recover the Game Maker files I needed to run the project again.

So, if you’re near Brighton on the 3rd of September and like the idea of collaboratively making an arcade game with scissors, glue and pens then please come along. If you have a Windows machine then check out the game we made in Nottingham in 2005. I think it’s still charming and delightful 6 years on. You can download it here.

This time round I’d like to make the game completely out of Creative Commons licensed works, so please suggest CC licensed books, comics and pictures that might make good source material in the comments, or bring them along on the day.