All Of Our Friends Are Dead

Posted by Paul Eres Sat, 09 May 2009 14:50:00 GMT

All Of Our Friends Are Dead is an atmospheric run and gun platformer. It’s pretty short (I finished it in under two hours), and what’s going on isn’t very clear, but it does a good job at immersing the player into a strange alien world and has nice and stylized visuals. To me it felt like a cross between Glum Buster and the final alien levels of Contra and Super C.

Though it’s not just a “zen platformer” as moi in the forums described a particular type of game, which I took to mean games like Knytt and Seiklus: there’s too many shooting enemies, precise platform jumps, bosses, and deaths from spikes for the player to zone out while playing it. But it shares their emphasis on carefully building up a strong sense of the game’s world and atmosphere with little interesting touches.

My only minor complaint is that the movement is a bit too slippery, causing me to fall into spikes unless I’m precise about it. But thankfully the emulator-style quicksave/quickload feature means that’s not a big problem. That and I wish the game were longer, as is often the case with games I like.

EDIT: Here’s a mirror for those who are annoyed by RapidShare. Also this is the willhostforfood download. Don’t download the first download in that forum thread, it’s v0.9, instead get v1.1 at one of the above links.

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Comments

  1. Fuzz said 26 minutes later:

    Hey, thanks for posting this! The final closing bracket doesn’t have an opening bracket to match it, though.

  2. Fuzz said 27 minutes later:

    And it’s called “All of Our Friends Are Dead”.

  3. Paul Eres said 37 minutes later:

    Thanks, edited.

    I’m not sure how the capitalization should go. Usually, in capitalization of titles, you don’t capitalize words like ‘of’ and ‘are’, but the author of the game does capitalize them in the thread. Also, the game’s forum thread is called All Our Friends Are Dead, not All of Our Friends are Dead. I’ll ask him about the title to be sure.

  4. Fuzz said about 1 hour later:

    I think he changed the title halfway through making it. As I posted in the forum thread, it’s “All Of Our Friends Are Dead” according to the readme, with all words capitalized.

  5. fuxter said about 1 hour later:

    oh, come on!!! rapidshare!?

  6. Fuzz said about 1 hour later:

    There’s a willhostforfood link, if you look far enough into the topic. Maybe Paul could edit this into the article?

    http://willhostforfood.com/?Action=download&fileid=62424

  7. Paul Eres said about 1 hour later:

    Not all indie developers can afford sites of their own, I guess.

    I’ll mirror the file though, one sec.

  8. Nikica said about 1 hour later:

    If you want fuxter I’ll upload it somewhere just tell me where.

  9. Paul Eres said about 1 hour later:

    Okay, I made a mirror.

    http://studioeres.com/mirrors/AOOFAD.zip

    If the developer of the game is not okay with me mirroring it let me know and I’ll take it down.

    EDIT: updated to v1.1.

  10. leave url said about 2 hours later:

    boring key collecting game

  11. Fuzz said about 2 hours later:

    Maybe you could mirror 1.1 instead, seeing as that one is more complete. Tried to link to it before, but the comments weren’t letting me use links.

    willhostforfood(DOT)com/?Action=download&fileid=62424

  12. Paul Eres said about 2 hours later:

    There’s a v1.1? I didn’t see it, I just downloaded the one that was mentioned in the first post in that thread. I’ll try to find it.

  13. Paul Eres said about 2 hours later:

    Updated to v1.1.

    http://studioeres.com/mirrors/AOOFAD.zip

  14. ADude said about 3 hours later:

    Like the game, the style is pretty cool. I really wish it saved when you quit, though.. I didn’t read the Read Me (yeah, I know, but still) and exiting only to find out you have to use quicksaving kinda sucked.

  15. van said about 4 hours later:

    Went through the game in roughly a half hour (downloaded at 11:03, writing this at 11:45). I really enjoyed it. The music and graphics kept me on edge. I might go through it a few times to grab some of those images between the levels. They’re only up for a split second, but it makes quite an impact.

    It could have used more puzzle elements, though.

    I’d recommend it for a quick game.

  16. DominicWhite said about 6 hours later:

    Pretty cool little romp. Like van, I got through it in about half an hour, and it was a moodly little piece of glitchcore nightmarishness.

    I actually wish there had been less shooting, more running. The freaky, glitching, instantly deadly monsters you’re fighting seem kinda trivialized by the fact that you have a huge gun with infinite ammo.

  17. Tokjos said about 6 hours later:

    “All Of Our Friends Are Dead” followed by “Today I Die”. What a gloomy front page.

  18. Super anon said about 7 hours later:

    Reminds me of the Turbonegro song:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHhJbtWKYt8

    Downloading :)

  19. Bleagle said about 7 hours later:

    Hmm, I cant get it to run. It opens up and the process is running but theres no window (nor sound). I thought this game uses the GM Engine? Do I need some extra files?

  20. Fuzz said about 7 hours later:

    @ Tokjos: Well, Today I Die had a pretty optimistic ending…

    @Bleagle: If you’re on Vista, you’ll need the Vista GM6 converter. Games made with Game Maker 6 don’t work on Vista unless you get the converter.

    http://wiki.yoyogames.com/index.php/MakinggamesworkunderWindows_Vista

  21. Fuzz said about 7 hours later:

    EDIT: Apparently underscores mess up links here. I PM’d Amon about the incompatibility, though.

  22. Lurk said about 8 hours later:

    Bleagle- It did the same for me, but just wait a bit, even if it seems to have hanged. Devs, I suggest you use an external resource loading script with your game - http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=284491 - REAL core is a good one. I had a similar problem with my game until I put it all in external packages. For some reason, whenever you start loading over 8 mb in game maker, it gets really slow. Great game though.

  23. oNyx said about 9 hours later:

    Finished it in about 40 minutes. It’s fun and pretty weird indeed.

    By the way, the 1.1 readme starts with “Status: First Release (v 1.0)”, which might be a bit misleading.

  24. Paul Eres said about 9 hours later:

    Bleagle, are you using Vista? Even with the Vista converter, some GM6 games do not run on Vista. And when that happens, you get the process running but no window. Not much you can do except to hope the developer updates it to GM7 one day (which is truly Vista-compatible).

  25. Fuzz said about 9 hours later:

    Well, the game isn’t Vista-converted at all, so Bleagle should at least try that.

  26. Paul Eres said about 10 hours later:

    Oh, it isn’t? v0.9 was for me. I haven’t tried v1.1 yet, but v0.9 ran on my Vista machine fine, without conversion.

    But yes, if you’re using Vista and this doesn’t work, try running the “Game Maker Vista Converter” program on it: you can find that with a simple Google search. If it isn’t currently Vista converted, I think it’d be a good idea to do that, since a good number of people will have this eat up their cpu without doing anything otherwise.

  27. Fuzz said about 10 hours later:

    I’ve PM’d Amon about it; hopefully he’ll respond.

  28. Amon26 said about 14 hours later:

    Wow!! I’m a front page mamajama?! I’m very sorry about the Vista incompatibilities, I thought I had converted it with the GM6 converter already, but maybe not. I sent a message to fuzz to be a “test dummy” for re-converting version 1.1 and hopefully it’s just a case of me including the wrong executable in the zip. (if this works, the new version will be 1.2)

    This is my first game, and I’m not actually a programmer or coder, so a lot of my work is sloppy and probably more complicated than it needs to be.

    Feel free to mirror this anywhere you like, TIGDB can have it too of course. It’s been an honor! Can’t wait to show you what I’m working on next.

  29. Fuzz said about 14 hours later:

    Okay, turns out he has already converted it.

  30. Flamebait said about 16 hours later:

    This is worth playing.

  31. Quetz said about 16 hours later:

    http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3155/2555919090_f8dd83f920.jpg

    related? :o

  32. Bleagle said about 18 hours later:

    Im running XP. Any Ideas how I can get it to work? It looks very interesting. I know my Pc isnt the best one, but until now it could handle all GM Games.

  33. SPOILER said about 18 hours later:

    listen at us will you? share with us your head do hide behind the iris as all of our friends are dead

  34. Paul Eres said about 19 hours later:

    Perhaps you closed the process too early then, Bleagle. The game uses 500 MB of RAM because he loads all graphics and sounds into memory (which isn’t professional but a lot of GM users do that). So if you have a bad computer, what you may have to do is just wait until it loads (it may take a while: even on my 3.0 core 2 duo with 2gb of RAM it took over a minute to load the game into memory).

  35. Bleagle said about 20 hours later:

    Now the game loads (I just had to wait 2-3 minutes) but sadly it runs so slow its nearly unplayable…

  36. Amon26 said about 21 hours later:

    I found that increasing the virtual memory settings helps a fair bit. That’s how I get it running smoother on my EEEPC. Again, I apologize for it being such a resource-beast.

  37. Paul Jeffries said about 22 hours later:

    Nice. The understated visuals along with the excellent sound design help to create a good atmosphere. Plus, (with the exception of a couple of irritating jumps) it’s a pretty fun game as well, which helps.

    I too finished it in half an hour but to me that felt like about the right length. Long enough to fully develop the concept, not so long it started to drag.

  38. TCM said about 24 hours later:

    (As a sidenote, this works fine and runs fast for me on Vista with no conversion of any kind)

    Man, I thought I wasn’t bothered at all by this game, but it creeped me the frig out late at night, 5 hours or so after I played it. All I could think about was this game, and I was the only person awake. No other game has inspired that level of “uncomfortable” in me (Not RE4, REmake, HL2’s Ravenholm). So, I guess good job on creating the creepiest game I’ve ever played? >_>

  39. PHeMoX said 1 day later:

    Dead, die and so on … hmmm, something tells me economic crisis has it’s influence on title choice and game genre, or what? :P

    Good game though, not particularly my cup of tea in general, but I definitely digged the atmosphere.

  40. Rogberth said 1 day later:

    Nice game, nice atmosphere but very short. Took 30 mins more or less.

  41. Jacksprat said 1 day later:

    This game was Awesome, Atmosphere and the Falling level in particular really freaked me out. great work.

    likewise i would have liked perhaps a level without the gun and maybe know enemies that relied completely on atmosphere.

  42. ngajoe said 1 day later:

    Touch the spinning blue diamond for the secret ending! :D

  43. MISTA TEA said 1 day later:

    man i played through that and touched the blue diamond and nothin happened you liar, i pity the fool

  44. MISTA TEA said 1 day later:

    man i played through that again and touched the blue diamond and nothin happened you liar, i pity the fool

  45. cm said 1 day later:

    @ngajoe: Nothing happens. Am I missing something?

  46. ngajoe said 1 day later:

    Hmm…I don’t know what’s wrong with your version of the game, but mine threw a handling exception when I touched it and crashed the game. I’m pretty sure that’s the secret ending.

  47. ngajoe said 1 day later:

    You have to touch it when the boss is alive!

  48. Fuzz said 1 day later:

    That’s a bug, not a secret ending. And it doesn’t crash if you click “ignore”.

  49. parabalabolabola said 2 days later:

    I’ve studied this game long and hard and I can safely say that it is indeed a secret ending.

  50. Amon26 said 2 days later:

    Ah, so you found the “green square” ending hm? well, you haven’t found it out totally.
    Once you touch the green square, you need to grab the phone and dial the phone number. 269-344-8104. A man will most likely answer the phone, ask him the question “When Do The Angels Take The Stage.” If he answers this question, make sure you don’t leave home without wearing silver. If he doesn’t.. then pray

  51. Stephen said 2 days later:

    Played it, liked it, got genuinely creeped out by the ominous ZALGO-ness of it all.

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