Press When Red

~What is this thing~

A minimalist humorous reflex game I made in 2012 when I was studying Computer Science at Stony Brook University. It's got tricks, might make you think you're forgetting something, Vuvuzelas, a reference to B.F. Skinner, and some other stuff. It's a thing.

~How did I make it~

In my wide-eyed student fervor, I was inspired by a remark by Jonathan Blow where he said Chess played as fundamentally the same game even when taking away any additional visual context. I thought of what would be the minimal form of an action game and imagined needing to press a black bar that shrank before it disappeared. I tested it with some some friends, calling it Minimal Action Game. Then I realized the bar should change color when you needed to press it (it stayed black before!). I made the title descriptive of the game's goal and called the game "Press When Red". It was my first game in Flash and I made it independently of any class I was taking (to the detriment of my grades a bit) and it was a Finalist in the Stony Brook Game Programming Competition. I left a bunch of stuff in there I should probably clean up, but that would probably mean finding another Windows machine with FlashDevelop in it, and I dunno if anyone would really care enough for it to matter. If you do, feel free to tell me if you care that much, it would be nice.

~Why am I uploading it now~
I'm uploading it now on itch.io because it's a late night on a Saturday and I haven't really uploaded it anywhere other than on a Newgrounds dump that I linked to on my website that maybe got 0 clickthroughs in the past couple of years and Flash is being offboarded by Adobe anyway so I might as well see what people think of it on something like itch.io. 

~Coolio, a trailer~

Here's a trailer I made for the game on a Windows netbook over a day in my landlady's damp basement that had mold and the stove's knobs were electrified at some point (the rent was hella cheap)