Jason Rohrer is an independent video game designer. Rohrer has released 13 games over the last four years. For these thirteen games he made all of the code, graphics, and music. Jason produces some of his games on a broken Dell which was given to him by his sister. He also operates on a used iPod and his wife’s first generation tray loading iMac to make games for Apple products. Jason Rohrer is most famous for the first game that we played in class called, Passage. This game was really confusing for me due to the limits that Rohrer makes. In Passage you only could move in four directions. Although the game was really confusing to me I loved how Jason Rohrer provides the source code for his fans to look at. Out of deep respect for Rohrer I decided to play some of his other games. I really liked his game called PrimRose.
PrimRose was Rohrer’s 6th game that he made over the last four years. PrimRose is a tile-based game designed for the iPhone. This game is a little different than Rohrer’s other games. In an interview Rohner stated, “Working on Primrose felt very different, much more like a process of design than a process of making art… The goal in designing Primrose was to make something with gameplay that was as interesting and compelling as possible.” In this game Jason Rohrer developed gravity free chain reactions.
Rohrer got the idea of developing PrimRose from other puzzle games such as Tetris, Bejeweled, Drop7, and Puzzle Fighter.
Every time I played PrimRose I developed another pattern. To play this game you choose where you would like to place the first color block. Next you are given limited choices where you can place the first block’s pair. The music in the background really gets you into the game.
This game is really addictiong! For the second level the blocks have numbers and letters on them. I noticed that I was placing the blocks in the same pattern as I did in the first level, but this time I wasn’t scoring as high. After playing this game for over 45 minutes I decided to download it to my iPhone. I really like playing it on my iPhone due to the touch screen!
Check out this link for more of Jason Rohrer’s games!