Even though we're different, our works inspire and inform each other, and together we grow. We put fragments of ourselves in our games and share them with the world, hoping someone will accept us.
I'm Sylvie, a game designer who creates various things. Originally, love ♥ game was just the name of my personal website, but recently it became a collective banner for works by me and my friend Aria (@aria-of-flowers). Aria makes shocking 18+ games for adults only, while my games are completely normal, so we balance each other out nicely, and we're always learning from each other's approaches to game design and art. Aria's work has recently inspired me to start trying to include more story elements and more fleshed-out characters in my games.
You can visit love ♥ game's website to learn more about us and our creations!!
Sylvie's key works
I've made over 100 games, most of which are documented in the Sylvie Spreadsheet! There's a short list of personal recommendations on my website. I have an itch.io page but it basically just contains the games I made after I started using itch.io (I think people sometimes assume it's more curated than that, it is not).
Below I'll highlight a few of my games that I think are important or representative of me as a designer. All of them are free!
Cat Planet is a short, cute and difficult exploration platformer where you fly around and talk to silly cats! It was released in 2009 and got 1st place overall in Ludum Dare 16 (much less impressive than getting 1st place nowadays, because there were only 121 participants, but I still feel proud of it). This was by far my most well-known game for a long time, and maybe still is, largely because of a popular and really fun playthrough video by raocow (part 1, part 2). This is the Sylvie game most likely to get "Wait, you made that?!" reactions from people. The original version was Windows only, but the link above is actually to a web browser port I made!
Clockwork Calamity in Mushroom World is my largest game so far, often taking people around 8-10 hours to complete. It's a collaboration with Hubol, a good friend who I work with sometimes. He did the sound and music, helped with some programming odd jobs, and influenced the game's design too, by virtue of being the only playtester for the vast majority of development.
It's a strange open-world exploration platformer with around 50 different characters to meet. Each character has their own unique inventory of items that you can trade for! But before you can trade, you'll need to enter massive twisted labyrinths full of poisonous air, known as Mushroom Zones, to gather the mushrooms that serve as the game's primary currency.
Probably the most notable features are the inventory system and the bouncy platforming. Each item you collect has pixel-perfect collision and must be placed into your bag without overlapping any other item. If you can't fit an item in, you might need to stop and reorganize your bag to make more space. As for the platforming, this game has a classic Sylvie feature where when you touch a wall from the side, even if you weren't moving quickly, you bounce away wildly. This makes basic navigation a challenge, but this bouncing also allows you to gain vertical height, and you can chain bounces to do complex wall-climbing tricks. These systems intersect because many items have passive effects while they're in your inventory, altering your movement in some way, and also because inventory items can be thrown into the world and used as platforms, allowing you to sometimes circumvent the wall-bounce suffering.
I think this is a strange enough game that some people will quickly become confused and won't like it at all, but it's my biggest work to date and I think it's one of the most interesting.
Pupy World is a gentle exploration platformer commissioned by and starring wolf pupy, with music by Chris Weed (@chris-weed-piano). You might have noticed that I'm a fan of exploration and platformers. Anyways, Sylvie games have a reputation for being difficult, but this one is significant because it's probably my biggest and best easy game. You can't die, and I can only think of one place in the game that really requires platforming skill to proceed (you might encounter other tricky jumps, but there's usually a way to get around doing them). So, it's just about exploring a cute world filled with funny characters and solving little fetch-quest puzzles to help them out. I suppose it's a lot like Clockwork Calamity in that respect, except without the strange and potentially frustrating bouncy platforming. I recommend it if you find my other games too difficult.
Cactus Block on Adventure! is the latest game in the cult classic Cactus Block series, which has been praised by several well-known indie game designers, and appears in at least one book about indie games (I'm not going to source these claims but trust me, it's actually true somehow). The basic premise is that it's a platformer where you need to place blocks with your mouse to reach higher areas. But every time you click to place a block, there's a random chance that instead you will place a cactus, which kills you if you touch it. I've started describing the series as "gambling platformers" after a Rock Paper Shotgun article used a similar description.
Cactus Block on Adventure wraps this in a vaguely arcade-game-like structure with 6 stages. To proceed to a new stage, you need to not only complete the current stage, but earn enough points to "purchase" entry to a new stage. If you complete the current stage with too few points, you get game over and have to restart. You can start from any stage you've "seen", but you have to complete all 6 without game-over-ing to reach the ending.
The defining mechanic of Cactus Block on Adventure, aside from the cactus/block dichotomy, is how "completing a stage" works. Before you can complete a stage, you must spend a point stick (worth 1000 points) to "declare your intent to win", an idea (very) loosely inspired by the Riichi mechanic from Japanese mahjong. This declaration doubles the point value of all remaining score items (fruits and gems) in the stage, and causes a star to appear at a random location. If you successfully reach the star, you complete the stage, but if you die in the process, the star disappears and you must spend another point stick to make it reappear. The idea is to riichi once you're confident the current arrangement of cacti and blocks will allow you to reach the star wherever it appears, and pick up any double-value items you can along the way, without making a mistake. It extends the "gambling platformer" concept to making gambles on your own skill. I wonder what will happen next in the Cactus Block series....
Sylvie Lime is one of my most recent releases, and the first "love ♥ game joint work". Most of it was made by me, but the characters were kind of co-designed by me and Aria, and some of the setting and story concepts come from Aria's work. (It was also probably Aria's influence that led to the game having a story in the first place – I've long been afraid of writing stories, and while some of my other games have a fair amount of dialogue, this is arguably the first and so far only one with a complete and fleshed-out narrative.)
Like many Sylvie games, it's a strange and silly exploration platformer with unusual movement mechanics, but I also feel like it's a significant step forward for me as a designer. In addition to having a story, it's also longer than most games I've made, taking around 3-5 hours to complete, so it explores a lot of ideas that I've played with in smaller games on a deeper level. It doesn't really feel like anything I've made before.
When I make games like this, which feel like a step forward for me, I always worry that people who enjoy them are going to try out my past games, and then find them disappointing because none of them are really the same. If you discovered my works because you played Sylvie Lime, I hope you enjoy some of the others and don't go into them with too high expectations.
