Narrative Machine

After almost 4 years of development, Natural Allies is now available on Steam!

Natural Allies on Steam Natural Allies is a 2D platform game inspired by the 8-bit era. Team up with a variety of animal buddies to stop an ancient evil from taking over! Explore 25 stages across 6 worlds, and test your skill against fearsome foes! Discover the true ending by collecting the hidden Spectral Stars.

Last summer, I began a fairly ambitious interactive project, and have been pretty quiet about it on online. While still in development, it's now ready to be shared!

Introducing "Natural Allies," a 2-d platform game inspired by some of my favorite 8-bit classics!

The player controls a character named Cado, who teams up with several animal buddies. Together, they are trying to stop a corruption from spreading through the natural world.

At launch, the game will have 30 levels (24 normal stages and 6 bosses). It will initially be available on PC, and I'm looking into the possibility of both an Xbox and Switch release.

Stay tuned for more updates!

Android users! I've updated my legacy apps for the first time in a long while. To celebrate, the ad-free versions of Missile Defense Force and Base Invaders are now 100% free to download! PachinkOwl and Seagulls will also be free through April 5th, 2023 (and $0.99 after that). Links below!

PachinkOwl: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.narrativemachine.pachinkowl

Seagulls: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.narrativemachine.seagullscantfly

MDF: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.narrativemachine.missiledefenseforce

Base Invaders: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.narrativemachine.baseinvaders

A new interactive piece to kick off 2022:

Doomscroll An interactive art piece by Jacob Pierzchala

https://narrativemachine.com/interactive/vanishingpoint/index.html

Vanishing Point was the first major project I began working on in 2010, during my first semester at BGSU. While it doesn’t meet the level of refinement I aim for today, it remains significant to me for exploring themes that would become central to later work: the clashing of perspectives, mortality, and futurology.

Originally developed in Flash, the piece tells a story of a reconstructed human and his confrontation with a mechanical overlord, from multiple points of view. The 2021 reworking replaces full form poetry with animated typography, to subtly guide the viewer through the events that unfold.

Over the past few months I’ve been working on a series of disk designs, inspired by the work of HYBYCOZO, Cocorrina & Co, and Carol Prusa. The first 3 of these are loosely based on sacred geometric patterns. While the core designs have been finalized, I am exploring how to translate these into both interactive and physical media.

The first set of images are screen-captures of an interactive experiment, which can be viewed at: https://narrativemachine.com/sandbox/disks/disk-series-sg-test.html. The photos that follow show prototypes fabricated from Baltic Birch. A very special thank you to Erwin Redl and Michael Kratochvil for helping to produce these!

© 2021 Jacob Pierzchala

Vanishing Point 2.0 Teaser