Nathan Simulator is the first game I ever released on hked.live. It's a simple action platformer game, where you play as Nathan and must gather money by defeating enemies, with the goal of earning one billion dollars.

Development

An early development screenshot of nathansim.

The first ever version is now lost to time, on an old laptop that I have since wiped. I was messing around with a Matter.js example along with p5.js and put the face of my friend Nathan Chen, who many of these games feature, on a rectangle that you could control by spinning around. I'm not sure if I have any images left of the original nathansimulator, but that was the predecessor to the current game.

It started with a squishy square. I had a variable that controlled the height of a square, and would inversely set the width so it looked all squishy. I had just started this project for fun, and little did I know it would start a series of games that I am still working on. I then added platforming, and a large money counter in the top right. I decided early on that money would control everything, including health. I added some enemies that would bounce around the simple map, and added some guns. I made a modular system for the guns in the game and notably I made an absolutely overpowered gun called the SUPERGUN, which later recieved its own game. I had these early versions published the earlier version of my website so my friends could play it as it was developed. I remember you could press P and a few other keys to constantly spawn enemies, and my friends would try to earn as much money as possible. It was a lot of fun to develop.

An absurd amount of money in the early versions of nathansim, captured by Nathan himself.

I added a shop and kept flushing out the mechanics. Notably a stock market, which would almost always go up. I added skills (including luck, which would influence the stock market!), and procedural generated worlds. I remember one specific night where I was so close to finishing, and I just kept working and working, adding a bossfight, dialogue, cutscenes and eventually finally released the full version. At the time there was a little leaderboard of best times, but my friends found out how to hack it not so long after.

In Retrospect

I'm glad I made this game, and it was a lot of fun to develop and became the inspiration for many of the other games that I've made. I may or may not make a sequel in the future.