Glitch (video game)
Glitch was a browser-based MMO game. Based in the world of Ur, it centered around eleven Giants who created the world. However, a corruption is spreading, and players, known as Glitches (or Glitchen, depending on who you ask), must help save the world. Although most of the time they just exist and interact with each other, being originally conceptualized as 'an online game with no fighting'.
The game could be played with a mouse and keyboard, and a unique aspect was players creating and enhancing the world in which they live and thrive.
The game and its servers were shut down on December 9, 2012. Its art and code was released into the public domain, and fan-made projects to remake the game, like Children of Ur and Eleven, are in the alpha stage.
See the official website here.
Tropes used in Glitch (video game) include:
- The Alcoholic: Friendly.
- Boring but Practical: Harvesting from animals and plants, especially at high skill levels, is a cheap way to get energy and food sources.
- Cloudcuckoolander: The trees, especially the Bubble Tree.
- Combined Energy Attack: Martial Imagination and Piety lets you charge Shrines to do this.
- Conspiracy Theorist: Bubble Trees.
- Creation Myth: The world was created by eleven giants. Although unless the giants knew a lot about biology, the Ancestral Lands may suggest otherwise, at least in the case of Glitches.
- Deadpan Snarker: The Magic Rock.
- The Dev Team Thinks of Everything: Saying "KFC" in front of chickens makes them freak out.
- Also, if the player is doing something quickly in the game faster than the local session can communicate with the game server, such as several gardening actions performed on multiple plots on a slow internet connection, their actions are prevented (to prevent duplication) until there's a server response, with a Hand Wave error message given in the game window (in this case, imploring the player to "Slow down! Gardening is a leisure activity").
- Double Entendre: Spice Trees and Wood Trees like these.
- Drugs Are Bad: Mostly averted (you can go on an acid trip with no ill effects), but possibly parodied with "no-no powder". When you sniff it, you get infinite energy and mood for a few minutes. Then you die.
- Familiar: The Magic Rock.
- The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: Rook attacks leave holes in your monitor.
- Friend to All Living Things: Humbaba, and players who take skills in Animal Kinship.
- Ghibli Hills
- Gods Need Prayer Badly: "[Giant Name] loves you. But they'd love you more if you donate."
- Guilt Based Gaming: Don't water trees or feed animals and they die. This includes ones in your house.
- Info Dump: The Rook Museum.
- Insistent Terminology: It's piggies, not pigs.
- Journey to the Center of the Mind: Completing the Tower Quest involves this.
- Mr. Exposition: The Magic Rock, and the staffers/exhibits of the Museum.
- Mushroom Samba: Eating a Purple Flower. Drinking Essence of Purple causes a more potent one, and takes you to a secret street.
- New Age Retro Hippie: Gas Plants.
- No Biological Sex: Tii.
- Obstructive Bureaucrat: The reptiles.
- Pungeon Master: Bean Trees.
- Ravens and Crows: The Rook.
- Reptiles Are Abhorrent: The rude bureaucrats who make you wait in the government offices for all Bureaucratic Arts related tasks are all reptilian.
- Road Apples: Piggies and batterflies produce dung, though it's generally useful.
- Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Egg Plants talk like this.
- Spell My Name with an "S": Tii is sometimes spelled Ti.
- The Tetris Effect
- Unexpected Gameplay Change: The Kid's Room involves wordplay, and occasional sidequests involve platforming.
- Video Game Caring Potential: You can raise pigs, chickens, and butterflies from birth. Feeding, singing to, or massaging them helps them live longer.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: You can starve animals and poison trees. Poisoning a tree even gives you a status effect saying you feel guilty for doing do.
- Virtual Paper Doll: You can buy clothes and change your Glitch's appearance; more options are available as a subscriber.
- Whale Egg: Chickens come from eggs, but so do pigs and butterflies. In fact, they all come from the same eggs; it just depends on how they're seasoned. Yes, seasoned. It's exactly what it sounds like, and it's more complicated than it sounds.
- A Worldwide Punomenon: The world of Glitch is called 'Ur.' If you haven't already figured it out, Tiny Speck, the developers of Glitch, tend to make a lot of jokes about the players' "Urthly possessions" and the like.