A clever social game quietly launched on Steam this month. Jono is the latest release from developer and publisher Part Time Monkey, which is actually original Angry Birds artist Tuomas Erikoinen's solo studio, and it's the first "massively singleplayer" game I've ever seen.
Jono is a pixel art 2D platformer with simple art and "deterministic physics," as Erikoinen puts it in a post-mortem Reddit post. The real hook lies outside the familiar gameplay of jumping over spikes and through portals: only one person can play Jono at a time, and only for one minute at a time, "then the next person in the queue takes over from exactly where you left off." Everyone else sits in a Twitch-like, in-game live stream overlay watching you play, waiting for their turn, or building levels for future players to complete.
"Cheer, advise, or complain in the chat. Spam emotes. Make the talking head say something stupid. Join the conga line," the game's Steam page reads.
"The game is the reason players come, and the chat is the reason they stay (I think)," Erikoinen says on Reddit. "They cheer when someone gets through a hard level, joke around, talk about off-topic stuff and so on."
The goal, Erikoinen says, is for players to collectively complete 1 million levels which are all totally unique. The Jono stream shows that they've currently cleared just over 87,600 levels, and died 114,200 times in the process. The top player has personally cleared over 7,500 levels.
Jono is free to download on Steam, where it's garnered 96% positive user reviews. When I first booted up the game, all I had to do was clear a short tutorial and suddenly I was fifth in the queue. On-screen leaderboards show how many rooms the best players have cleared, and customization options for the shared avatar live in the top-left corner by default.
An optional "Meat Grinder" mode collects player-made levels that were deemed too difficult for normal play, essentially quarantining the Kaizo challenges that are only for the real sickos. "One level maker died 1200+ times in the editor just to prove a single level could be done," says Erikoinen. "'DONT ASK HOW THE MEAT IS MADE' took 2627 deaths and almost 5 hours before anyone got through," he adds.
After clearing a whopping four levels in my debut run, I spoke to Erikoinen about Jono. He says it took about a month to make the launch version of the game, which has been expanded considerably since October 5.
Partly inspired by social games like Peter Molyneux's famously disastrous Curiosity – "but not at first to be honest, this idea sort of just came to be out of nowhere," Erikoinen says – the now-independent Angry Birds artist set out to make "something unique." (Jono reminds me a bit of VVVVVV from Terry Cavanagh, a beacon of unique games.)
"In this era of AI," Erikoinen says, "smaller games" can seem "'too easy to do' (exaggerating a little here, but especially valid for smaller games), so to succeed we now need something truly unique - which sparked up the idea of the queue. Once the queue was settled, I also wanted to have a looong goal for the community to work towards, hence came the 1M rooms."
Most of the rooms in Jono come from a procedural generation system that splices together different obstacles and modifiers. Player-made levels are reviewed and woven in more sporadically.
"When a player creates and verifies a level, they submit it," Erikoinen explains. "I check it in the editor with their replay and determine if it's casual enough for the game mode. If it's not, they can choose to put it in the Meat Grinder instead. If it does get approved, it gets put in the main room queue. The room number for it depends on how many player levels are already queued. Every room gets put 100-200 levels later than the previously approved player level."
Building on his point regarding small games in today's AI-colored age, he adds, "There's been tons of cases where some small game gets popular overnight and it gets replicated within hours, and clones appear on Steam instantly. There’s also been cases where someone posts a wip video of their game and that gets cloned instantly. Those are real problems especially for small games. So something like Jono, with a unique twist with not-so-easy to replicate implementations, may be what is needed now. It’s just a theory/idea, but I feel it carries some weight to it."
