Welcome To Mantis-Eye Labs

Mantis-Eye Labs

Mantis-Eye Labs, LLC is a small, unsuccessful, single-person game company owned and operated by me, Mike Watson. I program other things but games are my favorite.

Games for Sale

Realm of the Ghost King

  • Realm of the Ghost King is my first commercial game project. It was released on January 16, 2018. It's a traditional turn-based roguelike with simplified systems and gameplay and it runs on Mac and PC. There's lots more info over at the official site.

Free Games

Being

  • Being is a game I made for Ruin Jam but failed to complete on time. However, I was far enough along that I decided to finish it up and release it. It's intended to be as non-game-like as possible, so there's no useful input, no scoring, no interaction at all really. You start the game and it generates a little pixel person for you and then you just watch them. Your person will age (even when the game isn't running) and eventually die and that's pretty much it. You can interpret whatever you like from all that, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out (though I did have grander plans that were just not possible to build in only two weeks). I like to check on the little guy once a day just to see what he's up to.

Virtual/Bird

  • After the whole Flappy Bird fiasco the Flappy Jam happened and this is my entry to that. The goal was to create a faster-paced version of Flappy Bird while still staying true to the general idea. I really like feel of the game and I consider it complete though it's probably not possible to get too far. The source code is on GitHub as well if you want to check it out.

Tropical Fisherman (Fishing Jam Version)

  • I participated in a game jam with a fishing theme. The idea was to make a fishing game (with a potentially loose definition of 'fishing') in seven days. It was the first game jam I ever took part in and also (I think) the first complete game I've ever made. It's based on a simple Javascript game engine I wrote (which I will eventually release here). The game doesn't have a win condition because I ran out of time, so you can just continue playing it forever, but I think if you can capture every kind of fish and buy all the items in the store you can consider that a victory.

Unfinished Games

Unnamed Candy Jam Game

  • Less successfully I also participated in The Candy Jam, a game jam protesting King's attempt to copyright the word 'candy'. I'm not sure if I agree with the game jam's idea entirely (it's a pretty complex issue), but it was a good excuse to try to make a roguelike-like. I didn't complete it, but I learned some things and made some reusable things, so that's always good. You can only really wander around the level and shoot, but there's no notion of health or entity collision, so it's not really 'playable' in any way. The source is on Github if you're interested in that sort of thing.