AUTHORIZED LIKENESS

Download for Windows:

Itch.io

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Game Jolt

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Glorious Trainwrecks

(Note: Game cannot be played on a matte screen)

The screen is completely black. Look closely, and you can see your own reflection. Your task is to trace it as accurately as possible with the mouse. How successful will you be?

Long ago I came up with the concept for a fighting game where winning would involve knocking your opponent to the ground and completing a chalk outline of their body before they got back up. I believe that Authorized Likeness is the spiritual, non-violent, non-fighting game, non-multiplayer successor to that idea. Another old game idea also partially inspired it, but I will not mention what it was, because it's just different enough that I might make it after all someday.

I'm not sure there's much to state about this game. It is what it is. Try to successfully trace a picture of yourself, using the reflection in your monitor. Authorized Likeness works, in my eyes, because failure is just as fun as success - it's hilarious to carefully focus on tracing the mouse along all of your features, sure you've got everything down perfectly, only to hit the "done" button and realize you've made horrific mistakes. I've never myself managed to make a "good" drawing, and I still think I created a worthwhile game.

I remember having a heck of a time coming up with a name for Authorized Likeness. Most of them I've forgotten, but the two working titles I can recall are "Black Mirror: The Video Game", which was going to be a joke title but I scrapped because there turned out to actually be a video game called The Black Mirror, and "Narcissistic Face Tracing", which I scrapped because I didn't want people to think it had anything to do with actual NFTs (I'm writing this in November 2021; hopefully nobody has any idea what I mean by this by the time they read it). Wow, that's quite a run-on sentence.

In fact, the folder name that the project files reside in is called "Black Mirror Drawing." Aside from Pitch and Putt Club and All Hail the Beetle - Don't Jostle That Jewel!, I almost never give my project folders the name of the actual game, since I normally don't know what it will be until I'm close to finishing it.

For anybody disappointed that I never made the chalk outline game, Spookware appears to contain a minigame about drawing a chalk outline around a skeleton. Not exactly a multiplayer fighting game either, but somewhat closer to my original idea!