What?

Yourglass is a game of giving for two gentlemen.¹

The idea is to excersize your right to gift, as throughly as possible. The objective is to tilt the hourglass², insistently abuse gravity, and empty your half of sand³. As to how you go about doing it— Ask here.

Good, clean, gentlemanly fun.⁴

Why?

One late afternoon in January⁵, my good friend-philosopher-and-guide Joy, in his highness⁶, decided to, in the following order; make an RPG, not make an rpg, make the same rpg in a steampunk fashion, cancel it, make something new, cancel that, make something old instead. In the resulting flurry of activity he had decided to learn how to LÖVE⁷.

Being a true scholar, he learns by action; such dedication. He prompty conjured up a small gamelike activity to test his mettle on. The gem was as follows:

Imagine an hourglass, pure and intricate. In it's duality lie two planets. These planets — imagine one to be that of vile-creatures⁸ and the other to be that akin to our Mother-Earth⁹ — will struggle for influence. As the Viles rise they shall drop seeds of corruption downwards. As the Earth rises it will bestow cleansing motes to the Viles in turn. The singular player will have bear the burden of seeing his Earth rise, and overcome the vile opposition — A toy of allegoric proportions. The trick, if I may so use a word so vulgar, is to make the balance as intricate the glass itself.

(I have taken the liberty of transliterating the above monolog to the best of my abilities.)

As lively as my friend's mind is — truly a work of ceaseless marvel — I was skeptical of the idea and the resulting construct's potentiel pour le plaisir. And after few words of forthright encouragement¹⁰ I forgot all about it. Later that night, my sleep was interrupted with visions of unforseen majesty. Quickly, shaking aside my slumber, I had put down to paper¹¹ an idea quite similar to Joy's own.

Except, it will be a game fit for gentlemen.¹¹

How?

The controls are simple enough for even a simpleton to understand.

The gentleman in blue will tilt the glass by means of the left/right buttons. And to gird his loins in righteous insistence, he will press-and-hold down.¹³

The gentleman in red will reflect the same with the A/D and S keys, in that order.

The game has no fixation with a certain rodent.¹⁴

Where?

Here, of course.
Choose your download, packaging is — as the say — on-the-house.

.EXE
LÖVEless Windows.

LÖVE
LÖVE itself, for all!

.LOVE
Anyone with LÖVE.

And, of course, for those rugged, adventerous individuals who wish to see how things work¹⁶, here's the source courtesy of the ever-so-helpful Hub-o'-Gits, you can clone the same by invoking:

$ git clone git://github.com/5310/yourglass

Who?

The original idea was sired by the amazing Sir Joy Bhattacherjee. ¹⁸

And the game and the reimagined gameplay was made by yours truly, Sayantan Chaudhuri, Esq¹⁹.

The game was made using the wonderful framework LÖVE.²⁰

And of course, Github. Without whom there would be no remote-hosting...:sniff: Those brave, self-less souls.

Lest we forget, if it weren't for the ongoing Tigcompo, lack of progress on my main project, and whatever I ate that night, there would have been zergs in our base, eating of our dudes.²¹

The dashingly bold typeface used throughout Yourglass is called Chunkfive, by The League of Movable Type.

We were 'Freeware Game Pick' on The Indie Games Weblog! Michael Rose is a man of excellent taste, no doubt.