Free Steam game gives players one minute to control a shared character
Jono puts its players in a global queue while the community works toward a goal of one million unique rooms.
A free platformer called Jono has launched on Steam with a single character shared by everyone playing. Each participant gets exactly one minute at the controls before the next person in line takes over from the same spot.
Developer Tuomas Erikoinen, who created the art for the original Angry Birds, makes games independently under the name Part Time Monkey. Jono challenges players to navigate hazards including crushers, spikes, ice and portals. Dying returns the character to the current room’s starting point and leaves a gravestone marking the failure.
Players awaiting their turn can watch the action and use a shared chat. Erikoinen wrote on Reddit that he suspects conversation keeps people involved after the game attracts them. Over 540 players posted more than 85,000 messages across 17 days.
The community’s target is one million unique rooms, mostly generated procedurally. Erikoinen also adds player-created stages after manually checking them against replays submitted by their makers. Particularly difficult submissions go into an optional mode called “Meat Grinder,” where one room required 2,627 deaths and almost five hours to complete.
Erikoinen told GamesRadar that concerns about imitation helped inspire the shared-character approach. He said AI had made small games appear easy to produce and that he had seen successful independent games copied within hours.
