The Pixel Prophet #00
A newsletter featuring indie game releases, a new Alan Wake sequel, programming tips, and inspiring artwork.
Originally published on Oct 28, 2023 on Substack
Hello there, ladies, gentlemen, and unicorns! Let me know what you think by comment or voting in the polls at the end. Thank you for your interest and I hope you enjoy! — Phil
Games
Anything related to games, big and small, old, and new, indie and very indie.
1️⃣ INDIE • Inspector Waffles Early Days — If you like cats as much as you enjoy detective games, and miss new games for the GameBoy Color, this little gem might push all your buttons with its cute little paws. It’s “coming soon”, currently there's a ► Kickstarter with all the details. Doesn’t it look plainly adorable?
2️⃣ INDIE • SKEW - A The Last Worker Spin-Off — Remember the French OG survival horror game, Alone in the Dark (1992)? SKEW has absolutely nothing in common with that game apart from its creator, Frédérick Raynal. And now he’s back but in Pog form! with probably the most indie comeback in games possible, a new release for Panic’s Playdate, the Portlandian portable game console; you know it as “the one with that crank“. Jörg Tittel outlines in this insightful article how Raynal reunited with other Alone in the Dark stalwarts to create SKEW; lots of pictures included. ► “How the Creator of Alone in the Dark Came Back to Games - The Making of SKEW for Playdate”.
3️⃣ INDIE • REPOSE — Yet another indie game with 1-bit graphics and an all-caps title, REPOSE is one of those games that immediately draw me in. Made by just one creator, Hungarian artist Bozó Attila Bertold (which you can ► follow on Mastodon), released a ► gameplay trailer to this weird (in the best sense) dungeon crawler and I can’t wait to play it! The game should be out in early 2024, I have been told.
4️⃣ NOT INDIE • Alan Wake 2 — If you enjoyed Remedy’s horror action adventure Alan Wake from 2010 (is it really that old?!) and have been living under a rock since then (I won’t blame you!), you might love to hear that its sequel just got released on Friday and according to many outlets it’s their best game yet. If you have a thing for weird horror and unconventional storytelling, it might be up your alley; though it’s an ► Epic Games Store exclusive.
SALE • ITCH.IO — There’s currently a Halloween Sale on ►itch.io, spooky bundles included! Boo! 👻
Programming & Game Dev
Morsels on how games are made by and for the people who make them—tools, resources, wisdom, people, programmer humor, … you git it.
There’s nothing more permanent than a temporary hack. — Kyle Simpson
ROGUELIKES — Roguelike Celebration is a community with a ► YouTube channel dedicated fully to Fortnite. That was a joke. They celebrate, of course, roguelikes and have a yearly conference that takes place inside a MUD! This year’s event is over but you might want to keep an eye out for ► next year.
NEWS • Amazon Web Services - Amazon launched its European Sovereign Cloud this week to comply with European user privacy standards, Techmonitor reports.
RESOURCE • Pixel Fonts — Nimble Beasts Collective released another nifty little package of 20 public domain pixel fonts for your projects. They all look pretty nice and there’s even more free/affordable stuff from them at ►itch.io
GAME DESIGN • Mosa Lina — Mark from Game Maker’s Toolkit dedicated a ► video to Stuffed Wombat’s exploration in procedural immersive sim, Mosa Lina. Since Joshua (a.k.a Stuffed Wombat) is a huge inspiration to me and his sense of game design is awe-inspiring. I want to urge you to watch his talk on making Mosa Lina at the Game Dev Days Graz, it starts at 02:11:48 ► in the recording.
TOOLS • For Musicians — Bandcamp’s future is uncertain after Songtradr acquiring it and indie musicians might want to look for alternatives. Jazz Mickle has started a ►site to keep artists up to date and equip them with tools and resources.
If you are a musician and want to quickly create a page of songs for people to listen to, Packbats dug up some tools and ► shared them on Mastodon. Get your music to the masses without the hassle.
SHADERS — It’s perfectly fine to not know how to program shaders when you are as crafty as Fabi Smith is on Twitter:
Art & Inspiration
A small showcase of art & inspirations that left an impression on me
Artists are humans, not machines. — pho (on Twitter)
**TOOL • Nightshade — "**A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways." ► technologyreview.com
Intuition Is The Detective Within Us
Carpet Invaders
Just in time for Halloween, NASA posted this spooky photo Juno took of Saturn.
Foreign Feed
Posts from people I follow that are fun, interesting, or plain nerdy. I love the nerdy!
“3 hours of chkdsk investigation later: It was not a dying hard drive, but my teapot that was making the disturbing noises.” (Bernd Kilga, on Mastodon)
“Amazon: please set a “delivery day” so shipments can be more efficient and environmentally friendly for non-urgent things.
Also Amazon: delivers every package separately on delivery day. ”
(Joris “Interface” de Gruyter on Mastodon)What became of Phil Fish after he left Twitter ten years ago? You can ask him, because he’s back on Mastodon and as vocal as ever, subtly hinted by his ALL CAPS username.
Pixel’s Mixed Bag
Some of my emissions on the social mediaz, random thoughts, and stuff that doesn’t fit in anywhere else.
◾ Twitter served me an ad for a McDonald’s promotion in Korea — in Korean. I quipped that “Elon's ad targeting is spot on. 😜 If it really comes down to this 1$ annual subscription just so he can get my credit card data, I am out of here. You can find me on Mastodon and the sky, btw”.
There’s the option to click “Why am I seeing this ad?” which I did and got the answer, “The reason you're seeing this ad is not available” to which I dryly remarked “It’s a secret to everybody”.
◾ Someone in 2017 posted about a job opening supposedly asking for “8+ years of Swift experience” (Swift first appeared in 2014). I wondered whether 8+ years of Taylor Swift experience count, instead.
◾ On October 14th I tooted that I had “Watched Robocop 1 through 3 pretty much back to back for the first time just that I can play the demo of the upcoming shooter. And now I am too tired/busy for that. Maybe next week”.
When I finally had time for it, the demo wouldn’t launch. The reason being my “license” to play it had ”expired”. I didn’t know that demos could be time exclusive! Now I do.
◾ Bhaal_Spawn posted on the Platform That Shall Not Be Named that GTA 3 from 2001 is now as old as Asteroids (1979) was when GTA 3 came out. Feel old yet?
And that concludes the first test issue of this newsletter. Let’s finish with some polls. Please comment, how you like it and what you’d change.
POLL
What segment did you like best?
Games - 13%
Art & Inspiration - 13%
Programming & Game Dev - 63%
Pixel's Mixed Bag - 13%
Foreign Feed - 0%
8 VOTES · POLL CLOSED
POLL
And what segment you could do without?
Games - 0%
Art & Inspiration - 14%
Programming & Game Dev - 0%
Pixel's Mixed Bag - 14%
Foreign Feed - 71%
7 VOTES · POLL CLOSED