The Pixel Prophet #01
This edition features updates on the newsletter layout, game releases, game development resources, and art inspiration.
Originally published on Nov 6, 2023 on Substack
Thank you for your interest and feedback on the previous issue! ♥ I removed Foreign Feed and trimmed Pixel’s Mixed Bag to have more room for game dev and other sections. Also, from now on, new issues will be published on Monday. Again, if you have any opinions on how to improve it, let me know in the comments. I hope you like this Prophet even better! — Phil
Pixel Update
Games
Anything related to games, big and small, old, and new, indie and very indie.
1️⃣INDIE • Polish Horror — Probably an old hat by now, but the Silent Hill-inspired upcoming action adventure Holstin scores extremely high on presentation, atmosphere, and gunplay (!). According to the devs, it’s “a psychological survival horror game set in an eerie, isolated 90’s Polish town consumed by an ominous presence”. That made me wonder just how many of my buttons Holstin might push at the same time! The game is still in development but already so very polish-ed (get it?). I urge you to try out the ►demo on Steam.
2️⃣INDIE • Planet-Puzzler — Developer Johan Peitz released ►Cosmic Collapse last week, a gratifying puzzler that tasks you to “tidy up the solar system”: Combining planets to bigger ones and having them disappear in a chain reaction looks dangerously addictive. Johan graciously extended the sale, so if you act today (Monday), you can still get 25% off on the game’s itch.io page.
3️⃣RETRO-LIKE• Fantasy Console Game — You might know of PICO-8 or the Pixel Vision 8, fictitious 8-bit video game consoles but with very real emulators and games. Developer AERIF°RM currently works on ► Dead End, a minimalist take on Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear (1987) on the MSX2, but for the Minicube64 fantasy console. While their games look delicious, be wary of that self-described “aesthetic-first” approach, though.
4️⃣INDIE • Detective Game — Were you hoping for another Golden Idol to find, Obra Dinn to return, or just sneer at those contrived TV crime scene procedurals? Boy, have I got news for you: Scene Investigators makes you the detective, combing crime scenes for clues and evidence. It seems like a beautiful deductive reasoning game and it’s ► out on Steam. There’s even a demo!
RETRO • Reverse Engineering — People love to learn how old games tick, and Sid Meier’s seminal game Civilization (1991) is no difference. Now there’s a complete reverse engineered version of the original DOS game on ► GitHub called OpenCiv1. Though, you'll have to compile it yourself; provided you have researched that technology.
Programming & Game Dev
How games are made by and for the people who make them—tools, resources, wisdom, people, programmer humor, … you git it.
When you think about it, games are just spreadsheets running at 60fps
— (sindbad on Mastodon)
ALGORITHMS • 2D Fluids — AI researcher and math nerd Matt Henderson shared how to quickly do 2D simulations of fluids:
“[J]ust define what happens for all 16 possible 2×2 grids, and repeatedly apply these rules to the picture.”
GAME ENGINES • Godot Cheat Sheet — A Reddit user named adsci posted this massive ► shader cheat sheet for Godot because they “always forget everything all the time”. You still will forget things but now you have a place to look them up.
LEVEL DESIGN — Jake Birkett, veteran indie developer of Regency Solitaire and many more shared on BlueSky his philosophy of selecting levels:
“[W]e make a ton [of levels] (within certain parameters of playability) then we go through them all (hundreds) and rate them out of 5 and then bin lots of them, and edit those we think can be saved. We want to only end up with 4-5/5 levels.”
Find much more in-depth level design knowledge in ►this post on Jake’s Patreon.
MOTIVATION • Finish it! — Industry veteran Laurent Vicrotino ►blogs on how to actually finish your game. It’s all about knowing what to trim, folks!
TOOLS • Time Tracking — For those among us who like to procrastinate (it’s not just me, is it?) but also enjoy numbers, I found a tool that tracks how much time you spend in each window, aptly titled the ►Procrastitracker. Let us know how much time you waste with it each day.
BUSINESS • Google Accelerator — Did you know that Google has a program to help you build your indie game studio, business-wise? They call it the ►Indie Games Accelerator and you can still apply until December 12th for the 2024 virtual event.
POLL • Project Completion — According to ►a poll from Eccentric Stylist on Mastodon, 96% of the 101 games devs who voted have abandoned projects. So if you always finish yours, you are the weird one out!
Art & Inspiration
A small showcase of art & inspirations that left an impression on me
SPACE • JunoCam — What does raw image data from the Juno space probe look like? NASA ► shares it all and invites citizen scientists to process the data, and to create and share their results in beautiful galleries.
SCIENCE • CT Scans — USB-C cables aren’t all alike: Industrial inspection tool maker Lumafield ► shared high-res, macro CT scans that you can explore interactively in 3D. Fascinating.
ART • Painting — The impossible brutalist landscapes of Jean-Pierre Ugarte:
More ► here.
Life Afterlife
Seattle-based photographer ►Nilus Dantes finds and captures the weird and the gothic in nature and humans.
Pixel’s Mixed Bag
Things I’ve been up to, posts, random thoughts, and stuff that doesn’t fit in anywhere else.
◾ I started toying around with both chipmusic and attempting a bit of game dev on the GameBoy. With ►GB Studio it’s almost as easy as with Game Maker (No Programming Required!™). At the same time it allows you to write assembly-like scripts with GBVM Script, should you wish to. Best of both worlds, I’d say. The result even runs on the original hardware! Check out my last stream to see it in action, if you're curious.
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