The Pixel Prophet #02
Detective games, gaming history resources, and various other goodies are featured in this edition of the newsletter.
Originally published on Nov 13, 2023 on Substack
Hello there, ladies, gentlemen, and unicorns! This issue brings you lots of detective games and resources for gaming history among the usual assorted bag of goodies. Enjoy! — Phil
Pixel Update
- This week’s stream takes place on Sunday, Nov 19th at 23:00 CET
(► here’s the time in your time zone)
From the Headlines
Super Mario and Legend of Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto himself announced on Twitter last Tuesday that a live-action Legend of Zelda movie is in production.
After firing The Escapist’s editor in chief Nick Calandra for “poor performance” last Tuesday, their entire video department quit out of solidarity, Forbes reports. Among them Yahtzee Crowshaw, creator and voice of Zero Punctuation.
Unity’s attempted shakedown last month was because they need money desperately because of accumulated bad management decisions, according to The Verge. Layoffs loom over the staff, thus make the people least responsible suffer the most.
Games
Anything related to games, big and small, old, and new, indie and very indie.
1️⃣ INDIE • Afro-Fantasy MMO — Developer Twin Drums, the studio headed by Allan Cudicio, are creating a wonderfully original MMO, ►The Wagadu Chronicles. It already looks very promising, off the beaten tracks of high-fantasy pastiche with the game’s themes centered around African mythology instead. We need more of this!
2️⃣ INDIE • Retro Adventure — For years now, Canadian game dev and artist Julia Minamata has been hard at work on her detective adventure game ►The Crimson Diamond. Inspired by Sierra’s The Colonel’s Bequest (1989), it evokes feelings of finest nostalgia with its flawless EGA presentation. Julia also streams and toots her development journey regularly.
3️⃣ INDIE • Retro Detective Game — I probably shouldn’t have two EGA detective adventures in the same issue back to back. Then I remembered that I am calling all the shots here. Let me introduce to you Kini Games’ ►Signal & Echo: Iris is Missing. The game casts you in the role of a local newspaper journalist in a small English town, tasked to research the disappearance of a schoolgirl. The game is still being developed but I strongly encourage you to get the demo from ►itch.io or Steam.
4️⃣ RETRO • Interactive Making Of — Jordan Mechner, the mastermind behind Prince of Persia (1989), and The Last Express (1997) is also renowned for his dedication to preserving gaming history. He achieves this through the publication of his diaries and generous donations to museums. In the same vein, The Making of Karateka is as much game as at it is an interactive documentary. Anyone interested in playing history will enjoy falling down this rabbit hole.
RETRO • Rogue — Can’t get enough of playing gaming history after The Making of Karateka? Glad you’ve made it this far. GitHub user mikeyk730 shared his ►Retro Rogue Collection, that transports six old versions (for UNIX and DOS) conveniently to your beefed-up x86. Lot of options there as well, e.g. to switch the tile sets or see it on an emulated terminal display, CRT effects included!
RETRO • C64 de-make of Amiga classic — Commodore 64 scene coder Marv posted a two minute long ► video on Twitter showcasing the first level of Bitmap Brothers’ top-down shooter The Chaos Engine as it runs smoothly (and recognizably) on a C64. Bananas!
Programming & Game Dev
How games are made by and for the people who make them—tools, resources, wisdom, humor.
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
— Oscar Wilde (via Troy Miles on Twitter)
GODOT • Toolkit — Indie dev and active Godot Engine contributor Tomasz Chabora shared on Twitter a demonstration of a Metroidvania toolkit for Godot, that “provides tools for designing the world map and helps implementing some gameplay elements”. It’s open source on ►GitHub.
BUSINESS • Indie Marketing — It’s never too early to promote your game (unless you have a hunch it’s about to join the fate of the other pet projects) so indie game dev and indie publicist (marketer?) Ash Gwinnell has your back with tools such as ►Press Kitty, a useful and free tool to make a professional press kit within minutes; or ►Coverage Bot: Google Alerts on steroids. Keep an eye on Ashley’s agency, Force of Habit, in general, folks.
BLOG • Gaming History — You’ve probably noticed a theme with this newsletter by now. Let me double down with Jimmy Maher’s excellent blog, ►The Digital Antiquarian. It brims with excellently written and diligently researched articles on gaming history with a focus on narrative and text games (that broadened somewhat over the years). Merely scrolling the massive table of contents makes you giddy with anticipation. Just pick an article that interests you to begin your journey. There’s weeks of excellent reading for you there!
INDIE BUSINESS • Sales breakdown — Developer of the tubular Roto Force, Anton Klinger, tweeted a numbers breakdown of the game one month after its release. I took the liberty to ►unroll the thread and put it on ►Pastebin also.
LEVEL DESIGN • Testing Process — When applying for a job as a level designer, you might be tasked to create a level in a tight time frame and that sounds scary. Back in 2020, Media Molecule’s Peter Field broke such a test down to manageable parts with lots of examples ►on Twitter. Since it’s pinned to his profile, I assume it still holds up.
RENDERING • Resource — Physically-based rendering (PBR) is capable of producing stunningly realistic looking images. If you’re curious about the whole process, graphics researcher Wenzel Jakob published the excellent 4th edition of ►PBR: from Theory to Implementation as free e-book/website with lots of examples and pretty pictures.
WINDOWS • Source Code Review — Programmer David W. Plummer gave us some of our most beloved software, such as the Space Cadet pinball table on Win NT, or CALC.EXE. In this 26-minute long ►video he posted to Twitter, Dave walks us through his code for another staple of the Windows OS, the Task Manager.
RETRO • Amiga — For the utmost Amiga experience, look no further than ►AmigaVision, “[t]he ultimate Amiga games & demo scene setup for MiSTer & Pocket FPGAs, emulators, and real Amiga hardware.” You can download the massive 3.6 GB treasure trove with decades of ready-to-run games, apps and demos on archive.org.
Art & Inspiration
Art, science, and other inspirations that left an impression on me
HISTORY • WWW — Miss the old web? Neal Agarwal, creative coder from Brooklyn has put up an interactive museum of the early Internet and subsequent web artifacts on the, well, web. ►Revel in the nostalgia with Homestar Runner, Napster, the early Google homepage and much more!
Windmill Town by Darek Zabrocki
BOOKS • Cities in Games — Game urbanist, game designer, and overall renaissance man, Konstantinos Dimopoulos ►shared a big thread of book suggestions “for your game city design & concepting needs” on Twitter. If you don’t like Twitter anymore (and who could blame you) I posted it also to Pastebin.
Aurora Borealis (Nov 5 2023, Bonaventure Québec by Mike MacLellan)
Pixel’s Mixed Bag
Things I’ve been up to, posts, random thoughts, and stuff that doesn’t fit in anywhere else.
There’s an entire website dedicated to the good old Windows calculator, calcexe.com
I’m still tinkering with my GameBoy game and I am slowly getting to grips with stack-based programming (within reason). Here’s a current screenshot:
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