The Pixel Prophet #03
A Women's Day Sale on Steam, Embracer Group's layoffs, game recommendations, programming updates, and art inspiration.
Originally published on Nov 27, 2023 on Substack
News & Updates
Are you a woman and sell your game(s) on Steam? Then apply for the next Women’s Day Sale in March here!
Embracer Group laid off 900 people in the past quarter, RPS reports. A great year for games, but a horrible year if you work in the industry.
In issue 02 I recommended The Making of Karateka. Eurogamer published an interview with the studio behind it on making it.
Another issue 02 recommendation was The Digital Antiquarian. Matt Barton interviewed author Jimmy Maher for his Matt Chat YouTube series.
This week’s stream takes place on Saturday, Nov 25th at 23:00 CET
(► here’s that in your time zone).
Games
Games, big and small, old, and new, indie and very indie.
1️⃣ INDIE • Surreal H.R: Giger-esque Adventure — Japanese developer SmokymonkeyS released their very dark and bizarre ►Garage: Bad Dream Adventure last year that looks and feels like a 1990s CD-ROM render-adventure—albeit with much less mass appeal. Just look at the detailed pre-rendered puzzle screens! If you’re weird like me, it might be up your alley. (via Alfred Baudisch on Mastodon)
2️⃣ INDIE • Horror Adventure — In 2020, Rémi Bismuth and Nicolas Millot made a short horror adventure inspired by a fictitious Famicom game cover (shoutout to the annual Famicase exhibition!). In ►Veiled you explore an abandoned mansion infested with Lovecraftian monsters in stylish 1-bit graphics. (via indiebratgirl on Twitter)
3️⃣ INDIE • PS1 Horror — No, the horror doesn’t stem from the unfiltered, aliased, uncorrected textures and generally wobbly low-res graphics, that’s just the icing on the cake. Studio [notes.] (sic) from Japan released their PS1/Dreamcast-era inspired survival miniature ►Cold Abyss on itch, cheekily advertised as the “perfect game to unwind after a long day”. Let’s just say I have my doubts.
4️⃣ INDIE • 1-bit madness — Frankly, I don’t have a clue what exactly ►DarkwebSTEAMER is, but it looks delightfully weird, creepy, and disturbing. If you are into unnerving, scary, 1-bit horror, you should keep an eye on whatever this self-described “procedurally generated psycho-horror streamer simulation game” turns out to be exactly. Kidding aside, developer We Have Always Lived in the Forest shared some of the game’s features on Twitter (I also put that on PasteBin)
Programming & Game Dev
How games are made by and for the people who make them—tools, resources, wisdom, humor.
HISTORY • Lambda Complex — Yesterday, Half-Life turned 25 years (#feeloldyet). Valve celebrates their seminal masterpiece with a huge update to the game as well as an excellent hour-long making of documentary. Ready your crowbar, grab your pet headcrab and ►watch it on YouTube.
LEVEL DESIGN • Free eBook — Still somewhat afloat, Unity ►posted last week their “first-ever e-book for level designers”, “[…] written by professional level designers working in the games industry”. Get it while you still can.
GODOT • Level Design Tool — Game and tools dev CookieBadger recently ►updated their already super-useful tool Asset Placer that adds a powerful asset browser to Godot with automatic thumbnails, libraries, snapping, and so much more. It looks very convenient!
FONTS • Monospaced & pretty — Senior director of research at GitHub Next, Idan Gazit, worked with type foundry Lettermatic over two years to bless our code editors with ►Monaspace, a beautiful set of expertly engineered and sensibly designed mono-spaced fonts. Maybe it’s time to upgrade from your trusty Noto Sans Mono or Liberation Mono?
GAMES JOURNALISM • New site, who dis? — Former Kotaku staffers recently banded together to found ►Aftermath, “a worker-owned, reader-supported news site covering video games, the internet, and the cultures that surround them”. My favorite article so far is on the dire coffee situation in Bethesda’s Starfield, but the independent outlet won’t shy away from reporting on the inconvenient topics in the industry either, worker exploitation being one of them. Let’s wish them the best!
GRAPHICS • Real-time global illumination — Game dev and code tinkerer Asbjørn Lystrup posted a video (on YouTube) demonstrating his implementation of a realtime rendering technique: “Global illumination with radiance cascades, now optimized, running at ca. 0.3 ms per frame (GTX 970 GPU). No denoising or temporal accumulation. Calculated from scratch each frame.” Just watching it in action is mesmerizing. Curious? Here’s the ►paper!
BUSINESS • Indie Marketing — Recommending marketing resources for indies seems to have become a trend with this newsletter. Here’s ►advice about visibility on Steam and what The Algorithm does (Spoiler: There’s no one algorithm) by games marketing guru Chris Zukowski.
PRODUCTION • Accessibility — In a Gamedeveloper.com article, Whitethorn’s chief accessibility officer, Britt Dye ►lines out how you can implement an accessibility pipeline in your studio. Even if you’re merely a bedroom coder, it’s never too early to look into making your games accessible.
Art & Inspiration
Art, science, and other inspirations that left an impression on me
Midwest Modern — Josh Lipnik travels the US and ►posts (on Twitter) “Architecture, Art, and Design from the Midwest” he comes across; from the mundane to the imposing. His Twitter is like a coffee table book to browse through.
Collage of untitled works by Zdzisław Beksiński
Peaceful Neon Pixel Art by StuntmAEn Bob, posted on Mastodon
Pixel’s Mixed Bag
Things I’ve been up to, posts, random thoughts, and stuff that doesn’t fit in anywhere else.
◾ So I downloaded Nintendo source code just because I was curious. It’s not completely questionable, as July 2020 saw a massive leak of early Nintendo games (aptly titled the Gigaleak) that also included source code and unreleased assets of many 1990s Nintendo games. The archives are up on, well, archive.org, if you want to go dumpster diving too. It’s fun browsing the assembly code and developer comments on games such as F-Zero (1990), Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening or Starfox (both 1993). Fun fact: Super Mario Bros.’ “goal post” was misspelled in hilarious different ways in the source code, Supper Mario Broth (sic) shared on Twitter. I took a peek myself and can confirm!
◾ I signed up for DOSember which means that during the month of December I’ll stream and play mostly DOS games. Time to clean up AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS!
◾ I’m still futzing around with GameBoy development and delved head-on into writing assembly with the RGBDS package. I even wrote my own tool to convert tile sets and tile maps to assembly code. The latest version is online and it runs in your browser.
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