The Pixel Prophet #04
YoYo Games makes Game Maker Studio free, GTA veteran's blog shut down, Inspector Waffles kickstarted, and indie games featured.
Originally published on Nov 27, 2023 on Substack
YoYo games makes Game Maker Studio free. In a recent post, the Opera owned engine supplier surprised everyone by going free for non-commercial games! Also, a one-time-purchase option returned (“Pro”), the only subscription seems to be the “Enterprise” plan offering console exports. (See this overview of plans.) Another nail in Unity’s coffin.
GTA veteran Obbe Vereij started a blog with anecdotes of his time at Rockstar North but it took the current-day Rockstar mere hours to shut it down because he was “ruining the Rockstar mystique or something”, Obbe explains.
In issue 00, the very first game I recommended was the GameBoy color adventure Inspector Waffles Early Days. Last Friday it got successfully kickstarted.
This week’s stream takes place on Sunday, December 3rd at 23:00 CET
(► here’s the time in your time zone)
Games
Big and small, old, and new, indie and very indie.
1️⃣ INDIE • Shmup-Puzzler — Engine and game developer Martin Mauersics’s incredibly original combination of shoot-em-up (“shmup”) and puzzler, ►Eigengrau, recently hit the Switch. True to form, Martin coded Eigengrau’s engine himself that you can stay in the game's flow without any of the annoying micro-stutters of, say, Unity games when C#’s garbage collection kicks in. Show this original gem some love, it really deserves it.
2️⃣ INDIE • Bite-sized horror tycoon — What a jumble of words but how else could you describe rachedrawsthis’ ►Dead Plate, a “2D restaurant tycoon themed RPG horror game with visual novel and point-and-click elements set in 1960s France.” I love the premise and setting, I love the presentation and the general weirdness of it! Download Dead Plate at your own price on itch.io.
3️⃣ INDIE • Visual JRPG-like Novel — Expanding upon their The Salt Keep (2023) fantasy universe, Small Gray Games currently develops ►South of the March, an RPG that harkens back to Final Fantasy-style combat albeit with “semi-open world visual novel exploration”. The game looks promising and the presentation alone is wonderful.
4️⃣ INDIE • Mind Trip FPS — If you like first-person shooters but feel they all lack dream-like visuals and psychedelic presentation, Sorath’s ►HYPER DEMON might be something to check out. Screenshots don’t do it justice, you have to experience it in motion. The game’s store blurb tells you everything you need to know: “[…] pearl of lightning. a dream from the future. a drop of poison. a swan song. The faster you slay demons, the harder the game and the higher your score. There is an end. Will it see you?” It’s still on sale until tomorrow.
Programming & Game Dev
How games are made by and for the people who make them—tools, resources, wisdom, humor.
You don’t get wiser as you get older,
you just start running out of new mistakes to make.
— Bob Golen (on Twitter)
WEBDEV • CSS — I always enjoy finding out about cool CSS tricks. Software developer Marko Denic ►shares some and other useful webdev resources on his Twitter, e.g. this handy CSS :nth-child cheat sheet. (I also posted it to Imgur)
TOOLS • Demo Tool — Legendary Hungarian demo group Conspiracy (who you might know from their stellar 64k realtime intros), released their tool ►apEx (including source and data files) that they had been using and improving for over 13 years. Huge kudos for making it open!
GAMEDEV • Behind the curtain — Developer Fabien Sanglard’s website is a cornucopia of assembled nerdities which is exactly what this newsletter is about. For example, he dives into how Street Fighter II’s (1991) title screen typo was fixed last minute; how Another World (1991) renders cutscenes; or an intriguing (and illustrated) source code review of Jurassic Park: Trespasser (1998). He also wrote the excellent Game Engine Black Books on Wolfenstein 3D (1992) and DOOM (1993) which I can’t recommend enough.
GAME BOY DEV • Back to BASICs — If you’re like me and can’t get enough of GameBoy development, then you might be delighted to learn that there’s a new fantasy console in alpha, ►GB BASIC. It’s so close to the gray brick’s specs, that you can run GB BASIC games on the actual 80s handheld. (via GrumpyFunction on Mastodon)
PICO-8 • Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) — Kevin Thompson posted a YouTube ►video on OOP with LUA for PICO-8 (such uppercase, wow!), incl. GitHub repository.
BUSINESS • Press Kits — You might remember issue 02 recommending Ashley Gwinnell’s PressKitty tool. Last week he ►published an article detailing the five biggest mistakes indies make with their press kits. The title seems a bit click-baity, but Ash knows much better what works than I do. Be sure to subscribe to their blog/newsletter for more indie marketing gems.
GAMEDEV • Ditch Spreadsheets! — As part of the Roguelike Celebration (cf. issue 00), Patrick Kemp from Spry Fox ►shares their tooling design with a lightweight YAML-based config library to procedurally generate content, eliminating any need for wrangling a massive spreadsheet. The other talks in that video are interesting too!
PREDICTION • The future of indie graphics — Christer “McFunkypants” Kaitila predicted on Twitter the next big indie trend after pixels, voxels, and wobbly PS1 aesthetics:
“[…] [t]he NEXT indie game art style that is going to mega explode in the next few years[:] The Max Payne / GoldenEye / Deus Ex low-poly-with-photo-style textures will be the new flat shaded.”
Art & Inspiration
Art, science, and other inspirations that left an impression on me
SKILL TREES • Level up your hobby — Australian Creative Technologist and maker, Steph Piper is “building up a collection of printable open source templates that can guide and track progression in hands-on skills. Colour in the boxes as you complete each skill and get inspired to try new things”. Check it out on ► Steph’s GitHub and contribute, if you can.
CHIPMUSIC • Yuzo Koshiro’s new/old album — Japanese video game composer Yuzo Koshiro (whose career I outlined at length in my podcast once) is at it again with the old-school tunes. last week, chiptune label Brave Wave Productions released Koshiro-san’s revisit of his ►arranged soundtrack for the PC-88 game The Scheme (1988) he composed at age 21! Revel in those polished FM sounds!
CONCEPT ART • Scaly references — Illustrator and concept artist Mortimer M (Morty) shared a heavily ►illustrated thread on Twitter “[…] lesser known sources of cool scaly armor [inspirations] for those who want to vary up their osteoderm arrays!”
Pixel’s Mixed Bag
Things I’ve been up to, posts, random thoughts, and stuff that doesn’t fit in anywhere else.
◾ Too much work and no play makes Phil a dull boy. At least I got some work in my GameBoy tile generator done, although it’s nothing ready for public release at this time. So here’s an image of the neighbors’ cat I dithered with my tool-in-progress:
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