The Pixel Prophet #05
New adventure games, testing opportunities, and nerdy news in this edition—snowy greetings from Phil!
Originally published on Dec 4, 2023 on Substack
This issue features a few new classic adventure games you might not have heard of and the usual grab-bag of nerdy stuff. Enjoy the snow! — Phil
News & Updates
Developer of Signal & Echo: Iris is Missing, Kini Games, who you might remember from the issue 02 is looking for testers on their Discord.
This week’s stream takes place on Saturday, December 9th at 23:00 CET
(► here’s that in your time zone). And since it’s DOSember expect more DOS games being played.
Games
Big and small, old, and new, indie and very indie.
1️⃣ INDIE • Classic comedy — Tall Story Games from Britain is taking a comedic swing at the classic Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde with their “hilariously British” ►Heir of the Dog (which is also soon on GOG). There’s already a delightful demo to try out. Innit?
2️⃣ INDIE • Textual Horror — Self-described Post-Punk / Dark Wave / Metal artist and producer Stefan Vogt from Berlin also loves to write interactive fiction in the best tradition of Infocom. His latest horror adventure, ►The Ghosts of Blackwood Manor has you explore a Scottish manor with a dark history. Since the game runs in Infocom’s advanced Z-Machine interpreter, it can even be played on many original 1980s and 1990s computers!
3️⃣ INDIE • Wild West — Veteran developer Francisco González a.k.a Grundislav Games is about to release a new adventure that's also set in the world of his previous game Lamplight City (2018). In an alternate 19th century, ►Rosewater promises you “bandits, rebels, visionaries, eccentrics, and many more friends and foes on your quest for fame and riches.” I am so looking forward to getting into a messy bar brawl!
4️⃣ INDIE • Space Love — The VGA-tastic indie adventure ►Blood Nova published by Cosmic Void strands you on cosmic light house with your best friend Kal. assume the throne of a galactic empire in the end? There’s a demo if you want to find out.
INDIE • Ghostly comedy — Another example of a classic-looking new adventure is Fabio Guggeri’s ►The Will of Arthur Flabbington: The death of your uncle turns him into a ghost and this adventure into a buddy comedy. The game boasts “Jokes!” and “state-of-the-art 320×180 resolution” which the trailer definitely confirms. The affair look very funny; there’s a demo on Steam as well.
RETRO PORTS • Metroid — If only there was a Metroid (1986) game for the SNES… What? No, I’m not talking about Super Metroid (1994), I want to play the original. Curiously, NES hacker and ROM expert from Massachusetts, infidelity, made exactly that, a 1:1 port of the original NES game to run on the Super Nintendo (but with better sound) You can find this and other ports on infidelity’s ►uploads profile on archive.org.
Programming & Game Dev
Tools, resources, wisdom, humor.
If we want users to like our software,
we should design it to behave like a likable person.
— Alan Cooper (via Troy Miles on Twitter)
ADVENTURE GAMES • Old-school adventure game engine — If you want to get started with little friction on making old(-school) illustrated text adventures yourself, look no further than ►Adventuron. It’s an ideal tool to learn programming at an early age but that doesn’t mean you need to be a kid to have fun with it.
GAME DESIGN • Favorite Quests — Legendary designer Ron Gilbert of Monkey Island (1990) fame asked on Mastodon about people’s favorite RPG quests. His toot is a good place to start; but Ron is such a nice person, he compiled the responses he received in a post ►on his blog as well.
LUCAS ARTS • Interview with Sam & Max creator Steve Purcell — The title says it all: Two weeks ago, Daniel Albu ►interviewed artist Steve Purcell who not only invented the unhinged freelance policing duo, but also worked on many other LucasArts games. The video clocks in at over 3:45 hours, so if you want a deep dive, you’re sure to get it.
HISTORY • Swiss Games — Confederatio Ludens is a project that “unites a dynamic team of 20 researchers across four university locations in Switzerland”. Their goal is to study of the history of Swiss digital games. While this may sound as dry as a long-forgotten Toblerone but if you aren’t nerdy about niche topics, you probably stopped reading this newsletter long ago anyway. The project has a ►very welcoming blog/website, and series titled “Chunky Game Booklets” about instruction manuals always pique my interest — and maybe yours.
BETHESDA • Todd looks back — Wired recently published ►a video of Bethesda’s creative director Todd Howard looking back on the games he worked on the past 23 years. He’s such a nerd and I mean that as a compliment.
PROGRAMMING • VS Code’s “Sticky Scroll” — Did you know of this little life-improvement called “sticky scroll” with version 1.70? It sticks the declaration of the function you’re currently editing on the top, no matter how far down you are. It’s amazingly helpful when your code is a bit … messy. ►Here’s a little write-up on it I found on dev.io.
WEBDEV • CSS again — Francesco Vetere posted an article on dev.to titled “The most underrated CSS property?”. Usually when there’s a question mark in a headline the answer is always No, but if you dabble in webdesign and haven’t encountered CSS’s isolation property, you might want to ►check it out. (via Baldur Bjarnason on Mastodon)
Art & Inspiration
Art, science, and other inspirations that left an impression on me
ANIMATION • Blender — 16-year-old Euan Garbut from Glasgow won Blender’s Young Animator award of this year with his stellar street food vendor robot ►animation. It’s only a minute long but darn impressive! Also funny: Euran’s dad Errol on LinkedIn debunks rumors that he helped his son with the project.
WRITING • Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Rules for writing — I saw them posted by fascinating on Twitter and took the liberty to repost them to ►Pastebin.
READING • Classic Cyberpunk — ► 1986 saw the publication of Mirrorshades – The Cyberpunk Anthology, edited by sci-fi author Bruce Sterling. Long out of print since, the book is now “pirated by its authors”, available as free e-book and website! Find it ►here. (via John Shirley on Mastodon)
Pixel’s Mixed Bag
What I’ve been up to, posts, random thoughts, and stuff that doesn’t fit in anywhere else.
◾ I was without power this weekend, for nine hours! And without heating and hot water for even longer. The humanity! Good thing I know how to occupy myself without the need to constantly be on a computer of some sorts: I slept through most of it.
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