The Pixel Prophet #07
News, indie games, and longer stories and editorials on Disney, the Phaser framework and Monkey Island on the C64
Originally published on Dec 18, 2023 on Substack
A quick round of housekeeping before we start.
In the previous issue, I asked your opinion on the release frequency and release day of the Pixel Prophet and two thirds preferred the latest issue to drop on Monday. As for frequency, the votes for weekly and bi-weekly were almost equal so the deciding factor for me was whether people minded having to continue reading longer newsletters on Substack (~60% didn’t).
Thus, starting with issue 08, The Pixel Prophet will be published every two weeks, starting January 1st, 2024 with more content and more pretty pictures.
Should it get really bad with email providers clipping or, gasp!, refusing to display the additional content in the Prophet, please let me know. Should that happen too frequently, I’ll have to come up with something.
Thanks for voting and enjoy the holidays with another packed nerdy newsletter with a bit more substance to some stories than usual. Let me know how you like it.
— Phil
News & Updates
The Microsoft-owned OpenAI formed a global partnership with Axel Springer, the media behemoth with publications such as Business Insider, Politico, or Europe’s biggest tabloid, Bild. Financial Times quotes Axel Springer’s CEO that through the deal they seek to “explore the opportunities of AI-empowered journalism.” What could possibly go wrong?
In other AI news: Also in cahoots with OpenAI is Dropbox which has auto-opted-in their users to share their data to train the LLM. Being a paying Dropbox customer for over a decade, this understandably horrifies me. CNBC has more details and Alfred Baudisch posted an illustrated guide on how to opt out. Yet, the damage seems to be done.
This week’s stream takes place on Saturday, December 23rd at 23:00 CET
(► here’s that in your time zone)y followed by Sunday, the 31st at the same time. It’s still DOSember, so another DOS game awaits!
Games
Big and small, old, and new, indie and very indie.
1️⃣ INDIE • Austrian Dungeon Adventure — Microbird Games from Vienna offers an enticing action-adventure experience with exceptionally tasty-looking visuals with their game ►Dungeons of Hinterberg. The gameplay itself is divided between hacking and slaying monsters and walking around the (actual?) town of Hinterberg where you can talk to residents and tourists. The game so far looks very promising and will be released in 2024 for Xbox and Steam.
2️⃣ RETRO-INDIE • GameBoy Dungeon Crawler — Eligos Games recently released Broke Studio’s kick-started game ►Traumatarium on GameBoy … and the Switch! The GameBoy game itself is extremely pretty, the gameplay a series of simple choices, e.g. “Fight or use item?”, “Engage or flee?”, “Inspect or ignore?” i.e. gameplay reminiscent of Reigns (2016). While you can still play this minimalist dungeon crawler on itch.io in the browser, the Switch version adds more bells and whistles around it like the option to inspect the imaginary game box. What a hearty serving of instant nostalgia!
3️⃣ INDIE • Rubberhose Shooter — Remember Cuphead (2017), the tough-as-nails run-and-gun hyphen-inducing shooter borrowing the look and feel of 1930s animation? Of course you do! Now imagine, how a FPS in the same style would look and play like. But why imagine, when you can look at the current state of ►MOUSE by Fumi games from Poland? There’s a plot in there somewhere, but I’d be playing it for the aesthetics alone: Bouncy animations, heads exploding in inky splats, and everyone wearing those white gloves. And yes, you can drop a grand piano on enemies. I'm sold. The game is said to come out in 2025.
The elephant in the room, however, is a different mouse. Or rather, its proprietor—Disney. While it’s true that Mickey Mouse will enter the public domain in 2024, that comes with some strings attached: “It is only the more mischievous, rat-like, non-speaking boat captain in ‘Steamboat Willie’ that has become public,” AP clarifies. Thus MOUSE, the game, seems to remain clear of possible infringement with their depiction. Though, I wouldn’t fully count on it.
Disney are well aware of the priceless brand recognition of their golden goose and, throughout history, has lobbied heavily to extend its copyright protection. They got their way in both 1976 and 1998, effectively resulting in a Lex Disney, a law that’s tailored to their needs. It’s the reason, why we have these bonkers protection periods; “life of the author plus 70 years and for works of corporate authorship to 95 years from publication or 120 years after creation, whichever end is earlier.” (Wikipedia). Side note: Try searching for Lex Disney and the results are clogged with a toy titled “Lex-GO!” by Disney. Coincidence or calculation?
Doubtlessly, Disney will watch like a hawk over their rodent, their lawyers at the ready to litigate any overstep to oblivion, wielding that Big D energy. That was the joke I wanted to make all along and I’m almost sorry.
4️⃣ INDIE • Pulp Adventure — Hot damn! That’s how I’d describe ►Bahnsen Knights’ presentation and overall vibe. The pixely adventure game by LCB Game Studio from Argentina with its moderately enhanced CGA color palette (now including Red™!) transports you to the mid-eighties along the Tornado Alley. You “go undercover as Boulder, an agent infiltrating the notorious religious cult known as the Bahnsen Knights”. The game is another entry in LCB’s series of “Pixel Pulps” (“fast-paced visual novels with rich pixel art”). The game feels like True Detective (2014) meets Kojima’s Snatcher (1988) with a whiff of NORCO (2022). Fresh off the pulp press, you have until Thursday to enjoy the introductory 10% off over at Steam.
Programming & Game Dev
Tools, resources, wisdom, humor.
OPINION: Video games have not come a long way since Pac Man
— and they're getting worse with each passing year.
— Sylvie (@sylviefluff on Twitter)
RETRO² • Monkey Island on the C64! — In 2017, issue 100 of the Commodore 64 diskmag Digital Talk featured an innocuous little demo, a de-make of the LucasArts classic The Secret of Monkey Island (1990), made with the D42 Adventure System. It wasn’t the full game, of course, merely a proof-of-concept running on the Commodore 64. At its end, the demo joked that anyone who wanted to keep on playing should kindly make the full version themselves.
Hard cut. In mid-2022, a post appeared on a German Commodore forum. In that post, forum member Gerke Kemper* recounted the mentioned demo, specifically its ending message, and that they had “almost completely complied with [the demo’s] request.” A few rooms and dialogs in their version were still absent, no biggie. More pertinently, over 100 location backgrounds needed to be tailored to the smaller resolution and color palette of the Commodore 64, as merely downscaling and reducing the colors didn’t lead to satisfying results.
Gerke’s planned to recruit pixel artists for the task, and to complete and release the finished game that year concurrently with the long-awaited Return to Monkey Island (2022). That obviously fell through as it was over a year later, on September 21st, 2023 that Gerke finally announced “Game is finished, just one song is yet to be done”. Gerke also had reached out to Monkey Island’s creator, Ron Gilbert, about whether he, Gilbert, wanted to publish the game or Gerke could release it for free themselves.
Gilbert replied a week later and cautioned against angering Disney, the rights owner to all LucasArts properties, and to keep the little fan project inconspicuous. This was discussed on the forum as well, with some members suggesting alternative names as smoke and mirrors.
Not jeopardizing the project became a priority and on October 5th, Gerke announced that he made a version devoid of contributors’ names, including those of the D42 Adventure System framework. As late as December 7th, Gerke asked the forum moderators to change the thread’s title from directly mentioning the original game’s title to something less conspicuous, again to “stay under the radar”.
Finally, on the 13th of December 2023 (that’s last week!) the game was complete and saw its first release on the forum as C64 disk images. Gerke openly considered having the entire thread deleted (spanning 37 pages at the time of writing) once the counter surpassed 100 downloads, but in the end, the decision was made to just remove the download button as the game would proliferate on the internet by itself by then, as things do.
I am lucky to have caught the thread, followed the development and the discussions surrounding it to be able to report on it here. It’s a shame that developers of fan projects have to go out of their way to try and hide their identities just not to risk petty litigation.
You can get the three disk sides including PDF manual on the ►C64 Scene Database.
[* Editor’s note: To protect the identities of the involved parties, some names and dates have been altered and quotes rephrased.]
RETRO • Link’s Awakening on the PC! — Another cease-and-desist-pending release hit itch.io last week in the form of ►Link’s Awakening DX HD, a PC remake of arguably the best GameBoy game. Too good to be true? Perhaps, because I can’t help feeling that the copy has a ChatGPT smell to it. Also, itch.io issued a warning when I tried download the ZIP archive. Then again, the download includes source.7z and from poking around in it a bit, it seems legit. So either someone inserted malware in an existing project (possible but unlikely) or the Big N’s lawyers are already on the case.
Update December 15th: …and it’s gone. The real deal or not, itch.io published the take-down request by Nintendo of America’s legal team. they state the Link’s Awakening DX HD “infringes and makes unauthorized use of Nintendo’s copyrights in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening video game.”
As game developers, we can learn from this port nonetheless. Game designer at Bungie and Zelda nerd, Max Nichols, ►summed up on Twitter how pacing and player experience are impacted by not having fixed screen transitions. I put his thread on Pastebin as well.
BLENDER • Physical Correctness — Blender and the community surrounding it just keeps on giving: For example, last week the latest version of ►Photographer 5.3.1 by Fabien Christin went live. Photographer 5 is an add-on that simulates the physical properties of photographic lenses, lights, films, and cameras for Blender’s EEVEE and Cycles renderers. Coming from both VFX and photography myself, just looking at the examples makes me drool. I’m still bound to the expensive Maya + Arnold subscriptipny so, getting similar features with Photographer 5 for merely $24 is a steal!
HISTORY • Akalabeth (1979) and Ultima I (1981) — I am leaning very strongly on Konstantinos Dimopoulos’ posts on Twitter this week again but the stuff he posts often lies spot-on on my wavelength. There's another well-researched and -produced long form video on a game I know but never played myself? Yes, please! Majuular’s ►retrospective on Richard Garriot’s first two games is exactly that.
COMPUTING HISTORY • Old Ads — John Paul Wohlscheid’s newsletter / Substack presence titled ►Computer Ads from the Past delivers you the finest news in old ads and often provides historical context to them. It looks like one of those things that open up rabbit hole after rabbit hole for you to explore until the sun suddenly comes up again.
[* Editor’s note on Dec 25, 2023: Since Substack doesn’t oppose Nazis and decided to profit off their newsletters, I removed the direct link]
WEB GAME DEV • A new phase for Phaser — In 2010 Steve Jobs wrote a letter. Not just any old correspondence on the merits of his fruit-based devices but instead one of those open letters that garner a lot of attention. He titled it “Thoughts on Flash” and in it, Jobs talked about the issues he saw with Adobe's Flash and his decision for Apple devices to block it. (Here’s the full letter also on Pastebin)
Whatever the reasons, and Jobs stated six, without Apple’s support, the days of Flash were numbered. A hole appeared in its place and especially small developers making browser games for a living saw their floe melting quickly (yeah, I know I am mixing metaphors, whatever!).
One of them was Richard Davey, a web and games dev at the time. “[E]veryone thought, ‘What are we going to do instead?’ And I figured if I was going to keep making browser games I needed an alternative, but nothing existed,” he is quoted in a recent OCV blog post.
As so often before, new technology was born out of a personal need as much as the desire for a pet project. Richard was working on a complex application in 2013. “[S]ometimes you need some small wins to rekindle your love for development. So I literally spent a weekend while the family was away hacking together a crude conversion of [the Flash framework] Flixel [for HTML 5],” Richard said in a GitHub interview in 2016.
Thus the first version version of Phaser went live on GitHub in April 2013 as a fully open sourced project under the MIT license. The rest is history. Todayy t.housands of mostly browser-based games use Phaser—Vampire Survivors (2022) being the most prominent example (at least up to version 1.6 before their switch to Unity.) Today, the web-focused Phaser sits comfortably between much bigger engines that have their priorities elsewhere.
All the while, Richard’s company, Photon Storm, has been actively developing the framework with over 1000 community contributions over the past decade.
But there’s change on the horizon: Last week, Open Core Ventures (from whose blog I snatched most of this story) announced their partnership with Richard “to launch Phaser Studio, an open core company built around Phaser.” The plan is “to hire a team of engineers to modernize Phaser to take advantage of new technologies and accelerate product development.”
Why I welcome the added sustainability this partnership seems to bring to the table, I can’t help but irk at a headline in the aforementioned announcement reading “Playable ads everywhere and anywhere” because this is what we’ll get as well. I just hope to see more genuine and honest indie games created by artists using Phaser that counterbalance the increasing amount of low-grade *pLaYabLe aDs* we’ll have to endure.
Art & Inspiration
Art, science, and other inspirations that left an impression on me
Because this issue has ballooned in size, I shorten this segment substantially.
Pentlands Tree Study
by Paul Reid
(57cm × 42cm, Charcoal, Acrylics & Ink)
Pixel’s Mixed Bag
What I’ve been up to, posts, random thoughts, and stuff that doesn’t fit in anywhere else.
◾ I had this week off and couldn’t wait to get to all the things that I wanted to do, the coffee I wanted to drink, and hibernating projects to pick up. From phrasing alone, you probably guess where I am going with this. Between all the overdue chores and appointments I finally felt obliged to tackle, at least I continued pushing the boulder up that hill that is my basement studio. Then again, I made good on the coffee. And this newsletter. Thanks for reading!
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