The Pixel Prophet #10
Surprising hits, layoffs, Twitch revenue changes, and a variety of new indie games are featured in this edition.
Out of left field, Pocket Pair’s Palworld became 2024’s first surprise hit and Inkle shadow-dropped with The Forever Labyrinth another greatly written adventure on us. Even if neither is your cuppa, you still might be interested in recommended reading about them. As always, there are new indies vying for your favor so please check them out as well. On top, there’s the usual unsorted assortment of discoveries, news, and resources for your game-making
— Phil
News & Updates
More layoffs unsettled the gaming industry, as expected. Expert Matthew Ball published a long and insightful article into the complex reasons behind these layoffs and what to expect in 2024.
After substantial layoffs, Twitch announced on Jan 24th an expanded Partner Plus program where “partners AND Affiliates can earn higher revenue share [from subscriptions]” starting in May. While the change is welcomed by many Twitch creators, streamers with a big international following may see less revenue after all as subscribers from Amazon Prime are now assigned a fixed rate based on their country. Techcrunch has more.
Games
Big and small, old, and new, indie and very indie.
INDIE? • Art is Forever — Out of nowhere, Inkle surprised me last week with announcing (and publishing!) ►The Forever Labyrinth, an “art-filled quest through time and space” written and directed by the one and only Jon Ingold and realized by a small team of darn talented people. The game may be a Google Arts experiment, regardless it’s “a full-length adventure, playable in short bursts” with graphics and music and everything! On the technical side, it was written in Inkle’s Ink (what else?!), their open narrative scripting language that I urge you to try out.
INDIE • Rogue-lite Garden — Solo developer JgDoesThings from Barcelona has been working for four years on their colorful action-adventure rogue-lite, ►Galaia. Its gameplay looks very varied (and colorful) and promises fun for both newcomers and veterans of the genre. The game is about to be released later this year, so be sure to wishlist it if it ticks your boxes.
INDIE • Point ’n Thrill — While many point-and-click adventures tend to fall onto the spectrum between the comedic (Day of the Tentacle (1993)) or the dramatic (Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (1993)), Cosmic Void announced that their next adventure, ►Devil’s Hideout hews closer to the horror genre. The trailer looks as enticing as all of Cosmic Void’s other adventures and while the game is to release in Q3 of 2024, there’s already a demo out.
INDIE RETRO • Maniac Mansion? — If you are a fan of the Stamper bros’ (and/or Jon Ritman’s) isometric ZX Spectrum adventures, you will fall head over heels for Richard Jordan’s ►Melkhior’s Mansion, a free (!) action-adventure that looks and feels like it came out in the golden age, carefully modernized. It’s out on Mac, PC, and Linux; there’s even a port to the ZX Spectrum 128k by Bob Smith in the works.
INDIE • Metroidmania — With ►Before I Go, solo dev Jérôme Coppens got a “challenging Metroidvania with intense platforming” in development that appears already enticing. While the promise of “unforgiving battle action” repels me personally, it might be just right for some of you. The game could benefit from more wishlistings so please have a look at the trailer and immerse yourself in the game’s dense, otherworldly atmosphere.
INDIE • Gunning on Fumes — My last vehicular combat game was Interstate ’76 (1997) so I might be out of the loop on what’s current in that particular gene, but it seems that Mariusz Tarkowski’s ►FUMES one-ups that classic with a variety of customization options and faster-paced action. The retro aesthetic gives the game a fitting, rugged vibe. If Mad Max had a Playstation, that’s the game he would play. And you can too, there’s a demo out.
Programming & Game Dev
Tools, resources, wisdom, humor.
BEHIND THE SCENES • The Forever Labyrinth — Amanada Tien ►interviewed The Forever Labyrinth’s writer, Jon Ingold, about his approach to narrative design on PunishedBacklog.com. (via Ruber Eaglenest on Mastodon). Also, Tom Granger posted an article about the game from Google’s perspective.
BLOG • Indie Games and more — If you enjoy the Pixel Prophet, you might also enjoy Michael Klamerus’ blog, ►virtualmoose.org where Michael posts a regular Indie Game Roundup with lots of pictures and concise summaries of what the games have to offer. Michael also runs the Adventure Game Club, in case you want to join him in playing adventure games and frankly, why wouldn’t you?
TECH • LLM and You — Joris “Interface” de Gruyter, senior program manager at Microsoft, started an excellent series on AI and large language models (LLMs) in particular on his blog. In his posts, he amalgamizes the “thoughts, knowledge, and experiences from the last 12 months of LLM craziness in [his] life”. The articles are very approachable and an ideal starting point — even for people less technical than us.
FEDIVERSE • De-Google yourself — It’s a sometimes uncomfortable thing to ponder how much of my personal data is somewhere on Alphabet/Google's servers. And it’s not just me. Many of us set up our email with Gmail when the company didn’t yet seem evil, we write in Google Docs for the ease of use and shareability, and watch YouTube because that’s where all the good videos are and you don’t “get” TikTok. Alternatives are hard to come by but they do exist if you look close enough. FediFollows did and shared ►a list of Google Alternatives. Be sure to check out the replies for more; e.g. piped.video a “privacy friendly alternative YouTube frontend” (via ALICE on Mastodon)
GODOT • Switch it up! — Godot is a great, open game engine with a lot to offer—just not out-of-the-box support for multiple platforms, especially consoles due to the murky licensing situations with the big players. But now GamingOnLinux.com ►reports that RAWRLAB announced a “free Godot Engine port for authorized Nintendo Switch developers, supporting projects made with Godot versions 3.5.x and 4.1.x.”. Here’s RAWRLAB’s announcement that’s also mentioned in the article.
INTERVIEW • Nasir Gebelli — Six years ago John Romero (of Dangerous Dave (1988) fame, among other games) posted an ►interview he conducted with legendary games programmer Nasir Gebelli on YouTube that he conducted back in 1999. Already in the early 1980s, Gebelli had been a legendary and successful 6502-programmer; so much so, that his fame preceded him when he got hired by Squaresoft to program the first Final Fantasy (1987). After Final Fantasy 2 and 3, he was already a legend but after a long vacation, he returned once more to code Secret of Mana (1993) for Square before retiring with the income from his royalties. If you can stomach some very 1990s camerawork, the interview is a very interesting snack for video gaming history buffs.
FILMS • Public Domain and Chill — You enjoy the ever-growing library of public domain films but eschew the hassles of tracking down an old moving picture (I call them “movies” for short)? Fear no more, as Magnus Manske’s ►WikiFlix has your back: It attempts to recreate the convenience of a Netflix experience featuring freely licensed films from Wikimedia Commons, a built-in video player, and links to cast and crew.
RESOURCE • 1-bit Art — There are more generous creators than good old Kenney.nl, or on OpenGameArt.org who are kind enough to share their creation with anyone for making games. Musician, artist, game dev and cyber witch Hexany Ives is one of them with their ►Roguelike Tiles (16×16px) and ►Monster Menagerie (32×32px). Both seem perfectly suited for anyone trying to capture the spirit of the early Ultima (1981) or Spectrum games.
WISDOM • Think before you act — Tech entrepreneur and ”someone who's trying to make technology more responsible“, Anil Dash, ►posted on Mastodon the two questions he ”advises people to reflect on when they’re making new tech tools or platforms:
What happens if this succeeds? Does it make the internet better? The world better?
Who is harmed by the changes this causes? What would you choose to do if you loved them? Every single choice gets easier if you know those answers.“
KNOWLEDGE • Palworld’s Miracles — Palworld (2024) fell on fertile soil with the Pokémon crowd: After GameFreak dropped the ball with their not very effective Pokemon Scarlet and Pokemon Violet (both 2022), Japanese developer Pocket Pair stepped up and gave gamers what they craved: A fresh take on the Pokémon-like with contemporary visuals and more varied gameplay, cheekily and effectively combining current trends in gaming: Base-building (Fortnite (2017)), survival, and collecting cute “pals”–that are Pokémon with the serial numbers filed off–teetering on the perilous edge of copyright infringement. Think what you will of its AI-generated content, gratuitous violence, playful ”enslavement“ and weaponization of your pals but the game exploded and became this year’s first big success.
Friend of Pixel Prophecy, Alfred Baudisch, found a great and lengthy blog post by the developer’s CEO, Takuro Mizobe. While the ►original post is in Japanese, the Google-translated version is also a relatively palatable read, albeit with text in screenshots remaining Japanese. In it, Mizobe shares at length what he identified as the ”six miracles“ that contributed to the game’s success. If the original article is tl;dr, then have a look at Alfred’s summarizing thread on Mastodon.
EXPLAINER • Understanding QR Codes — I remember when I was a kid and the magical moment when I figured out that barcodes were just encoded numbers. QR codes are a different matter, impossible to decipher without a computer.
Or so I thought! As part of the 37th Chaos Communication Congress, 37C3 for short, Blinry and Piko made a wonderful ►interactive explainer that teaches you how a QR code works and how to read them—no computer required!
RESOURCE • Books about Games — In March of 2022, Dean a.k.a. Round2Gaming started a project to record and document literature and other publications about video games, the ►Video Game Library. It’s a place “where fellow gamers like you could come and discover literature about a franchise you enjoy, a creator you love, or even a topic you're looking to do a video on.” Also, if you are researching a topic, the well-tagged and organized site is a dangerous rabbit hole and has increased potential to cause the pile of shame on your nightstand to increase.
PROGRAMMING • Code Painting — I stumbled across this esoteric bit of computing, a visual programming language based on Piet Mondrian’s paintings titled ►Piet by David Morgan-Mar. You don’t write code with Piet, you paint it out of 20 distinct hues where a pixel’s hue and position define commands and values. “Okay, weird,” you might think, but it keeps getting better:
A small art gallery displayed artworks of an unnamed (but present) artist. One of the paintings in particular (presumably titled Get Together) caught the eye of some Piet J. [sic], who was familiar with Piet, the language. Piet (the person) got chatting with the artist, who hadn’t heard of Piet (the language) before. Still curious, Piet (the person) took a photo of the art and turned it into a Piet program just to see if it would run. And run it did:
“The code executes an infinite loop which reads in ASCII characters and prints out the corresponding numerical ASCII values. […] This is probably the first time in history that a graphic artist has painted a functionally workable computer program by accident.” (source) I love this story!
NAMING THINGS • Low — Medium — Ultra! — Game programmer and Lead Graphics Programmer at ZeniMax Online, Alex Tardif ►reflected on the names we give graphics settings and proposes alternatives.
Art & Inspiration
Art, science, and other inspirations that left an impression on me
Ivan Fedorovich Choultsé
“Sommerliche Parklandschaft” (summer park landscape) by Ivan Fedorovich Choultsé
“A storm on the horizon”
Few understood light such well as painter Ivan Fedorovich Choultsé (1877–1932) who painted hundreds of realist paintings around and after the turn of the century.
Find many more of his painting here and here.
Kieran Healy posted these delightful 1970s terminals on Mastodon when “colorful” didn’t mean RGB-LED-illuminated yet.
Mike Lynch
“Elevator—29th and Harriet” (oil on canvas, 1988) by Mike Lynch
“The Horn Towers” (oil on canvas, 1997)
More of Mike Lynch’s art in this ►book
Pixel’s Mixed Bag
What I’ve been up to, posts, random thoughts, and stuff that doesn’t fit in anywhere else.
◾ Started a painting of my own, it’s been almost ten years since I last flung a brush and spread oil colors everywhere. I am working on a pixel-perfect, albeit fully analog, rendition of Tetris’s space shuttle launch from its 1989 GameBoy installment.
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