The Pixel Prophet #15
A newsletter full of lists, gaming docs, and indie games with a touch of humor on stolen AI art, game development, and absurd UK modding. (This summary was AI generated)
Dearest readers!
This is another issue packed with cool stuff; many lists compiled as resources, high-quality gaming documentaries, and a wide variety of indie games. Forgive me that with one or two, I had a little more to say.
Thanks again to all the wonderful people who decided to pitch in again and make the Pixel Prophet possible. I hope you enjoy this one.
— Phil, unicorn-in-chief
You can support the Pixel Prophet at ko-fi, or donate via PayPal to ensure its sustainability. It also helps to tell others about the Prophet who share your great taste in newsletters.
News & Updates
- Adobe’s “ethical” Firefly AI was trained on stolen art, by way of proxy via Midjourney, Bloomberg reports. You can’t make this shit up, really. Thanks to that article’s co-author Rachel Metz for the gift link.
- Slay the Spire developer Mega Crit ditches Unity for their sequel after over two years of development, PC Gamer knows. It’s a bold step that’s symptomatic of the trust Unity lost with developers in the last year.
- Elon’s X auto-replaces any mentions of “Twitter” with “X” in tweets on iOS (Mashable ) because he’s just that determined to destroy any remaining brand value.
- DREDGE gets a film adaptation EuroGamer reports. The production company Story Kitchen (Sonic the Hedgehog starring Jim Carrey) secured the rights, at least. A look at their projects page reveals many more plans, but which will become a reality and eventually see light of day is a different question altogether.
- Nintendo retires 3DS and Wii U online services. On April 8th, 2024 the online functionality of the beloved handheld and the not-as-beloved console will cease. Nintendo confirms that StreetPass and offline play will remain possible.
- The Solar Eclipse in North America prompted some cool posts on Twitter, such as how it looked from space or from a plane
Games
Big and small, old, and new, indie and very indie
goodbye.monster
RELEASED • Bit rot
In ’96 or ’97 I got my first (and sadly only) pet. It was a Tamagotchi. I don’t remember the name I gave it, only that I brought it with me to the movie theater and cleaned its pixel poop away while Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones were busy hunting an alien roach on the big screen. My little pal died a few days after, likely from that exposure.
27 years later, I still don’t have a pet, but at least I could pretend with ►goodbye.monster, an unusual text adventure with a twist: Instead of exploring the world alone, you soon meet little creatures, (monsters?) that you need to care for as you venture through a “nostalgic world until the inevitable end of those creatures’ lives”. The presentation is minimal and unusual, but the atmosphere is thick with mold and decay; it reminded me of how Dark Souls (2011) depicts its world. It’s an odd but engrossing mix of exploration, imagination, and contemplation. Tip: Don’t forget that you can scroll the page!
The game was a nominated finalist for Best Student Game at the IGF (Independent Games Festival) and because of that, Game Developer’s Joel Couture ►interviewed the team that came up with goodbye.monster.
The Endarkenment
IN DEVELOPMENT • At the Mountains of Madness
Solo dev Graham G. Uhelski in Nashville currently works on ►The Endarkenment, a “narrative-based psychological horror game” that will send you to Antarctica at a time “where the apocalypse is only the beginning”.
Even from the few, early screenshots it’s obvious that Graham brings a filmmaker’s eye to the project; and Unreal Engine 5 is an excellent choice for cinematic realism. I think it’s that attention to framing and visuals that caught my eye, myself being a colorist by trade, after all.
The game looks promising, is wishlistable, and with the planned release in the first quarter of 2026, there’s plenty of time to keep building anticipation.
Duke Smoochem 3D
DAFT CURIO MOD • Hail to the United Kingdom, baby!
The United Kingdom has been going through a lot lately. Tories are partying and lining their pockets with taxpayer money, Scotland seeks independence (I’m here for it!), the NHS is in a deep crisis, Brexit continues to be a disaster, and the weather is not very good either, I’ve been told.
Symptomatic of these big issues are the small, everyday scandals, affairs, and oddities the daily news media report on: The overly optimistic Brexit bus. The whereabouts of the harebrained Ed Stone. Or the rats crawling over freshly baked Sainsbury croissants.
It was one of these tabloid articles, the “absurdly detailed floorplan of Matt Hancock’s office at The Department of Health” (source), that inspired London-based modder Dan Douglas in 2021 to craft a joke map in a beefed-up version of the same engine that powered the Gen-X shooter Duke Nukem 3D (1996).
As things sometimes go, this one took off and the positive feedback inspired Dan to continue modding and spending way too much time on Twitter. He would interpret and recreate these sad in-jokes of current Britishness as maps in Ken Silverman’s Build Engine. Soon Dan’s creation got a name, ►Duke Smoochem 3D. He has been sharing in-game footage on his YouTube channel and updates in a miles-long Twitter thread since.
Even when you’re like me, an outsider to British daily politics, experiencing the sheer mundaneness juxtaposed with an FPS’s mechanics and affordances has a mesmerizing spell that’s as weirdly captivating as seeing a union-jacked Boris Johnson dangling from a zip wire.
I am not the first to write about Duke Smoochem, not by a long shot. There’s Will Nelson’s NME story from 2021, Wired’s Will Prichard feature, or Andrew Brassleay’s Whynow article from 2023.
Hollowbody
WISHLISTABLE • In my restless dream, I see that game
Headware’s ►Hollowbody describes itself as “a tech-noir survival horror short story” and nails the key: It wears its main inspirations on its sleeve; I’ve been strongly reminded of Konami’s oppressing, beautiful psychological horror series Silent Hill (1999), and Capcom’s Resident Evil 2 (1998).
Hollowbody appears to blend these and other PS2-era games with an original story that’s set—gasp!—in the future! The game offers combat, exploration, puzzles, and a narrative. I’m sold.
Damien Crawford’s Golf Experience 2024
RELEASED • Set your putter to fun!
What is it with so many designers’ urge to subvert golf games? Triband gave us the idea-explosion that is WHAT THE GOLF? (2020); two issues ago, I recommended Lee Carvallo’s Putting Challenge 2, that quirky Simpsons adventure game for the GameBoy; and today I want to introduce you to ►Damien Crawford’s Golf Experience 2024.
What is golf, at its heart? According to Damien Crawford, it’s patience. It’s not about whacking that tiny white orb as it is about what you contemplate while looking for it. Pocketing the ball is not the purpose, it’s the journey. It’s about zen. It’s about how far off the course one can go with RPG Maker.
Playing Kafka
IN DEVELOPMENT • “Paths are made by walking” — Franz Kafka
Kafka’s themes of alienation, anxiety, surrealism, or guilt lend themselves to being adapted in video games. We’ve seen some in Infocom’s titular Bureaucracy (1987); steered an unfortunate soul that got transformed into a roach in Bad Mojo (1996); or felt utterly at the mercy of an omnipotent force in Davey Wreden’s and William Pugh’s The Stanley Parable (2013).
Few games, however, tried to adapt Kafka’s works or feature his person directly. There’s the, sadly, middling puzzler The Franz Kafka Videogame (2017) by Denis Galanin, or the first-person adventure Metamorphosis (2020).
May 21st, however, sees the Steam release of another take on this enigmatic writer. ►Playing Kafka is a narrative adventure with a branching story, “atmospheric puzzles, [and] fateful decisions” that will be free to play.
The game was co-developed by the Prague-based studio Charles Games with the local Goethe-Institut. As the game’s focus is to be “an excellent educational video game,” it also offers “extensive accompanying teaching material”. (source)
Penny’s Big Breakaway
RELEASED • Yo? Yo!
You know me as the person who digs up obscure mostly solo-developer efforts for this newsletter but occasionally I enjoy subverting your preconceptions about the games I pick. This time with ►Penny’s Big Breakaway, a new 3D platformer by the Los Angeles-based boutique studio Evening Star Games.
The trailer alone makes it come across as a stylish and fresh joyride. That it all looks very good comes as no surprise as it’s from the same studio that’s also behind the excellent Sonic Mania (2017). Penny’s Big Breakaway’s art style was what caught my attention at first (that palette alone oozes 1990s joy!) but the yoyo-based mechanics had me write about it.
The game is out on PC and all current platforms, published by Private Division.
ABYSS X ZERO
IN DEVELOPMENT • “Best Abyss To Gaze Into!” — Nietzsche
Since we are on the topic, here’s another game that harkens back to that late 1990s aesthetic, ►ABYSS X ZERO. It’s a fast-paced 3D action Metroidvania with a strong focus on elegant combat and dungeon crawling that offers players two different characters with unique abilities and playstyles. Just watch the trailer that does a good job showing the variety in gameplay and storytelling.
Three years prior, Studio Pixel Punk, the two-person developer behind the game, had already released a game in the same genre in the form of the much-lauded UNSIGHTED (2021). With ABYSS X ZERO, the step up in both technology and scope feels appropriate; going from a 16-bit-ish look to 32-bit. Can’t wait to play Studio Pixel Punk’s first PS2-era game in 2029!
Programming & Game Dev
Tools, resources, wisdom, humor.
HISTORY • Making of Oregon Trail (1971) — Norman Caruso, better known as the Gaming Historian recently published the feature-length documentary ►The Story of The Oregon Trail on his channel. It’s yet another extremely well-produced video featuring the game’s original creators that I can’t wait to watch.
Bonus: Christopher Pederson digitized Oregon Trail’s source code listing that appeared in a magazine in 1978 and put it on GitHub, if you want to peruse it after watching the doc.
MAKING OF PENTIMENT • Re-Illuminated — What’s that? You crave more new well-produced gaming documentaries? Coming right up! Enjoy Noclip’s 82-minute-long ►The Making of Pentiment. Bon appetit!
MARKETING • Line to Success — Game developer and legendary indie advocate Rami Ismail has always been supportive of the small and especially the underpriviledged developers. To level the playing field and help them succeed he shares his wisdom and experiences, in talks and social media, and recently in another blog article.
It is about ►the one-liner, that one distilled sentence that describes your game’s experience. How can you find it? What’s it good for? How can it help you when you struggle to identify your game’s core?
CALL FOR DEMOS • Haunted past — The Haunted PS1, a “community for low rez game devs and enthusiasts” is looking for ►submissions to the 4th volume of their Haunted PS1 Demo Disc. You have until April 30th to submit your demo (which doesn’t necessarily have to be in the horror genre). The Haunted PS1 also run a Discord where you can meet and chat with like-minded glitch goblins.
PS1 GAME DEVELOPMENT • Code like it’s 1995 — So you’ve read the previous article and might have considered making an actual PlayStation 1 demo. Damn, you’re lucky: Gustavo Pezzi just launched a course titled ►PS1 Programming with MIPS Assembly & C. 25 hours of on-demand video will teach you all you need to know about the system, the tools, and how to write code that runs on the actual hardware!
NOKIA ART JAM • Finnish lines and pixels — I got my first cell phone in 2000, a Nokia 6210. Its 1-bit LCD screen boasted a whopping 96×65 pixels resolution and the battery lasted for a week. Soon, I began to mod the carrier bar (72×14 px) to display whatever I wanted. This was my first foray into 1-bit pixel art.
24 years later, I might get to relive my modding as freelance indie gamedev Polyducks is hosting their second ►Nokia Art jam. Follow the limitations of the ancient hardware and make some art by May 31st!
CALL FOR ADVENTURE GAMES • Use game on list — YakWaxLips is both the handle of the adventure game content creator Michael McEntee as much as it is a reference to an inventory item in The Secret of Monkey Island (1990). With that out of the way, Michael asked on Twitter about adventure games released in the past ten years. If you made more than zero, please reply with a link to it in ►the thread.
OBSCURE 2D PLATFORMERS LIST • 2005 and earlier — Another person compiling a list for non-nefarious reasons is game music composer and developer Melos Han-Tani from Tokyo. They are collecting “2D indie platformers from 2005 or earlier” so should you know one, or even made one yourself, please ►submit your game(s)!
There is no notoriety requirement for the games. But they must be platformers in some way. Stuff from unfinished Mario fan games to ‘big’ games are fair play!
2024 IN GAMES • Liam’s List — Liam Twose who started PitchYaGame made ►“The LIST”, a tagged, filterable catalog of all the games from the current year. If yours is missing, let Liam know on Twitter.
DISCORD • Gamify Everything — A couple of weeks ago, Discord announced their release of the ►Embedded App SDK that lets developers create interactive activities (“multiplayer games and social experiences”) for the popular instant-messaging app. Almost anything is possible as these activities run in an iframe within the client, (Discord is built on Electron, after all), with the SDK acting as the intermediary between them and Discord’s servers. Maybe it won’t be as shortlived as the flash in the pan that was gamedev for Amazon’s Alexa… If you want to stay up to date with what’s new on Discord, consider following Discord Previews on Mastodon.
HISTORY • Indiana Jones and The Fate of Point-n-Click — TimeExtension’s Jack Yarwood ►published a long interview with LucasArts’ Hal Barwood on the inception and creation of the highly-regarded adventure Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992) that Hal directed. Lots of good stuff in that one—and pictures! I like pictures! (via Konstantinos Dimopoulos on Twitter)
GAMEDEV ● 20 Tips — In 2022, legendary game coder Dylan Cuthbert posted on Twitter legendary game developer Jordan Mechner’s “20 Tips on Making Games”. Itself a poignant resource, Dylan added his own take in a comprehensive ►thread (that is archived here).
RAY-TRACING • Bend it like Alhazen — Benedikt Bitterli, Senior Research Scientist at NVIDIA, created a captivating toy for your browser that lets you experiment with light propagation and refractions titled ►Tantalum. Click to place the light source and watch how within a few seconds millions of virtual light rays are being cast and theirs paths traced. But beware, Tantalum also bends time: I wanted to take a quick screenshot and suddenly half an hour is gone!
FONT • It looks like you’re writing code — If you want to troll a friend, or trigger graphic designers (or just yourself), why not get Thai Pangsakulyanont’s ►Comic Mono, the mono-space mod of Comic Sans for your code editor? (via Alan Zucconi on Twitter)
SHADER MAGIC • Endless Possibilities — For years now, Yonatan Offek has been ►tweeting obscure shader listings. Trying to comprehend them is a different matter, just looking at the minified code makes my eyes glaze over like it’s 1999 and I’m failing yet another maths exam. But run Yonatan’s code on a GPU and it will transform into beautiful procedural, real-time art. These waves lapping at a ghostly mountain range are my favorite.
Art & Inspiration
Art, science, and other inspirations that left an impression on me
The tantalizing light in the paintings of the Nebraska-born traditional artist Kim English (b. 1957)
More here.
Pixel’s Mixed Bag
What I’ve been up to
◾ I’ll be away for almost two weeks when this newsletter is out, but rest assured: I will try to do my best to gather, curate, and edit enough bits to produce the next issue.
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By DevteamLife on Twitter, BlueSky, and Mastodon
You can support the Pixel Prophet at ko-fi, or donate via PayPal to ensure its sustainability. It also helps to tell others about the Prophet who share your great taste in newsletters.