The Pixel Prophet #18
This issue of Pixel Prophet covers a range of indie games, from dreamlike mysteries to tender detective stories, with updates on game shutdowns and industry acquisitions. (Summary was AI generated)
Dearest readers,
So many indie games showed up in my social streams in the past two weeks that more curation than usual became necessary! I arrived at varied mix of titles and hope that there’s something in it just for you.
Another thing: Since many people grew wary of Twitter/X’s aggressive pushes against privacy and don’t want to reward Elon with their clicks, going forward, I’ll mark any links leading to that particular hell site with the Unicode character U+1D54F like this: 𝕏. Where possible, I’ll also try to provide alternative sources.
Let me know what you think and enjoy this issue of the Pixel Prophet!
— 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
Not really an indie game dev topic but important: With the EU election coming up, ►Elections24Check checks the “accuracy of content circulating on the internet such as on social media platforms or in the media.”
- IGN Entertainment acquires Gamer Network who own Eurogamer, Gamesindustry.biz, Rock Paper Shotgun, and more. Undoubtedly this will lead to layoffs throughout as IGN consolidates. Consequently, games journalism is likely to suffer. (IGN Announcement)
- Winamp goes open source. Llama Group, the parent company of the popular Gen-X mp3 player software, Winamp, recently announced that they open-sourced it. Even to just take a peek, you have to request access, though. Also, let’s not forget that Llama Group got on board the NFT train and sold the original Winamp 1.0 skin as NFT.
- Uh-oh: ICQ to shut down for good after nearly 28 years, Andy Chalk reports for PC Gamer. The once-popular instant messenger service, now owned by the Russian social media giant VK (formerly VKontakte, ВКонтакте) will cease to work on June 26th, users are encouraged to transition to VK Messenger.
- Happy Broccoli Games releases Duck Detective, I mentioned the game back in issue 6 and now it’s out!
Games
Big and small, old, and new, indie and very indie
HoloVista
RELEASED • Cinema 5D
I always like it when I see screenshots or a trailer of a game and have no idea what it’s about and how it plays because it’s so different.
That’s what I love about Aconite’s ►HoloVista (2020), that “story-driven puzzle game in which you explore a dreamlike mansion, photograph mysterious objects, confront your deepest secrets, and confess them online.“
That the game’s aesthetic is to die for is no surprise as the game’s art director (and Aconite’s co-founder), Star St.Germain is a seasoned 3D artist, designer, illustrator, and art director.
Sadly, the game is only available on the Apple Store, though, at a more than reasonable price.
Dead Minutes
RELEASED • After Life Consequences
<First off: No, ►Dead Minutes won’t bedazzle you with its graphics (albeit the typesetting is gorgeous) as it’s not a computer- or video game but a book, available in both electronic and physical form. To play, all you need is a few hours and 3 to 6 people. This is not a one-person project by author and artist Tom Kemp, many people contributed to it in various ways.
Dead Minutes is a collaborative storytelling RPG “about systemic change in an undesirable afterlife” where the players decide what that is, how it changes, and how these changes play out; “[i]t’s a game about impossible seeming actions at impossible seeming scales, making difficult choices, and dealing with unexpected outcomes.“
Angel’s Nest
IN DEVELOPMENT • Not Your Average Folk Horror
Artist, game dev, and educator, Darion McCoy started a passion project in late 2017, ►Angel’s Nest, a “folk-horror survival RPG set in an alternative, pre-colonial Africa.“
At first glance, Angel’s Nest looked to me like an overlooked PC-98 action game but judging from the trailer, the gameplay is closer to that of a cinematic platformer—with weapons. The mix of combat, puzzles, and RPG mechanics and the original setting made me want to wishlist it instantly but, alas, I can’t just yet as there’s no official Steam page or similar.
Darion admitted that the press kit this article links to is “super outdated” and that the game is still in development. If I have any updates, I’ll let you know.
Cruelty Squad
RELEASED • Power Fantasy
The absolutely bonkers and intentionally overcranked aesthetic of Consumer Softproducts’ ►Cruelty Squad is such a breath of fresh air (albeit LSD-infused) in the times of super-realistic, RTX-enabled shooters striving to depict even the last pebble in finest photorealism.
The last trippy shooter I remember was Shiny’s MDK (1997) with its abstract and surreal, yet extremely well-designed levels and encounters, yet Cruelty Squad takes it up a notch; it’s not merely an absurd FPS of a MySpace site come to life, it’s an immersive sim.
And it’s cyberpunk AF: The world is brutal and broken, corporations and syndicates reign supreme and you, the player, are their mercenary hitman making ends meat (sic). There’s, of course, more nuance to the world; Super Bunnyhop worked out the game’s draw and ambivalence in this video essay very well.
With 15k reviews on Steam the game remains “overwhelmingly positive” and if you can stomach the visual cacophony, by all means, check it out!
Tiny Glade
IN DEVELOPMENT • Cozy Age
Anastasia Opara and Tomasz Stachowiak of Pounce Light Games just released the demo of their upcoming build-em-up ►Tiny Glade that’s all about “doodling castles” much in the same spirit as Townscaper (2020) is about clicking houses.
Simply click and drag to build and shape medieval buildings and their surrounding. As the genre dictates, there’s neither a skill tree nor fail state, it’s all about playing and experimenting with the procedural creation engine.
The technology, “gridless building chemistry”, that Pounce Light crafted is impressive and works miracles under the hood. The procedurally generated structures and terrain react to their surroundings believably and always end up looking beautiful and homey.
Finally, let me answer the two most pressing questions you have about Tiny Glades: It was written in Rust and yes, you can pet the sheep.
1000xRESIST
RELEASED • Watcher, we’ve been lied to
I’m glad that I saw a post by games journalist Rachel Watts praising𝕏 a review of a game I’ve never heard of by a developer I didn’t know either. But at this point, I was already intrigued.
The author of said article, Natalie Flores (who’s also a consultant at the delightful Future Friends Games indie publisher), touted it as “one of 2024’s best new games”. The game in question is Sunset Visitor’s debut title ►1000xRESIST. At first glance, you would assume it to be an over-the-top JRPG with a focus on combat and some tacky narrative in between all the fighting, but you would be dead wrong—I was.
From what I’ve seen, 1000xRESIST is in tone much closer to NieR: Automata (2016) with a strong focus on its story, world, and characters. Natalie also mentions NieR and praises 1000xRESIST’s writing, how bold and masterfully it handles its themes. If you are on the fence, please read her review and give the game a chance as it might become your best narrative experience of 2024 as well.
From Natalie’s review:
“1000xRESIST is a dazzling testament to the stories this medium has yet to tell; an exemplification of the best that small yet ambitious teams can create[.]“
Mind Diver
IN DEVELOPMENT • Likeminded
I remember when ten years ago, the hottest shit to come to gaming was photogrammetry, the process of taking multiple photos at various angles of real-world objects or scenes and recreating them as a 3D model by triangulating the features in the photos. For example, here’s a Faschingskrapfen I constructed with photogrammetry.
While some models come out pretty well, most of the time they require lots of touch-ups and sometimes entire re-shoots to be game-ready. Nonetheless, there is a certain, dream-like aesthetic to these “in-progress” models. Which brings us to ►Mind Diver, “a tender indie-detective game, inside a mind.”
Instead of trying to hide the rough edges and phantom polygons that emerge as artifacts in the process, developer Indoor Sunglasses commits to them. A smart move as I feel it’s a wonderfully creative choice to represent a person’s porous, fragmented memories.
Underneath, Mind Diver is similar in spirit to The Return of the Obra Dinn (2018) and “combines challenging deduction with sci-fi and romance. Investigate a mind, and solve a heartbreaking case.“ Currently, there’s a demo on Steam, there is no date when the game will see its full release.
Pixel Art Academy: Learn Mode
EARLY ACCESS • Anyone can draw!
Oh boy! I fear that ►Pixel Art Academy: Learn Mode is one of those creativity/educational games that I might fall into head over heels, much like SuchArt (2021) or Passpartout: The Starving Artist (2017).
While not a “game”-game per se, it’s more like an extremely polished and well-made compendium of tutorials to teach you pixel art from the ground up. Pixel Art Academy already offers a variety of features such as tutorials, challenges, and an adventure mode. My favorite feature is that as part of the challenges you draw the pixel art for simple games that you can play right away in the seamlessly integrated PICO-8 emulator.
The developer behind it is none other than pixel artist Matej ’Retro’ Jan whose ZX Spectrum art I featured last year in issue #1, including the link to Matej’s pixel art & gaming news magazine, Retronator.
Pixel Art Academy is currently in Early Access and should get released in August 2024.
Programming & Game Dev
Tools, resources, wisdom, humor.
MORE GAMES! • MOAAAR! — If you’re addicted to indie games, don’t seek treatment, keep on reading instead: Ryan T. Brown threads that day’s indie releases; “whether they’re big titles or under-the-radar games to check out.“ Sadly this seems to be a Twitter-only thing, nevertheless here’s Ryan’s profile𝕏
VOXELS • Turn up the volume — Dennis Gustafsson, the creative soul behind Teardown (2020) recommends𝕏 a comprehensive and well-illustrated ►blog post by Daniel Schroeder.
See, Daniel is building a renderer with a new approach to displacement mapping: Instead of tesselating the crap out of your meshes, Daniel’s renderer “uses very small voxels and displacement mapping to modernize the retro aesthetic of games like Doom (1993) and Quake (1996)”. His post titled “Voxel Displacement Renderer – Modernizing the Retro 3D Aesthetic” goes into detail (literally) with lots of examples and pretty pictures.
3D MODELING • Liquid 3D — As readers of the Prophet you know that so many star-ups overpromised their AI’s 3D modeling capabilities and I’m all for grounding expectations. Now I came across a new player, Womp, and what it promises looks pretty cool.
Instead of their AI failing miserably at mesh topology, their ►Primfusion AI instead tries to build its models out of primitive meshes (spheres, capsules, boxes) that behave as if glued together. Womp calls this Liquid 3D which seasoned modelers might know as “Blob Meshes”.
Of course, I’m very cautious as it’s yet to be seen if/how well it works in actual productions, still I like the different approach and the demo video looks fun.
BOOKS • Deep-Dives — Don’t you wish that you could dive head-first into all the details behind a game you love and respect, get your nerd on and learn about the circumstances that lead to design decisions? You and me both!
If that game happens to be Will Wright’s SimCity (1989) look no further than Chaim Gingold’s ►Building SimCity. The Paperback boasts 486 pages and over a hundred illustrations. Chaim was the guy who designed Spore’s Creature Creator (2008), by the way.
If the game you want to explore instead is Wolfenstein 3D (1992) or Doom (1993), let me remind you that Fabien Sanglard wrote the excellent Game Engine Black Books on them, and his website is as enticing as it was when I first wrote about it in issue 4.
INSTAGRAM/FACEBOOK • AI Opt-Out — Sigh! Nowadays, Corporations shove AI into everything like there’s no tomorrow (and if they continue like this it’s likely there won’t be any). On top of that, the corpos help themselves to any user-provided content to train their AIs and Opt-outs are hidden away behind the darkest of patterns—if offered at all.
Artist Chii posted a setp-by-step guide𝕏 on how to do just that, how to opt out of Meta-AI scraping your posts on Instagram and Facebook. As before, I stitched the thread together and posted it on imgur.
As X-user Another Titanic Violinist points out𝕏, you have to fill out a form to object, and she graciously posted her successful objection—feel free to copy/paste:
I object to my data being used in training an AI. My photos are personal and contain images of my face associated with my name. This data could be used to generate deepfakes using my likeness if it is included in an Al data set. I further object to my captions being used within this data set as these contain personal information which would not be appropriate to include.
MARKETING • Steam Discounts Cheat Sheet — Game developer and author Matt Hackett compiled𝕏 a handy list of how Steam’s discounts work for developers, including best practices:
ARTICLE • How an indie veteran makes games — Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software has been making indie games since the dawn of time (1994). In addition to his excellent GDC talk from 2019 in which he talks about how he makes a living with his niche turn-based RPGs; recently Jeff ►shared Spiderweb’s “weird development process that actually sort of works,“ in tandem with the release of his latest indie RPG, Geneforge 2 – Infestation.
If you can stomach Twitter, then follow𝕏 Jeff for lots of more knowledge like this.
JAVASCRIPT • console.log("tedious") — When writing JavaScript and wanting to print something in the console, you usually do it console.log("like this"). Who has time for all that typing? Lu Wilson shared on Mastodon a nice hack that shortens the tedious console.log("Foo") to a simple "Foo".d.
Again, as a service to you I took the liberty to type it out for your copy/paste convenience.
Reflect.defineProperty(Object.prototype, "d", {
get() {
const value = this.valueOf()
console.log(value)
return value
},
set(value) {
Reflect.defineProperty(this, name, {
value,
configurable: true,
writable: true,
enumerable: true
})
},
configurable: true,
enumerable: false,
You’re welcome. 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.
TRAINING • Working in Games — Game writer, composer, singer, and cultural heritage consultant Tine Schenck recommends Caspar Field’s introductory course to game production, ►Games Workplace Production Training. Caspar has been in the games industry for decades in various roles and knows producing from the inside out. The course promises to teach you “the basic skills and production tips for working in a modern games studio [and you] learn how to develop your team working skills to get ready for your first role in games.“
INTERVIEW • Grim Fandango — Konstantinos Dimopoulos found this insightful feature-length interview with Grim Fandango’s Lead Programmer Bret Mogilefksy on ►The Making of Grim Fandango.
GAMEDEV • Billboards — If you have a top-down 2.5D game, you might be interested to learn how Lavapotion realized a cool zoom effect in their recently released RTS ►Songs of Conquest (2024).
All they needed to share𝕏 was an animated GIF. I reproduced it on imgur as the animated GIF’s file size was too big for this newsletter.
MUSIC • Amiga Music for the Masses — Two years ago, remixes of legendary C64 music saw their release as Encore64. Last year something similar dropped for the Amiga with ►Encore500 where some of the old guard returned with new old music such as Jogeir Liljedahl and Barry Leitch (Lotus Turbo Challenge (1990).
Both albums are on Spotify but I like amigaremix.com best; thanks for the recommendation, Jake Birkett!
BLENDER • Urban Creation Kit — Technical artist Hothifa Smair, a.k.a. “the Geo nodes guy” announced𝕏 the release of ►ICity, “a Blender add-on powered by geometry nodes that makes it easier than ever to create and visualize cities!“.
The demo looks impressive, creating and adjusting entire realistic-looking city blocks is as easy as drawing lines with your mouse. I especially love the integrated imperfections like leaves and trash accumulating believably.
ARTICLE • Memorable Game Design — Developer and composer Melos Han-Tani mused about the Pokémon (1996) franchise and asked “Why Were Older Pokemon Games More Memorable? And what takeaways on adventure games can we learn from this?”. In an illustrated ►article Melos dug into the issue and what we as game designers can learn from Pokémon. It’s super effective.
PRONUNCIATION • What gibs? — There has been a long-running debate on how to pronounce “gibs”, the word describing “the little bits of internal organs, flesh, and bone that are left when a player or monster has not only died but exploded into body parts” (source) that was purportedly coined by artist Adrian Carmack (source). As the term is a truncation of giblet, pronounced with a soft g, the matter seemed clear yet uncertainty remained.
Last week, John Romero weighed in𝕏 and settled the debate once and for all:
Now do GIF!
Art & Inspiration
Art, science, and other inspirations that left an impression on me
Pixel art by Leon Bitler a.k.a. Exidelo
Leon isn’t just magnificent with pixels, but also with other digital and analog media. Follow Exidelo on Twitter𝕏, Instagram, or buy art prints.
Pixel’s Mixed Bag
What I’ve been up to
◾ My joke game is nearing completion, despite taking longer than anticipated (yeah, that old trope). It was a delight trying to mimic that KC85/4 computer’s capabilities and attempt making recognizable music and sound effects. If you want to give it a play, the current in-development version can be found at itch.io.
}
“Coding with GPT”, as posted by Baloo Uriza on 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.