June 24, 2024

The Pixel Prophet #20

Exhausted creator contemplates the fate of their magazine-like newsletter, as tech news, game updates, and indie recommendations await. (Summary was AI generated)

Dearest readers,

welcome the 21st issue of the Pixel Prophet! It’s been quite a journey since I started this newsletter last October as “just a collection of links.” As you probably have noticed, it evolved into something bordering on a digital magazine. And that has become a problem.

The past issues have been pretty taxing as I do everything my sparse spare time, and with my increased ambitions, also the time I pour into an issue has dramatically increased. To be honest, I am exhausted.

I am very grateful for everyone who read, shared, and especially supported the Pixel Prophet since its inception! But the truth is that I am publishing this newsletter at a loss for the sheer love for our culture.

I am not sure what to do. Pause the newsletter for a few weeks? Decrease the effort I put in? Sell it Microsoft for AI training? I don’t know yet. Feel free to comment and let me know your thoughts on this.

Enough gloominess! Let’s get back to it with the usual unusual assortment.

— 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.

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News & Updates

• Microsoft walks back their invasive Copilot+ AI. Because of the justified public outrage, Microsoft delayed their assault on privacy for the time being, The Verge knows. Stay vigilant and keep speaking up, friends!

• Nintendo announces new Zelda game in which you finally play Princess Zelda. 38 years after the series’ first installment, Nintendo’s upcoming The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, will have Princess Zelda as main protagonist with entirely new mechanics, the Japanese kabushiki-gaisha revealed in its latest Nintendo Direct.

• Creatives flock to Cara, a new site with their best interests at heart. After Meta announced that anything uploaded to Instagram & Facebook is fair game to train their AI on, artists emigrated to Cara, a portfolio platform by Jingna Zhang (see issue 17) that prevents AI scraping by optionally protecting uploaded works with Glaze.

• 500,000 books removed from archive.org due to a publisher’s lawsuit. The archive is constantly under attack from various rights holders for providing free access to information. Please sign the open letter to the Publishers in Hachette v. Internet Archive if you value access to information.

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Games

Big and small, old, and new, indie and very indie

Crescent County

IN DEVELOPMENT • Broom-Vroom!

A wonderful fresh take on the racing genre is Electric Saint’s whimsical ►Crescent County. The small studio recently announced its bewitching open world life-sim that combines high-paced broom-racing with relaxing interior decoration, exploration, and relationships. I love the original setting (“witch-tech”) and the flawless art direction.

At the time of writing, there is no release date, but the game is already wishlistable.

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The Farmer Was Replaced

EARLY ACCESS • Harvest Drone

Thousands of years ago, humanity started its steady cultural incline by settling down and cultivating edible grass. We were on a good trajectory until that fateful moment when drones, artificial intelligence, and a straw hat merged in Timon Herzog’s ►The Farmer Was Replaced. Okay, maybe I lied when I mentioned AI (though it got the shareholders excited) because in this brain-tease of a game, it is you who programs the drone for optimal efficiency.

If you have a hankering for automation, programming, and farming, then The Farmer Was Replaced is certain to plow your field (sorry!). Thanks Martijn Frazer for the recommendation!

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Generation Exile

IN DEVELOPMENT • Grow Home

I like the new trend that has emerged in city builders over the last decade, that new, more holistic understanding of how building a city impacts the ecosystem beyond SimCity’s simplistic “Pollution” models.

I felt it began with Banished (2014) that added survival to Will Wright’s classic core mechanic. Next, in Frostpunk we witnessed and played the remains of a civilization that had to face a hostile environment (by burning still more coal). The town we built in 2022’s The Wandering Village needed to remain its symbiosis with the colossal creature whose it’s built on. Most recently, we’ve come full circle with the “reverse city-builder” Terra Nil (2023) that emphasizes environmental rejuvenation over exploitation.

Now there’s another stepping stone on the horizon, Sonderlust Studios’ debut game, ►Generation Exile seems to continue this trend with their turn-based city builder taking place inside a generation star ship. Naturally, the resources are limited so “craft[ing] a circular economy” is key in keeping the passengers and their stories alive. And once more, I am smitten with the well-directed visuals.

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Return of the SLIMEPIRES!

RELEASED • They Slimed Me!

An edition of the Prophet wouldn’t be complete without mentioning PICO-8, however I got something same but different for you: Joseph White’s (Lexaloffle) Picotron is “a Fantasy Workstation for making pixelart games, animations, music, demos and other curiosities.” Being largely code-compatible with PICO-8, its most prominent feature is the bigger resolution and other niceties suited for more complex scenes and more room for code.

Sophie Houlden’s ►Return of the SLIMEPIRES!, utilizes Picotron’s features as it’s a port of their vanilla PICO-8 game with the same name. This action-platformer is a masterclass is teaching you its mechanics through gameplay, and opens up into a veritable Metroidvania. There’s a lot of goodies that go along with the game, such as a delightful retro-looking manual, maps, and even videos on the development at an almost criminally low price.

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Dujanah

RELEASED • Dark themes in full color

Another oldie but goodie you might haven’t heard about, is the glitch-punk, claymation action-RPG that is Jack King-Spooner’s ►Dujanah. It’s a game set in a fictional muslim country in which the titular protagonist, Dujanah, attempts to come to terms with loss, death, and mourning.

Dujanah embodies so much that I love about indie games, this very personal journey a developer wants to take us on, the fυċκ all! attitude to photorealism, and the heart in the place that AAA games reserve for maximum player spending.

Jack currently works on Judero, “[a] handmade action/adventure game based on the rich folklore of the Scottish Borders.

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Ghostship Delgado

RELEASED • Classic Horror

One of the earliest genres in computer games is text adventures. What started with Will Crowther’s Colossal Cave Adventure (1976) on the PDP-10 inspired not merely some nerds at MIT who later became Infocom, but others who tried to boil the experience down to the early home computers (Scott Adams the first among them, for example).

The scene really exploded, especially in the UK, with Graeme Yeandle’s The Quill, a text adventure construction kit that was the gasoline on the fire of interactive fiction.

Since then many more tools have appeared over time (AGT, TADS, Inform, Twine, ink, to name but a few) but The Quill has stayed around in some form or another.

Retro games developer Tony Kingsmill just released an old-school text adventure, ►Ghostship Delgado that not only runs on the original BBC Micro (or Acorn Electron), but was also written on one (or at least an emulated version of the same) with The Quill. The game has you play wake up on a mysterious ship with yourself as the only passenger. Presumably.

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Stories from Danger’s Den

IN DEVELOPMENT • Procedural Fantasies

Anyone remembers LucasArts’ Desktop Adventures series (if you can call two games a “series”) from the mid-1990s? I have cozy memories of enjoying the procedurally-generated top-down adventures starring Indiana Jones or Luke Skywalker and only learned much later how despised these games apparently are.

Developer Kathy Bunn seems to have a similar soft spot for games of yore, specifically the Final Fantasy (1986 onwards) games on the NES. Kathy currently works on ►Stories from Danger’s Den that looks and feels like those 8-bit classics. “Cool, what’s the game’s story?” you might ask. Ah, here it gets interesting:

“Each game is procedurally generated: it takes place in a unique world, and has its own story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

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Wingleader

IN DEVELOPMENT • Origins in Space

Artist and game dev Howard Day is a sci-fi nerd as his cinematic Star Trek and Star Wars CGI projects on his YouTube channel make abundantly clear. As if that wasn’t enough, Howie shares updates on a game he’s been working on for over five years, Wingleader.

In case you’re wondering, yes, Wingleader is Howie’s re-imagining of Chris Roberts’ first Wing Commander (1990) with the serial numbers barely filed off. In my book it looks like what I imagine an expertly crafted modern remaster of Wing Commander to be and love the attention to details, down to the dark blue space filled with enemy sprites.

The game is still being developed, I couldn’t find a project page, only this interview at Vintage is the New Old from 2019.

Despite the lengthy development, it’s safe to assume that it’ll be out before Chris Roberts’ own “Wing Commander with the serial numbers barely filed off” that is Star Citizen (2012–?)

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Programming & Game Dev

Tools, resources, wisdom, humor.

WINDOWS 95 • Space Cadet 3D — Us nerds of a certain age probably have memories of Cinematronics’s Space Cadet 3D virtual Pinball table that shipped with Windows 95 Plus!. And many of us didn’t RTFM (“read the fuƈк!ոg manual”), so we only had the vaguest of ideas what the game wanted of us. Dave W Plummer, who ported the table of the DOS original to Windows 95 ►posted𝕏 this comprehensive cheat sheet for the classic table; original source unknown.

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BOOK • Learning Godot — After last year’s Unity debacle, many developers flocked to the open source Godot engine, especially those just starting out. But as Godot’s built-in GDScript language is specific to Godot, it can be a bit difficult to pick up. Developer Sander Vanhove has your back: His book ► “Learning GDScript by Developing a Game with Godot 4” recently hit store shelves and has seen stellar ratings on Amazon.com at the time of writing.

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HISTORY • Indiana Jones and the FM of V — From Daniel Albu I learned that LucasArts had an Indiana Jones FMV (Full-Motion Video) game in production in the early 1990s. In Daniel’s ►conversation with LucasArts alumnus Mike Levine, we get a glimpse at some never-before-seen FMV cheesiness.

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GAME BOY DEVELOPMENT • GBStudio 4.0 — Making GameBoy games nowadays has never been easier thanks to Chris Maltby’s ►GB Studio — no programming knowledge required! Now there’s version 4 out with a new debugger, a mode for Color-GameBoy-only games, and lots of quality of life improvements.

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PIXEL ART • "Isometric games don’t exist!" — Pixelartist virtuoso and outspoken pixel art evangelist, Thomas Feichtmeir (cyangmou) ►shared a downloadable collection of no less than 40 slides “teaching geometry with a focus on computer-graphics.” Among them Thomas demonstrates𝕏 different modes of perspective and projection and why there is no true isometric game.

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GAMES BUSINESS • Pitch Perfect — When trying to get noticed by publishing partners, presenting your game well is essential. You want to be clear, concise, and ignite excitement as best as possible with your pitch deck. But where to even start? Games consulting firm GameDiscoverCo lets you browse many pitch decks of various PC and console games in their ►Pitch Decks for you to study and get inspired by.

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GODOT • Ups and Downs — Indie developer spimort shared ►TerraBrush, their “minimal terrain heightmap editor” for Godot 4.2. Now you can easily draw terrain, plop trees, and enjoy texture blending.

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RESOURCE • User Interfaces — My most cherished resource when researching user interfaces is Edd Coates’ amazing ►Game UI Database that has screenshots of UIs in over 1000 games in its database. If you wonder, for example, how tutorial screens in touch-controlled 3D card games on mobile look like, it’s but a few clicks away.

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PROCEDURAL TEXT • Five [great|awesome|useful] Tips — Riad Djemili of Maschinen-Mensch shared in this ►thread𝕏 five tips for developers dealing with procedural text in their games. Here’s it again as PNG on imgur because Twitter remains, well, ex-Twitter.

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WEB DEV • 3D in your browser — A few weeks ago, Release of 165 of Three.js went live. ►Three.js lets you create interactive 3D content that runs in the browser with, you guessed it, JavaScript. It’s not a full-fledged engine, instead more of a rendering tool that makes state-of-the-art 3D inside a browser a reality.

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FEELING OLD? • Don’t fret. — I started my indie game dev “career” in my mid-30s and felt that I was way too old to keep up with what the youngsters were creating. So it was reassuring to learn of other late-bloomers, such as Grace Hopper who “began computing at 38, completed the first compiler at 46, helped shape COBOL at 53, kept developing COBOL for the Navy in her 70s, retired from the Navy at 80 & then became a consultant for the Digital Equipment Corporation” (source𝕏). Donald Knuth has been writing on Volume 4 of his seven-parter “The Art of Computer Programming” since 1973; when Tolkien’s The Hobbit got published, the scholar was 45. So take it easy, friends.

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DOOM MODS • Super Carnage World — Whenever someone manages to trick an unlikely piece of hardware to run DOOM (1993) that end up doing the rounds on tech news for a week. But there’s more creativity to DOOM than “just” getting it to run. After all, it’s the ancestor of an entire bouquet of subcultures; speedrunning, e-sports, and modding.

So let me recommend some bonkers DOOM mods:

• ►Super MAYhem 17 (2018), “a 28 map set based on using assets from the various classic Mario games” for DOOM 2. For the full experience, also get Mario Doom and enjoy bloody Mushroom Kingdom in a completely new and gory frenzy!
• ►Rats Solitaire (2012) shrinks you to the size of a rat and lets you play solitaire in a kitchen, including many creative ways to to kick the bucket. Also “includes scoring and timed options.”
• ►InstaDoom (2015) adds 40 Instagram filters to the game that now lets you take selfies with an in-game selfie stick and pose in front of landmarks and monsters. Hellarious! [sic]
• ►MyHouse.wad (2023), a sublime work of art that extends beyond the map itself. It’s the House of Leaves of our medium. Play it, then watch this video.

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GAMEDEV • Reliably Random — Us programmers know, having a solid RNG (random number generator) is anything but trivial once you dive even a little into the subject. Especially games that need their random values to be 100% repeatable or otherwise synchronized depend on this. Ron Gilbert is in a similar predicament as he is working on his indie top-down pixel RPG. He ►asked around on Mastodon and Tomasz Mazurek from People Can Fly suggested to “[p]re-generate a table of 4k good random floats and step through the table. No one will notice ;)”. A simple, straigh-forward solution that I might steal.

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SCI-FI TYPOGRAPHY • Alien Symbols — I must confess: I am one of the weirdos that enjoy spotting fonts. Even in the most riveting drama, I will point out that the sign behind the crying person on screen is set in Eurostile Extended Bold. If you are one of us, welcome, here’s your complimentary letraset sheet, have a seat, and let me introduce you Dave Addey’s ►Typeset in the Future, a blog about “typography and design in science fiction movies”.

My favorite article remains the one on Alien for its attention to detail, copious examples, and sheer love of the subject matter. In 2018, Dave also published a book.

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PIXEL FONTS • More Fonts! — In the last issue I already shared some pixel art resources, but on the off chance that you didn’t find that perfect font for your project, Not Jam ►offers 19 additional fonts under CC0 (public domain) license. Not Jam creates many more cool things, be sure to check out their other stuff. You can’t go wrong here!

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Art & Inspiration

Art, science, and other inspirations that left an impression on me

Sorry, I am so not inspired lately 😅

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Pixel’s Mixed Bag

What I’ve been up to

◾ My game finally released! I’ve been going on an on about my 8-bittish arcade-like game ►Aufgeblähte Drossel but it’s finally complete released! As mentioned, it was intended as a joke game to go along with a podcast on an obscure East German computer and I am happy to say that the podcast hosts played, enjoyed, and praised the game and its design! (If you try it, please also leave a rating.) Naturally, I am over the moon and intend to adapt it to a full Steam release.

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by Alex Norris (Webcomic Name)

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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.