Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
We try here to introduce people to things they may not have seen. This means having a certain mental model of our audience, a guess of what you have and haven’t seen before. And since you’re a bunch of people, a clowder of individuals, even the best guess I make could be wrong for many of you.
(Clowder is a term for a group of cats, not people, but it seemed appropriate in this case. Meow.)
I’d expect that today’s presentation is already known to some of you, it’s very popular on Youtube, with the pilot, from a year ago, having racked up a third of a billion views. But if I asked a random person on the street, “Hey, isn’t the Amazing Digital Circus great?” I’d get blank looks. But then, here in the US, I think certain political choices are beyond obvious, yet I personally know people who choose otherwise. We all have our intellectual ruts.
Let’s not veer too far from the subject. It should be enough to say that even very popular internet things may not be known to those who are not “very online.” So it is with the Amazing Digital Circus. Created by Gooseworx, who also created the animation Little Runmo (previously here, and again in playable game form), The Amazing Digital Circus is about human characters who get transported into a digital reality and are left stranded there. While it’s not explicitly a game, we do consider all forms of electronic entertainment within our sphere of discussion, and the A.D.C. is very game-like.
At first, the Amazing Digital Circus looks like it’s a crazy-fun kind of cartoon, but it doesn’t take long for the lore to set in, and reveal that there’s a lot more going on than there may seem at first. In the Circus, the humans have a whimsical representation that they didn’t choose, and none of them are much pleased to be stuck there. The circus is overseen by a ringmaster, Caine, who has godlike powers. Caine is an interesting figure, he creates adventure situations for the humans to overcome, and is antagonistic, but isn’t a evil figure. He’s not responsible for the humans being in there or stuck there. Humans in the Circus who give in to despair tend to become abstracted, becoming big and mindless glitchy eyeball monsters, so Caine tries to give the surviving humans things to do to preserve their sanity, even though he’s not really all that sane himself.
The main character though is Pomni, the Circus’ newest inhabitant, and the least content with her predicament. Will she find a way out, or will she eventually manage to make peace with being trapped in the Circus’s virtual world? My own theory is that the human characters aren’t really humans, but copies of humans, that think they’re the originals, so it doesn’t really make sense to “escape” the Circus. But that’s just a guess, and a really big guess at that. Let’s see where it goes.
So far, there are three episodes, each about 25 minutes long, so set a little time for each one.
The pilot is episode one, where Pomni enters the Circus and we meet the other characters:
Episode two is Candy Carrier Chaos, which focuses on an “NPC,” a character who isn’t a human:
Episode three, just a couple of days old as of this post, is The Mystery of Mildenhall Manor, which reveals some off the backstory of one of the human characters, Kinger:
We’re on UFO 50 kick here, there’s so many nice games in there, and of such a wide variety. And that starts right off with the first game in the set, Barbuta, a simple but mysterious platformer.
I suggest walking one tile to the right, then immediately restarting the game. You’ll see why.
Barbuta is made in an old school style, and it’s rough, although short. You get seven lives, instead of the one a really old game might give you, but there are no continues. The very first screen contains a death trap. It’s the kind that you won’t fall for more than once, but it teaches an important lesson: pay attention to the terrain. Anything that looks unusual, different from its surroundings, could be important, or deadly.
Rather than tell you of my findings, which might not be too useful since, while I’ve gotten some ways in, I haven’t finished it yet, I present a Youtube walkthrough from sylvie (32 minues). If you just need a nudge you could just watch a few minutes, until you find something that gets you unstuck. That’s my recommendation, anyway.
As previously reported, UFO 50 is a collection of 50 solid games made by Spelunky creator Derek Yu and a number of collaborators over eight years. It costs $25 and is very much worth it. It invents a fictional game console maker and studio called UFO Soft, and also an elaborate backstory around the games’ construction. It contains a Little Computer People-like garden animation that expands as you play, and even a cheat terminal that no doubt hides many secrets to be found. Half the games even have local multiplayer.
Pilot Quest’s title screen
Many of the games in UFO 50 are deep enough that they could have been released on their own. One of them is Game #44, Pilot Quest, which is a nice little mixture of action-adventure exploration and idle game mechanics.
It stars Pilot, a character who appears in several other games in UFO 50. Pilot’s first game in the company’s fictional sequence is Planet Zoldath, where he must survive a weird and randomly-generated world. Pilot helms the Campanella, a cute little red spaceship that has a problem with crashing, and that also appears in several games. Pilot’s sister, Isabelle, is another recurring presence in UFO 50. Pilot’s the head of his own little invented franchise, UFO Soft’s version of Mario.
UFO 50’s title screen makes evident that Pilot and Isabell are a big deal (names here added by me)
There aren’t many easy games in UFO 50, and Pilot Quest is challenging, but because it’s partly an idle game, you can make progress even when you’re not playing. If you have trouble with the Wild Area, you can close the game for a while and come back when your garden and alien friends have generated more resources for you. (Sometimes. I’ve found that sometimes the feature’s a bit buggy. But if you leave UFO 50 running you seem to earn resources at the right speed, even if you’re playing a different game in the collection.)
But how does all that work out? Well, I’ve prepared a bit of a guide here, to help get you started playing this, one of UFO 50’s deeper games….
This is the game we’re talking about here. The others will have to wait until later. About 12 hours later, which is how long a standard first play of Pilot Quest requires.
Getting Underway
After a cutscene that shows the Campanella getting struck by an asteroid, you’ll be left on the surface of the plane in an area we’ll call Camp. Talk to the characters to learn a bit more about what’s happening, but the most important thing here is the big spinning diamond. That’s called the Moon Crystal. It’s an inexhaustible supply of Moon Drops, the first of the game’s several resources. Moon Drops aren’t very valuable in general, but they can get you on your way to collecting the most important resource, Moon Ingots.
The Moon Crystal. You will come to hate it.
Every strike of the Moon Crystal with your basic combat Yo-Yo will generate one Moon Drop. (Did Pilot get his yo-yo from Mikey from The Goonies II, Mike from Startropics, or Ness from Earthbound?) Moon Drops don’t automatically go to your inventory: you must step close enough to collect them, so if you don’t move around once in a while you’ll miss out on some of them.
1,000 (yes, with three zeroes!) can be converted into one Moon Ingot. But once in a while the Moon Crystal will drop a Moon Ingot at random. This is pretty nice when it happens at the start of the game! More likely though you’ll have to grind Drops for a bit. If you talk to the tree in the upper-left of the camp area, you can pay an increasing number of Moon Drops to grow plants that will automatically generate Drops for you. At first though their rate is very slow. It’s best to buy the first two upgrades when you can, but save the third for after you’ve got your first Moon Ingot. You can’t have a whole lot of most resources, including Moon Drops, until you’ve expanded your storage a bit, which needs Ingots.
Your Moon Drop Garden
But the first upgrade you can buy, the Hunter’s Shack, only costs one Ingot. It’s an important upgrade, because it gives you a free Meat, and after a bit of time generates more Meat that you can buy for 500 Drops. In Camp, really the only things you can do with Drops is buy Drop-making plants, convert them into Ingots, and buy Meat with them, so there’s not a lot of reason to focus on Drops unless you’re desperate for Meat.
With Meat, you’ll be able to explore the Wild Area, which is the main focus of your efforts. In order to win, you’ll need three Ship Parts that are hidden in dungeons in the Wild Area. But you won’t be able to get them for a while, because each hunk of Meat only gives you 120 seconds to explore it! You can use more Meat at once for more time, and in fact you’re forced to use all the Meat you have whenever you enter the Wild Area, but at the start you only have one Meat, and can only carry up to five anyway.
Part of the Wild Area
The Wild Area is a much better place to collect many resources than Camp. In Camp, you have to save up 1,000 Drops to get an Ingot or rely on a rare event; in the Wild Area, they’re common drops from enemies! You’ll want to explore the Wild Area as much as you can, meaning you’ll want lots of Meat, and fortunately Meat also appears fairly often there.
Like most of the games in UFO 50, there is no supplied manual, and little in the way of instructions, so the rules of the Wild Area aren’t clearly communicated. Here they are:
To keep anything you find in the Wild Area, you must exit it before time runs out. If you don’t, then all your effort is wasted. It’s always better to leave with something than nothing.
The timer is your health. When you take damage from enemies, shots or hazards, it comes out of your time. Most enemies drain the clock of 30 seconds when they hit you. Ouch!
Hit enemies with your Yo-Yo to damage them. Most enemies take from three to ten hits to kill.
Enemies drop random resources when killed. There are also jars and skulls you can find that give you resources when broken. Treasure chests drop a whole lot!
This isn’t so important on your first playthrough, but will become evident if you try to load a video walkthrough: while the map is the generally the same each game, some routes are randomly blocked, forcing you to explore by different means each game. The contents of the caves you find in the Wild Area are also shuffled on each playthrough.
This game randomization only happens at the start of play: each exploration of the Wild Area doesn’t reshuffle the maze, so if you find a useful nearby cave on one expedition, you can rely upon it until you win the game; if you choose to start over then (Pilot Quest has a New Game+ mode), then you’ll have to learn new routes, and rediscover what’s in the caves.
Another part of the Wild Area
The map isn’t the only way Pilot Quest wields randomness against you. The tricky thing about the Wild Area is that most of the enemies have of a lot of randomness in their movement and attacks. Your Yo-Yo only has a short range, so you have to get close to the monsters to hit them, and it’s easy for one to suddenly decide to bump into you or shoot. You can mitigate this somewhat by trying to attack them kind of on a diagonal, but there’s really no way to completely avoid damage. You should always be aware of how much time you’ll need to get back to Camp.
This will risk becoming a full walkthrough if I don’t stop myself here, so I’ll leave you with a few tips:
Whenever possible, you want to use Meat found in the Wild Area to fund your next trip into its depths. Meat drops randomly, but treasure chests and strong enemies generate it fairly frequently.
Once you have more Ingots, you can build housing for friendly aliens, who will help out if you build them workbenches. All of this costs Ingots, but they can generate more Ingots for you over time.
When exploring the Wild Zone, there is a tendency to try to push your timer as far as you can. Resist this urge, especially if it involves fighting monsters. Every monster type has enough randomness in its movement and attacks that it could ding you at nearly any time, and the less time you have left, the more a 30 second penalty will hurt. Remember: run out of time, and you lose everything you collected, and all the Zoldnarks you had whether you collected them that trip or not.
Pilot’s Quest really isn’t that hard once you’ve built up your Camp a bit. Eventually you can carry up to 25 chunks of Meat, enough for 50 minutes of exploration, more than enough time to clear out the whole map in one run if you don’t take much damage.
It’s possible to gain more time while in the Wild.
The dungeons have more than just your ship parts. There are secret passages you can walk through to find lots of resources.
By completing a subquest in the Wild Area (check the caves), you can get a gun! It takes Moon Drops to fire it, but it makes enemies a lot easier to deal with.
There’s a miniboss in the area north of the entrance that can tear you up if you’re unprepared, but there’s a trick to beating it.
The dungeon layouts also change with each play, but not much.
Somewhere in the Wild Area (different each game) is a Gear that’s essential to bring back to Camp, in order to start generating Science.
There’s a spider miniboss that you should defeat once you start building up substantial amounts of Meat, that unlocks a new resource when you beat it.
A new and dangerous monster appears in the Wild Area when you get two ship pieces. You don’t have to pursue it to win the game, and since it’ll probably involve exploring the whole place several times in one Wild Area run and fighting it several times you’ll want a full tank of Meat to even try. Beating it is involved in the extra “Cherry” goal for Pilot Quest.
One of the game’s three dungeons
To win the game, you’ll need to collect all three Ship Parts, and to build the Ship Fuel. Fuel costs 1,000 Ingots and 1,000 Science. That is literally all you need to win, but it can help accelerate your progress to build other items too.
Once you win the game, in short order Pilot will crash again, starting you over from scratch. However, on subsequent playthroughs, there will be a trio of statues by the tree in the upper-left of Camp. You can buy one upgrade there per trip through the game, that can make playing through again easier, or faster, in different ways. Try them out, if you want to risk another trip through the wilds of Planet Zoldath.
Everything’s day-glo on Planet Zoldath
If you want to watch someone’s first-time, unspoiled playthrough of Pilot Quest (which itself eventually spoils the whole game), here’s Val1407’s 12 hour playthrough, full of drama and suffering:
Ghosttown Pumpkin Festival, a free itch.io game that we reported on last year, has returned! Install it, apply the easy-to-use tools to carve a randomly-generated pumpkin, then upload it to the servers for everyone to look at and vote on! The servers stay up until mid-November, so you have lots of time to construct and show your work. While it’s free, you can spend $2 for a version that will let your ghost avatar wear a hat of their choice.
While you can upload pumpkins whenever, if the festival display fills up you might end up having your pumpkin shunted into an alternate town shard, so if you want more people to behold your work (and despair?), you’ll want to complete your Jack-O-Project soon.
To place your pumps, enter the festival, press Escape to choose the “dimension” you want for it, then explore for a bit with the WASD keys. When you’ve found a good spot for it press Escape again and click the pumpkin icon to select which of your saved creations to place. The spots where your orange gourdfriends can reside show up as gray dots.
Create something cool, and tell us about it here, if you feel like it!
Recently I’ve been working on a getting-started guide on what I think is one of the most interesting games in UFO 50, Pilot Quest. (Other games I’ve really enjoyed, though I’ve by no means tried every game in the collection yet: Magic Garden, Waldorf’s Journey, Planet Zoldath, Attactics, Kick Club, Onion Delivery, Porgy, Valbrace, Grimstone and Mini & Max.)
Guides take time, so in the meantime here’s an hour-long talk by Ed Logg on the creation of Gauntlet, from GDC 2012!
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
While there were games with aspects of Rogue before it conquered university Unix systems, like Beneath Apple Manor, Rogue still deserves its status as the namesake of the roguelikes. Its great popularity on campuses inspired a slew of expansions and variations.
The world of early roguelikes wavers in its documentation and preservation. There’s several early roguelikes that are nearly unplayable today: the Roguelike Restoration Project (their site appears to have returned to the internet in 2022) has tried to preserve them but its manager has time constraints. I know that Herb Chong, who created a variant called UltraRogue, is still around, and has expressed interest in getting the code running again, but it’s a difficult project, not the least reason for being that the original game saved games by creating and reloading raw chunks of memory. (Roguelike Restoration Project put the original source up here if anyone wants to take a crack at it.)
Several versions of UltraRogue, as well as many versions of Rogue, Advanced Rogue, Super Rogue, XRogue, and others, can be found on The Rogue Archive. Playing some of them might be difficult, but the code is there, sometimes in object form, sometimes as source. It preserves the code for Rog-O-Matic, the computer program that, itself, plays Rogue. You can even find more obscure variations of Rogue there, like HexRogue (which has become unplayable on its home site since Java support for browsers was abandoned), zRogue (an implementation for the Infocom zMachine), PalmOS versions, something called Advanced SuperTurbo Rogue Plus, and more.
I’ve always maintained my affection for Rogue, even if in the eyes of many it’s deficient in features these days. But that means it’s short, it won’t consume weeks of your free time to finish it, while it’s also complex enough to maintain interest, and challenging enough that it’ll take a while to master. If, in this Year of our Frog 2024, you haven’t tried Rogue yet, well, why not? You’ll probably die, but in the end, that’s better odds than real life!
