Set Side B

Last Moments for Kickstarter for Dancing With Ghosts

Set Side B usually updates at 10 AM Eastern time every day, but this post needs to go out right now, since it only has 18 hours to go….

Dancing With Ghosts is the next production by Greg Johnson and Humanature Studios, producers of site favorite ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove, and Doki Doki Universe. Johnson is also the designer of the classic DOS and Genesis game Starflight, and also co-designed Star Control II, a.k.a. The Ur-Quan Masters!

But Dancing With Ghosts (Kickstarter, free demo) is a different thing from all of those. It’s the story of a troubled young girl who can see ghosts, and the departed girl who she befriends. I’ve played through a lot of the demo, and I think it’s wonderful. It’s also inspired by the look of Studio Ghibli’s movies.

There’s less than a full day left, so please have a look and give some thought to whether you can help chip in. It’s already made its goal, and then some, but every bit will help out the production. Thanks for listening!

rodneylives

Link Roundup 3/25/2025

Hello! John “rodneylives” Harris here. Let me quickly explain this before I get into it.

I have an overabundance of games links to present through Set Side B. My usual style of doing this is to pick one of them, then maybe write a bit of text introducing it, maybe a bit of a preview, a media embed of it’s a video somewhere (nearly always Youtube), and that’s a complete post. One a day, for approaching four years now. (SSB launched on April 5th, 2022.)

But working this way, I’ve developed quite a backlog! Not all of them are really worthy of a whole post, maybe, or I don’t have a full post’s worth of context to coax out of it.

So in an effort to clean up my link collections, I think I’m going to make regular posts, maybe one a week, that’s just several things that might be interesting. I post them, my link folder get slightly shorter, each individual person might be interested in one or two items in it each, then we move on to more of the usual kind of thing the rest of the week.

Got all that? Here we go:

1. Dave’s Garage interviewed Commodore 64 chip designer Albert Charpentier three years ago (it’s about an 1 hour):

2. On Mastodon, there’s an account, @everybodyvotes@social,miyaku.media, that posts every poll published on the Wii’s “Everybody Votes” channel, back in the days when Nintendo would do fun, free things just for the sake of doing them. You can even vote on them again, using Mastodon’s polling feature.

3. On Balatro creator LocalThunk’s blog, they’ve published a timeline of its history, from original concept to launch, whereupon LocalThunk earned more money than he had ever had before in their entire life.

4. Back on Youtube, speedrunner Kosmic expresses disbelief on the current state of Super Mario Bros. speedrunning (24 minutes), which is more active than you’d think it’d be for a game that’s so old, and has had so much attention poured onto it.

rodneylives

Chronicles of the Wolf Review

This is a review of Chronicles of the Wolf played with a press key from the publisher.

Josh Bycer

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”

game-wisdom.com/

Indie Showcase for 10/28/25

The indie showcases highlight the many games we check out each week on the channel. Games shown are either press keys, demos, or from my (Josh Bycer’s) own collection.

00:00 Intro
00:14 Runman Race Around the World
1:08 Eternalgorhythm
2:11 Fowl Damage
4:01 Super Roboy
5:16 Smells Like a Mushroom
6:48 Lucky Tower

Josh Bycer

game-wisdom.com/

Upcoming: Roguelike Celebration 2025

It’s a time for annual reminders, so here I am holding up a sign, reading “ROGUELIKE CELEBRATION THIS WAY ->“. And another sign, “<- ROGUELIKE CELEBRATION SHOP’S OVER HERE!” And a third sign, “ROGUELIKE CELEBRATION STEAM SALE AROUND THAT CORNER ⤷!” Yes, I’m carrying three signs. It’s a trick I picked up from Zaphod Beeblebrox.

This year it’s happening between Saturday and Sunday, October 25-26. That’s the day after tomorrow! There’s an unusually good roster this year, and I don’t just say that because I helped find speakers for it this year.

We’ve already had a preview event with a couple of great talks, including a real star, Jon Perry, who created two of the best games in UFO 50, Mini & Max and Party House. While I spent a lot of time with Mini & Max uncovering its many secrets, it’s but a small fraction of the time I’ve played Party House. (If you want to hear Jon Perry’s talk, from September, you can find it here, as well as Ezra Stanton’s talk on Synergy Networks in roguelikes, and Alexei Pepers’ Designing for System Suspense.)

I’ve already gushed voluminously about Party House here. Let’s move on to this year’s talk schedule. Times given here are Eastern/Pacific/GMT. (The later times in GMT are pushed into the following day.)

Saturday, October 25th

Time	Speaker	Talk
12:30 PM 9:30 AM 6:30 PM	Michael Brough	The Roots of Roguelikes in Fantasy Fiction
1 PM 10 AM 7 PM	Sébastien “deepnight” Benard	Mixing Hand-Crafted Content with Procgen to Achieve Quality
1:30 PM 10:30 AM 7:30 PM	Max Sahin	Stuff: The Behavioral Science of Inventory
1:45 PM 10:45 AM 7:45 PM	Florence Smith Nicholls	Roll for Reminiscence: Procedural Keepsake Games
2:30 PM 11:30 AM 8:30 PM	Alexander Birke and Sofie Kjær Schmidt	Hoist the Colours! Art Direction and Tech Art in Sea Of Rifts, A Naval Story Generation RPG
3 PM Noon 9 PM	bleeptrack	From Code to Craft: Procedural Generation for the Physical World
3:30 PM 12:30 PM 9:30 PM	Zeno Rogue	The Best Genre for a Non-Euclidean game
4:30 PM 1:30 PM 10:30 PM	Cole Wehrle	Play as Procedural Generation: Oath as a Roguelike Strategy Game
5 PM 2 PM 11 PM	Jeff Lait	Teaching Long Term Consequences in Games
6 PM 3 PM Midnight	Ray	A Mythopoetic Interface Reading of Caves of Qud
6:15 PM 3:15 PM 12:15 AM	Johnathan Pagnutti	Wait, No, Hear Me Out: Simulating Encounter AI in Slay the Spire with SQL
6:30 PM 3:30 PM 12:30 AM	Jamie Brew	Robot Karaoke Goes Electric
7:30 PM 4:30 PM 1:30 AM	Stephen G. Ware	Planning and Replanning Structured Adaptive Stories: 25 Years of History
8 PM 5 PM 2 AM	Tyriq Plummer	Scrubbin’ Trubble: The Journey to Multiplayer Roguelikery
8:15 PM 5:15 PM 2:15 AM	Andrew Doull	Roguelike Radio 2011-Present

Sunday, October 26th

Time	Speaker	Talk
12:45 PM 9:45 AM 6:45 PM	Ada Null	Dyke Sex and Ennui: Generating Unending Narrative in “Kiss Garden”
1 PM 10 AM 7 PM	Younès Rabii	We Are Maxwell’s Demons: The Thermodynamics of Procedural Generators
1:30 PM 10:30 AM 7:30 PM	Dennis Greger	The Procedurality of Reality TV Design – An Overview
4:15 PM 1:15 PM 10:15 PM	Paul Dean	Picking up the Pieces: Building Story in a Roguelike World
4:45 PM 1:45 PM 10:45 PM	Patrick Belanger and Jackson Wagner	Hand-Crafted Randomness: Storytelling in Wildermyth’s Proc-Gen World
5:15 PM 2:15 PM 11:15 PM	Nifflas	Music algorithm showcase
6:15 PM 3:15 PM 12:15 AM	Seth Cooper	Building a Roguelike with a Tile Rewrite Language
6:30 PM 3:30 PM 12:30 AM	Quinten Konyn	Anatomy of a Morgue File
6:45 PM 3:45 PM 12:45 AM	Alexander King	Don’t Pick Just One: Set-Based Card Mechanics in Roguelike-Deckbuilders
7 PM 4 PM 1 AM	Brian Cronin	Playtesting Process for Ultra Small Teams
8 PM 5 PM 2 AM	Mark Gritter	Sol LeWitt, Combinatorial Enumeration, and Rogue
8:15 PM 5:15 PM 2:15 AM	Dan DiIorio	Luck be a Landlord – 10 Lessons Learned
8:45 PM 5:45 PM 2:45 AM	Liza Knipscher	The Form and Function of Weird Li’l Guys: Procedural Organism Generation in a Simulated Ecosystem

If some of these talks seem like they’re spaced closely together, some of them are “lightning talks,” very short. Those have their titles in italics in the above list.

If you follow indie gaming circles, there are a fair number of exciting speakers among the talks! Jeff Lait (homepage) has made twenty highly interesting roguelikes, many as 7DRLs. Nifflas of course is the creator of Within a Deep Forest, the Knytt games, Affordable Space Adventures and others. Dan DiIorio is the creator of the oft-mentioned (at least in my hearing) Luck be a Landlord, and Zeno Rogue makes the long-lived, and brain-bending, HyperRogue.

And make sure to have a look at the Redbubble and Steam links too! In this year’s Steam selection, MidBoss and Shattered Pixel Dungeon are already on sale.

rodneylives

Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival 2025

It’s your annual reminder that adamgryu’s Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival is online and live again, through and a couple of weeks beyond Halloween.

Log in, carve up a gourd with the easy mouse-based controls, and submit your new orange child to reside on the shelves for people to gawk at and wonder over.

And some of the pumpkins that were up when I logged in this year:

rodneylives

Review of The Shattered Spectrum (Mod for The End is Nigh)

This is a review of the Shattered Spectrum fan mod for The End is Nigh. It is free to play but requires a copy of the End is Nigh to work.

Josh Bycer

game-wisdom.com/

Indie Showcase for 10/13/25

Our weekly indie showcases highlight the many games we play here on the channel (Josh Bycer’s Game Wisdom). Games shown are either press keys, demos, or from my own collection.

00:00 Intro
00:14 Altered Alma
1:20 Arsonate
2:35 Demon’s Mirror
4:21 Mecha Simultactics
6:04 Bore Blasters
7:23 Eye of the Commando

Josh Bycer

game-wisdom.com/

Kulebra Review

This is a review of Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo played with a press key provided by the developer.

Josh Bycer

game-wisdom.com/

Indie Showcase for 9/30/25

The weekly indie game showcases cover the many games we (Josh Bycer and friends) play each week on the channel. Games shown are either press keys, demos, or from my own collection.

00:00 Intro
00:14 exophobia
1:33 The Paradogx incident
2:48 RKGK
4:22 Rabbit and Steel
5:57 Battle Train
7:46 Knights of the Road

Josh Bycer

game-wisdom.com/