The Flipside of Gaming
For this perceptive podcast, I spoke with Matt Sharp who is the designer of Video Game Fables to talk about creating a subversive RPG while still adhering to the design and structure of the genre.
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”
Zachtronic’s last game is here and represents a great combination of brain teasers, programming puzzles, and solitaire.
This was played with a press key provided by the developer.
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”
Tutankham Returns (itch.io link, $0) is a port/expansion of the classic Konami/Stern arcade game Tutankham. While Tutankham had only three levels, this has seven, but otherwise is much the same kind of thing. Compare the above to the original. It matches the original’s sound, graphics, and presentation exactly! The games have especially good sound design.
Creator Luca Carminati has a number of other recreations of classic games in itch.io, some, like a version of Tutankham Returns, for the Commodore 64. (Yes, it’s another Commodore post!) Of particular note is Bagman Comes Back (video, C64), a port of another neglected classic, with 24 different maps, compared to the original’s single three-screen board. Luca has been in this for a long time; he has a collection of Amiga games on itch that he made starting back in 1995!
For this episode we reviewed the store page for the game Dracula’s Castle, if you would like us to look at your page in a future episode, please reach out.
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”
Popular and prolific game asset creator Kenney has a page up at Github that links to some of his favorite tools for manipulating pixel art, such as creating sprite sheets and extracting images out of them. It’s got a lot of useful info! If you have an interest in this style of art, especially making games with it, these programs are worth having in your toolbox.
Kenney: Manipulating pre-made game assets
For this perceptive podcast, I sat down with Dima who is working on the upcoming game The Dark Heart of Balor. We spoke about their background and designing an action game along with some of the fundamentals of good action game design.
All footage shown was from our live stream of a pre-release build and may not represent the current version of the game.
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”
itch.io is becoming quite famous for its bundles, where you can contribute money for a great cause and pick up a large number of great indie games at the same time. Past bundles have raised millions of dollars in support of Black Lives Matter, to help Palestinians, to aid LGBQTIA causes, and to help alleviate the plight of the Ukrainian people. If you’re hard up for cash you can donate the minimum, but if you have the means then please consider donating more than that?
A current bundle is especially important, the Bundle for Abortion Funds, to provide funds to women to travel to abortions-friendly states in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s disastrous decision concerning a woman’s right to choose All proceeds are going to The National Network of Abortion Funds‘ Collective Power Fund. As of this writing the bundle still has about seven days left to go, but please don’t put it off for too long!
Of particular note, when you purchase a bundle on itch.io like this, by default the games will not be immediately put into your “library.” Being in your library can result in getting extra email and making it difficult to keep your bought games organized. When you load the page of a game that you’ve bought in a bundle, if it’s not in your library yet, there should be a notice at the top of the page to include it.
I have sometimes noticed, however, the notice not appearing, and generally I prefer to have it all in my big big list. If you’d rather just go ahead and dump them all into your main itch library, for instance to make it easier to use the itch.io app to automatically maintain and run your games, there is a Greasemonkey script you can install to do that. You’ll need Greasemonkey on Firefox, or Tampermonkey on Chrome, to run it. You can also use the website Bundle Browser to explore it, and see which games it has that you might already own.
(via simmering octagon at Metafilter)
For this extended interview, or light college course, I sat down with Chris Park and Willard Davis to talk about what is happening over at Arcen Games over these last few years working on AI Wars 2. We discussed game design and the changing market and perception of games, not just in the strategy genre. Chris spoke about the challenges of working on AI Wars 2 and teased what he has planned for the future.
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”
Remember The Witness? Remember how everyone loved The Witness?
What? You didn’t love The Witness? Are you it some kind of blasphemer?
Sure, it has all those smarmy tape recordings all over the place. Certainly, you never quite feel like you’re done with it. Absolutely, everyone has at least one puzzle they find maddeningly obtuse (mine was on the ship). But you gotta admit, the special category of puzzle was a work of genius. If you don’t know what I mean by the special category, um… forget I said anything!
Well whether you loved The Witness or if you think it Jonathan Blows, you might want to have a look at The Looker, a pitch-perfect parody that’s actually a pretty decent puzzle game in its own right. It’s rated Overwhelmingly Positive, and as a reviewer says, “If you liked The Witness, you’ll like The Looker. If you hated The Witness, you’ll love The Looker.”
It’s free on Steam, and only takes a couple of hours to complete!
Steam: The Looker ($0) via Dominic Tarason.
Via MNeko on Twitter, Apotris (itch.io, $0) is nothing more than a really sharp and responsive clone of a certain tetromino-stacking puzzle game. It just feels good to play! It’s Game Boy Advance homebrew, and I can personally vouch that it’s particularly nice if you have the means to play it on a jailbroken 2 or 3DS.
Us remaining (or even new!) blogs in the distant future year 2022 have to stick together, so I feel it’s important to point you to the blog of Matt Sephton, which is on a variety of tech and tech-adjacent topics, including sometimes games!
The particular item of interest there that I want to point you to today is on the obscure Japanese handheld P/ECE, released in 2001, which is a lot like a foreshadowing of Panic’s quirky elite gamer fixation/lust object, the Playdate. It too was a purposely-monochrome device in an age of color, and it also hosts a range of quirky homebrew games. It even still has a website!
f special note is that it was a place that notable and prolific small-game homebrew design genius Kenta Cho, a.k.a. ABA (Twitter), released their wondrous work even way back then! And where else can you find a demake of Rez that pits you against a malevolent Microsoft Outlook icon?
Please, check out all of these far-flung and varied links!
Matt Sephton’s blog, Get Info, and its article on P/ECE.
By now many of you are no doubt familiar with Alvi Tekari’s Baba Is You (itch.io, Steam, Switch, Android, iOS). The premise is simple. In a Sokoban-style world composed of discrete blocks aligned with a grid, you try to get a figure (usually the sheep Baba) to a goal (usually a flag). But nearly everything about this game world is malleable, according to special word blocks in each level. If a set of three blocks is arranged in a horizontal (reading left to right) or vertical (reading top to bottom) line, then that statement becomes true throughout the level. In fact, every level comes with certain statements already in effect: it is only because somewhere it says BABA IS YOU that you can control Baba, and if something else IS YOU, then you can move it too. And you can make new rules by moving the words to make new sentences.
Baba Is You became an indie darling from its game jam release in 2017, and in 2019 it absolutely exploded, being featured on several game stores including Nintendo’s eShop picks page. Its rules are simple, yet their implications becoming diabolically complex later on. Not to give away some absolutely amazing secrets, but there are very few games that get as hilariously weird as Baba Is You-or as difficult. Baba Is You is a challenge that will keep you going for weeks, but eventually pays it all off with one of the best end game sequences anywhere. If you haven’t played it yet, you really should. I did a Q&A with Alvi Tekari for Game Developer about the creation of Baba Is You, and I think it’s one of the best interviews we’ve done.
This is all to make sure we’re on the same page when I mention the sublimely ridiculous Baba Is You XTREME, a free parody of Baba Is You made by Baba Is You‘s own creator!
Baba Is You XTREME seems just like the original at first, right until you press the first key and discover: the game now has a completely spurious physics engine! Baba no longer snaps a step at a time centered in the cells of a Sokoban grid, but now moves around freely, with acceleration and friction. The same is true with all the other objects on the screen that are IS PUSH. Objects that ARE STOP are locked in place, though.
The addition of physics makes the execution of any move into a challenge to itself. The rule system is still in place, some old words have much weirder implications, and there are even some new words to explore. There’s only 11 levels (it is a free game, after all), but around level seven you’ll be scratching your head. But one implication of the physics is that words that are in a corner aren’t completely impossible to shift like they were in a grid setting, so with some dedicated pushing it’s possible to break some troublesome sentences here that would be impossible in Baba Is You‘s Cartesian cosmos.
It’s completely free, so if you’re a fan of BIY it’s worth checking out. And if you haven’t tried Baba Is You yet, it is worth a look too!
Baba Is You XTREME (itch.io, Windows)
