Tag: indie

Othello Trigger

Presented largely as a curiosity, but an entertaining one. An itch.io user named The Great Foohachi went through the trouble of converting background and character graphics from beloved SNES Squaresoft JRPG Chrono Trigger to Gameboy format, and from there put them to work as window dressing for a fairly rudimentary single-player Othello clone, a.k.a. Reversi, using GB Studio, which is rapidly becoming a go-to tool for this kind of monkeyshine. I would expect that 90% of the 256K ROM space goes into the art, which is really only there to give it some prologue cutscenes.

How does it play? Once you get to the game portion, fairly slowly, but it works. I played a round on Normal difficulty and won pretty easily. The thing to remember is, try to look ahead a move or two, don’t set up your opponent for huge moves, and if possible don’t let your opponent get a corner spot, while trying all you can to get them yourself.

Here’s a few screenshots. P.S. If you try this, you’ll want to turn the sound off.

This bit of dialogue should give you some idea of how seriously this is taken.
It’s a nice conversion of the SNES game’s graphics at least.

You can’t play as Robo because he’s the opponent, natch.

Othello Trigger (by The Great Foohatchi, Gameboy ROM on itch.io, $0)

Best Games of Debut Festival Part 1

This is part 1 of my (Josh Bycer’s) look at the favorite demos from Debut Festival 2025.

00:00 Intro
00:22 House of Decay
1:59 Vampires Veil
3:22 Slumber Realm
5:46 Oolo
7:50 JumpMap
8:57 Fire Hero Pixel Rescue
10:19 Goblin Vyke
12:26 Cubetory
13:43 Buttonman

Multilink Monday 11/10/25

I’ve got a huge backlog of things to post about, so once a week I’m going to just dump a few of them into a post, preferably on a Monday without much discussion of the contents, just to get them out of my notes. I figured I’d do a new pixel art banner for this idea later, for now let’s get to the links!

  1. Video Games Chronicle interviews Hip Tanaka, a.k.a. Chip Tanaka, composer of Nintendo music going back to Metroid and Earthbound, president for a while of Pokemon company Creatures Inc., and current chiptune musician with many wonderful tunes.
  2. The podcast Eggplant: The Secret Lives of Games recently concluded a tour of every game in UFO 50;
  3. On Game Informer (welcome back), from February 2022, before their recent troubles, Inside the Nintendo Power Hotline.
  4. A wiki, Ukikipedia, is a knowledge resource for Super Mario 64 speedrunners.
  5. And from Kaze Emanuar, a video delving into the power of Mario 64’s sound engine, which can run code itself. (15 minutes)

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!

The “Officialist” SkiFree Homepage

SkiFree was part of one of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack releases for Windows 3.1, part of their limited gaming output before the went in on Xbox. Who knows, at the rate they’re going, maybe they won’t be doing Xbox much longer.

It’s a simple game where you guide a skier down through a scrolling course, avoiding obstacles, and trying to get a good time. After finishing the course and registering a time you could keep skiing, just for the fun of it, although eventually a yeti will chase your skier down and swallow them whole. Closing times on this slope are strictly enforced.

Its creator Chris Pirih maintains a homepage for SkiFree, along with history (it’s a port of a VAX terminal game he had written in Fortran), downloads (including one of an updated, 32-bit vesion), and other info. It’s the kind of page I’m surprised to see is still up, and hope remains up for decades to come.

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.

Chronicles of the Wolf Review

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

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

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

TimeSpeakerTalk
12:30 PM
9:30 AM
6:30 PM		Michael BroughThe Roots of Roguelikes in Fantasy Fiction
1 PM
10 AM
7 PM		Sébastien “deepnight” BenardMixing Hand-Crafted Content with Procgen to Achieve Quality
1:30 PM
10:30 AM
7:30 PM		Max SahinStuff: The Behavioral Science of Inventory
1:45 PM
10:45 AM
7:45 PM		Florence Smith NichollsRoll for Reminiscence: Procedural Keepsake Games
2:30 PM
11:30 AM
8:30 PM		Alexander Birke and Sofie Kjær SchmidtHoist the Colours! Art Direction and Tech Art in Sea Of Rifts, A Naval Story Generation RPG
3 PM
Noon
9 PM		bleeptrackFrom Code to Craft: Procedural Generation for the Physical World
3:30 PM
12:30 PM
9:30 PM		Zeno RogueThe Best Genre for a Non-Euclidean game
4:30 PM
1:30 PM
10:30 PM		Cole WehrlePlay as Procedural Generation: Oath as a Roguelike Strategy Game
5 PM
2 PM
11 PM		Jeff LaitTeaching Long Term Consequences in Games
6 PM
3 PM
Midnight		RayA Mythopoetic Interface Reading of Caves of Qud
6:15 PM
3:15 PM
12:15 AM		Johnathan PagnuttiWait, No, Hear Me Out: Simulating Encounter AI in Slay the Spire with SQL
6:30 PM
3:30 PM
12:30 AM		Jamie BrewRobot Karaoke Goes Electric
7:30 PM
4:30 PM
1:30 AM		Stephen G. WarePlanning and Replanning Structured Adaptive Stories: 25 Years of History
8 PM
5 PM
2 AM		Tyriq PlummerScrubbin’ Trubble: The Journey to Multiplayer Roguelikery
8:15 PM
5:15 PM
2:15 AM		Andrew DoullRoguelike Radio 2011-Present

Sunday, October 26th

TimeSpeakerTalk
12:45 PM
9:45 AM
6:45 PM 		Ada NullDyke Sex and Ennui: Generating Unending Narrative in “Kiss Garden”
1 PM
10 AM
7 PM 		Younès RabiiWe Are Maxwell’s Demons: The Thermodynamics of Procedural Generators
1:30 PM
10:30 AM
7:30 PM 		Dennis GregerThe Procedurality of Reality TV Design – An Overview
4:15 PM
1:15 PM
10:15 PM 		Paul DeanPicking up the Pieces: Building Story in a Roguelike World
4:45 PM
1:45 PM
10:45 PM 		Patrick Belanger and Jackson WagnerHand-Crafted Randomness: Storytelling in Wildermyth’s Proc-Gen World
5:15 PM
2:15 PM
11:15 PM 		NifflasMusic algorithm showcase
6:15 PM
3:15 PM
12:15 AM 		Seth CooperBuilding a Roguelike with a Tile Rewrite Language
6:30 PM
3:30 PM
12:30 AM 		Quinten KonynAnatomy of a Morgue File
6:45 PM
3:45 PM
12:45 AM 		Alexander KingDon’t Pick Just One: Set-Based Card Mechanics in Roguelike-Deckbuilders
7 PM
4 PM
1 AM 		Brian CroninPlaytesting Process for Ultra Small Teams
8 PM
5 PM
2 AM 		Mark GritterSol LeWitt, Combinatorial Enumeration, and Rogue
8:15 PM
5:15 PM
2:15 AM 		Dan DiIorioLuck be a Landlord – 10 Lessons Learned
8:45 PM
5:45 PM
2:45 AM 		Liza KnipscherThe 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.

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.

My contribution for 2025

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

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.

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