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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
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”
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.)
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.
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:
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”
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.
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”
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”
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.
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”
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”
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”
