The Flipside of Gaming
This is the third part of our February 2025 coverage of Steam Next Fest.
0:00 Intro
00:16 Flocking Hell
1:58 Total Chaos
4:00 Isle of Reveries
5:08 Reignbreaker
6:46 ZPF
7:34 City of Rampage
9:08 Paperklay
10:52 Haste: Broken Worlds
12:02 Coin Push RPG
13:23 Rogue Light Deck Builder
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”
Part 2 of my (Josh Bycer’s) favorite demos from the Steam Next Fest event.
0:00 Intro
00:18 Gentoo Rescue
1:37 Nitro Express
2:43 Mother Machine
4:01 The King is Watching
5:53 Repose
7:53 Demon Tides
10:02 Chromagun 2: Dye Hard
11:27 Sliding Hero
12:39 9 Kings
14:06 Twilight Monk
15:24 Squeakross: Home Squeak Home
16:22 Last Report
17:25 Deck of Haunts
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 is a collection of my favorite demos from our first nights of streaming next fest 2025 February edition.
0:00 Intro
00:17 Monster Train 2
1:50 Moadra
3:44 Chainstaff
5:33 Ruffy and the Riverside
7:02 Scaravan 66
8:16 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Tactical Takedown
10:14 White Knuckle
11:35 Twisted Tower
13:34 Shotgun Cop Man
15:08 Empyreal
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 indie titles we play here on (Josh Bycer’s) channel. Games shown are either press keys, demos, or games from my collection.
0:00 Intro
0:14 Solar Raiders
1:30 Sol Cesto
2:47 Spider Fox
4:13 Preserve
5:43 Lightyear Frontier
7:17 Metal Mind
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”
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
I think I’ve posted some of these before, but I don’t think I’ve done all of them, and I’m cleaning some links out of my list. So let’s take another look.
These are from a six-or-so year old meme that began with putting creepy (but not too creepy) music to battle music from perennial retro JRG favorite Earthbound. Earthbound had lots of weird and crazy enemies, so they fit fairly well. But they’re not all Earthbound collections, just so’s you knows.
I’ve got quite a few of these links. I could spread them across weeks, but I’ve got other posts to make, so I’ll just unload them all at once. Watch as many as you can stand.
First, the Earthbound collections. 3 minutes:
Now, 9 minutes:
They’re getting longer in length. 12 minutes, if you’re getting tired of them I can’t say that I blame you:
And the mother (heh) of all collections, 51 minutes, using music from all three games:
The meme mutated a bit into science diagrams that look like shitposts, and with other game music. This one’s Miitopia (8 minutes):
And, with Splatoon music (11 minutes):
Last one! With Toby Fox music (13 minutes), you know, Undertale and Deltarune and stuff:
I’m glad to get those out of the list! Something different next time, whew.
For this podcast, I spoke with Dominic O’ Reilly from Krunchy Fried Games who is working on the adventure game Five Day Detective. We spoke about adventure game design and writing along with the challenges of creating the story alongside the puzzles.
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 the original Mac isn’t often considered a top gaming platform, there were neverthless some very nice games for it. One of those was John Calhoun’s classic shareware title Glider. (Glider can be played on Infinite Mac’s emulation of System 6—look in the Games folder in the Infinite Mac disk on the Desktop. The source code is on GitHub.)
Calhoun had a lot of fun just making prototypes for new Mac games, and so while he didn’t release many there are a number of half-made ones that he’s now put up in their own GitHub repository. Elite-inspired space exploration games, a computer version of the classic Black Box puzzle, a computer aquarium and other ideas are among the presented experiments.
The title of the repo is Unfinished Tales Vol. 1, and there’s already a Volume 2. There really has never been a game playing or development platform like the classic Macintoshes, it’s a window into a lost era of both computing and entertainment. Cameron Talley on Youtube made a 13 minute examination of some of their contents. This is it:
This is a review of Blade Chimera 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”
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Everyone loves Stardew Valley, and its engaging and quirky denizens! Whether it’s alcoholic bus driver Pam, or horny mayor Lewis, or Pierre the Capitalist, or the evil corporation you can let take over the town, or that one person who’s like that. Sure, you know, that one!
Many of the personable and mathematically romanceable characters of Stardew Valley can be spotted in Emmanomia‘s STARDEW VALLEY ANIMATION (3 minutes). Here:
This is a review of Magenta Horizon played with a press key. After I recorded this review, the developer updated the tutorial with a new version, but I have not had a chance to go back and play through it.
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”
Games From Scratch is a prolific Youtube channel dedicated to helping solo and small team gamedevs with tutorials and tools. They really do post frequently, so if I linked to everything they made it’d overwhelm the blog, but it’s been a while since I referred to them, and they just made a nice omnibus video of free tools. There is a sponsored section in it, but if that kind of thing bothers you I suggest using the browser extension SponsorBlock, which shows time-wasting sections on the Youtube timeline in different colors.
Here is the video (13 minutes):
Here are the tools recommended, along with links (which the video maker neglected to provide):
Blender (3D modelling)
Godot (game engine)
O3DE (game engine)
Krita (raster art)
GNU Image Manipulation Program (raster art)
Audacity (audio editing)
Tiled (map creation)
Inkscape (vector art)
Pixelorama (pixel art & animation, can be run in browser)
DPaint.JS (pixel art, in-browser, recreation of Deluxe Paint for Amiga)
GraphicsGale (pixel art)
Material Maker (procedural texture creation)
Ucupaint (texture painting extension to Blender)
MagicaVoxel (voxel-based painting, Windows & Mac only)
SculptGL (browser-based sculpting)
LDtk (2D level editor)
This is a showcase of almost every demo featured in the Haunted PS1 Demo Disc Flipside Frights.
0:00 Intro
00:55 Sorrow
2:15 Spyrit Walker
3:46 Subversive Memories
5:08 Axyz
6:14 Scissors In Hell
7:36 Ticky’s Tower of Time
8:24 Prison of Husks
9:27 500 Calibur Contractz
10:39 Blessed Burden
11:34 Toree Saturn
12:26 Death in Abyss
13:44 Eclipsium
15:00 FriendShapes
16:37 The Hungry Fly
17:45 No Strings Attached/ Vladimere Lhore Collection
18:36 No Players Online
20:03 Trip
21:09 Children of Saturn
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”
