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!

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BitFinity has a Kickstarter going for an “ultimate” version of all the Brawl in the Family comics, and a wealth of additional material. It’s already made its base target and is chasing stretch goals now with five days to go. The next goal is new Brawl in the Family comics, and plenty of people would like to see that I think! Here’s a promotional video for it.

Matthew doesn’t know who the hell I am, but I enjoy his work, and I think you’ll enjoy it too, so please consider it? And one of the levels is a King Dedede-ish plush toy, and won’t that be nice to have and to hug?

That’s it for today. The search for interesting things to link stretches ever onward. See you tomorrow!

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For this perceptive podcast, I sat down with Joseph Mirabello from Terrible Posture Games to talk about developing the upcoming roguelike Battle Train. We spoke about the challenges of roguelike design, what is special about Battle Train, and then talked about their Kickstarter.

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/

This is a preview of the demo build of Sunset Devils which is finishing up a Kickstarter campaign at the time of this posting.

• Store Page
• Kickstarter

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/

For this Perceptive Podcast, I sat down with RPG designer Kasey Ozymy to talk about working in RPG Maker and designing Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass. We discuss RPG design and making something that stands out from the rest of the pack. For the final part of our talk, we focused on the Kickstarter for his next game: Hymn to the Earless God, and what makes that one different.

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/

Lately he’s been experimenting with more physical kinds of games, and he has a Kickstarter going for a deckbuilding game called Spellstorm!

It’s an asymmetric game, with eight characters who each play differently from each other. And if you want to try before backing, there’s already a module available for it for Tabletop Simulator (it is here), and you can download a free PDF copy of the rules for more info.

As of this reporting the Kickstarter’s just gotten underway with 27 days to go, and is approaching halfway to its goal already. $40 gets you a complete copy of the game, and $60 gets you it another another clever little game Keith made called Dragon Bridge.

Why not give it a glance over, and good luck to you Keith!

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Recently Scott did a video Q&A over Zoom, the record of which is up on YouTube (listen for a certain familiar name to come up near the end-I was one of the spectators of the Q&A). One of the things revealed is that there is a modern remake of Adventureland, called Adventureland XL, on Steam for a mere $5! It’s in Early Access, and has been for some time, but they’re geared towards finishing it up for full release soon.

Adventureland XL is described as a “Conversational Adventure” game, which is to say, it’s driven by a text parser (although a better one than the old Adventure International games) and has text descriptions. But, like the original, it also has included illustrations.

Scott works for a company called Clopas, which has a Kickstarter going for another new game called Stereotypical, to be made for iOS and Android platforms. It’s just getting started and has a month to go. They have a very charming pitch video! Please consider it, won’t you?

Another couple of items of interest came up in the Q&A. Scott Adams did games based on several Marvel properties at the time, which are Marvel’s very first computer game adaptations. They also made a graphic adventure version of cult movie The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension, which The Retroist discussed here, and links a quick playthrough here.

A couple of other related items:

Mike Taylor has made available tools for using Ruby to compile your own adventure games using the old Adventure International engine, which you can find on GitHub.

And also mentioned at the Q&A is FujiNet, which is a line of network adapters (and other useful tools) that work with 8-bit computers. They work by handling all the actual networking within the device so it doesn’t strain the resources of their old processors. They can even emulate printers (so as to produce PDFs of output by the machine) and storage devices like disk drives, making for a nice all-in-one device.

During the talk someone mentioned what I think was a version for the Atari Lynx portable console, and even talked about using it to play Lynx Rampart with others over the internet, and since I am the biggest Rampart fan in the entire world, it felt like they were pressing my buttons specifically.

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The Oyua was a beautiful dream that was not to be. It was a notable early success on Kickstarter, bringing in much more money than they expected, but the money soon ran out and what they were able to produce turned out to be not as enticing as people expected, with weak Wi-Fi and flimsy controllers.

And yet, the premise was, and still is, pretty sound: an Android device connected to a custom app store, dedicated to games, and taking no money out of software sales.

That last bit might have harmed it, since it reduced the income they could make. But this post isn’t about what-might-have-beens, but about as-they-now-ares, how they are now is not that bad! A community of Ouya buyers have gotten together to support each other. When the Ouya servers went down in 2019, it had the effect of nearly bricking many of the consoles, but there are fan-made replacements where much of its origin al software has been made available again, and even including some new games!

Dan Wood explains the current scene in a YouTube video on the state of the Ouya in 2022, and it’s interesting reading. For those with Ouyas who want to connect with others, he mentions the site Ouya World (check out the Tutorials section!), and a Discord server called Ouya Saviors (which I can’t link to because of Discord’s invitation policy, YAY).

The tutorial that Dan recommends in his video is the stouyapi Ouya API server. It should help get people with inoperable Ouyas up and running again.

Dan Wood: Playing The Ouya in 2022

EDIT 7/10/22: Someone mentioned in comments that they didn’t think Ouya’s cut was nothing, and I think they may be right. Until I can find confirmation, I’m going to acknowledge their concern with this note.

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