It’s a weird time for video games.
Console prices are going up, not down. Nintendo wants me to stop playing games in English. Xbox has lost the plot. This week Sony announced the end of physical media. And an incredible number of video game developers are getting layed off.
Since I won’t be getting another console, I won’t be playing the next Zelda game. This, I have come to terms with (with thanks to Frank Cifaldi). It’s OK, I’ll just play desktop…
I made a manifesto as part of Manifesto Jam called Your unfinished projects are gems.
Esoteric Ebb by Christoffer Bodegård.
This is a game that will kill you for being too masculine.
You start the game building essentially a Dungeons and Dragons character. It doesn't matter so much which stats you pick out at first, you character will be very weak. You don't know anything, you don't have any gear and you certainly aren't strong. Any action that could constitute hubris or over-confidence (especially in front of women) will have you taken down a notch.
As the game progresses you and your character will explore politics, gender and city of Norvik. Your choices are guided by 6 inner monologues corresponding to the stats Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma. The quality of their advice depends on how strong you are in each of those traits. They have their own personalities (with political stances) and often riff off each other.
The A MAZE. games festival looks really cool. I wish I could go. That and Playtopia.
In the lead up to this year's festival A MAZE. are hosting an online game jam based on the Philip K. Dick short story The Defenders.
This is cool because I really enjoyed taking part in the PiCoSteveMo which is also a month-long, fiction-inspired game jam.
This is a post about the Murder game engine.
I've been playing around with this engine because it has a great feature set and is built by very talented people. I'm hoping that getting familiar with this framework will help me learn some game engine fundamentals.
My approach so far is to use the Murder engine to build a 2d side-scrolling platformer. I don't have a strong idea of what game I would like to make so I am focussing on getting basic platformer features down.
This is a post about a game engine called Murder.
Having seen recommendations on Bluesky for this game I started by playing the demo on itch.io and quickly knew that I would have to play this game in full.
I only very recently started playing 2D platformers; at least since becoming an adult. My reintroduction last year was playing The End of Gameplay by droqen, and HollowKnight by Team Cherry and then subsequently platformers like Barbuta in UFO 50 by Mossmouth and friends.
However unlike these skill-based games this is very forgiving - this is a thinky game with many save points and no run backs. I completed it in less than four hours.
As part of learning how to make video games I took the UCSanDiegoX: Comptuer Graphics CSE167x course on edX.
The course covers the fundamentals of rendering 3D scenes. I gained some experience in:
As part of the PiCoSteveMo game jam I've been building a deck builder game where you host a great party.
The last time (see day 9) I responded to feedback from play testing by making the gameplay easier to understand. I also added sound effects by printing control codes.
It's coming up to time to finish this game. I enjoyed reading Derek Yu's Finishing a Game post - which is cool because Derek Yu probably made the game that inspired this one.
As part of the PiCoSteveMo game jam I'm building a deck builder game where you host a great party.
The last time (see day 8) I worked on adding animation for a title screen and importantly a game over screen.
I was lucky enough to have some friendly strangers from the internet play test the game. Today I'd like to act on that feedback - the game is "within tweaking distance of fun" - so let's get tweaking.