I've been thinking I need a #fun side project for when I'm not feeling working on big things. I have the source #code for a few old #DOS#games I've hacked on a few times.
The games were written in #QuickBasic (and it's predecessors) and in the past I've used #QB64 to get them running natively on Windows....
Now I'm thinking of using an #LLM (e.g. like that powering #github#copilot) to translate the code into a modern language.
Arcane Cache: Review to Carcosa, a faithful rendition of a poem as video game.
This game holds an elegant, hypnotic beauty and goes down the path of minimalism in a bolt and consequent way that makes it rather unique – the playtime is probably around one minute. It is an adaption of a poem that doesn’t really attempt to refresh anything, and isn’t interested in re-contextualization; this is an approach that bears the risk of gliding into a uncritical relation to the source material, and of getting a bit dusty – the game plays very much like a game that was released when the poem came out could have looked like, like a forged relict from an era that predates the medium; and looking at the developer and their affiliation with goth this might have been exactly what they wanted to do.
UI/2D asset artist looking for a job from an association (100% palkkatuki) or a business (50% palkkatuki) in Finland. 5+ months of semi-free labor for your game project!
Bilingual (Finnish/English), able to place assets into Unity project and into scenes/prefabs, able to use Github, fast learner, pleasure to work with, also capable of writing game narrative, and wireframing.
Me, trying to figure out how to implement basic drag functionality in #Bevy#BevyEngine UI without the cursor jumping to the mid-point of the dragged rectangle.😬
Earlier this year we stepped into the future of Godot with the release of Godot 4.0, and 4 months later we followed it up with Godot 4.1 which was full of new features and improvements. Today we are proud to announce the release of Godot 4.2, our latest and greatest offering to game developers looking for a free and open engine...
#AdventureGame#pointAndClick#2D
We have recently put a spoiler walkthru on the website for those who think they need it. To avoid using it, check out the instruction page, tap each icon to see what it does. tap everything, even the Ravens that give information. We hope you enjoy the journey
I'm not one for "New Year's resolutions", but I am one for overly ambitious projects.
For 2023, Project365 is "One New Game Per Day".
Given that I have 634 unplayed games in my Steam account and {mumble} unredeemed bundle Steam keys, there's a reason my unplayed collection is tagged "Pile of Shame".
I'll pin this to my profile, and give a brief summary here each day (or x, if I miss x days due to work or stuff).
I'll play 15-30 minutes of (at least) one new game I've never played before (or played less than 15 minutes of). I'll give every game at least 15 minutes, even if I hate every minute of it.
I'm also open to suggestions; if you reply to this thread with a game, I'll schedule it, or tell you what I thought of it.
One of the things that's come up is that I have a bunch of games that I've played once, and not touched again.
CryoFall is a sci-fi themed 2D top-down survival game.
Realising that I'd not made a dent in my unused Steam keys this year, I picked an interesting sounding game at random, and installed CryoFall.
Lots of times this year I've had difficulty defining a game, CryoFall made it easy for me. If you've played Minecraft, Rust, Valheim, V Rising (grrr), ARK Survival Evolved, or Fallout 76 the game mechanics are fundamentally the same.
The main difference is that unlike those games, which are either first- or third-person, CryoFall is the first time I recall seeing this gameplay in a 2D environment.
I don't remember seeing the technology tree model laid out quite as clearly or extensively as CryoFall does it, which extended my playtime, but it actually helped crystallise my thinking regarding survival games.
Almost all of the games I listed above have less than three hours playtime, except for Minecraft, and Rust (neither of which I play now).
The gameplay model scratches an itch in my brain for a little while, then it doesn't. The game also has online PvE and PvP modes, but I played it solo to explore the game mechanics.
I generally lean more towards PvE multiplayer games; particularly when the game is a huge timesink like a survival game.
If the game is PvP-oriented, it's worse; returning to V Rising a day later to find everything I'd built completely destroyed? It ended any desire to play again.
What I realised is that if survival & base-building is part of the game, building towards a narrative end goal (eg. Fallout 4), or a win-state, I enjoy that element of the game; when it's the focal point of the game, without any further purpose, for me, it fundamentally becomes work, and loses purpose.
As a survival game, CryoFall's 2D environment offers something a little different to other survival games, but it's not a something I see any long-term playability in; as such, it's (just barely):
Wandersong is a 2D music-themed rhythm adventure platformer.
As with so many other platformers, the game opens with your character standing defenceless on the left hand side of the screen, and setting out on their adventure.
The game world is rendered in a brightly-coloured papercut stop-motion animation style. It was here that I ran into my first problems with the game.
It's definitely a controller-based game, but the UI for menus is so frustrating that I resorted to keyboard and mouse - and STILL had problems.
I lost close to ten minutes (which I subtracted from the playtime to get the total above) just wrestling with the options UI and trying to get it to commit the resolution I'd chosen.
With game actually running at a reasonable resolution, I set off to the right, to embrace my destiny. A sword! Every adventurer needs a sword!
This is when I encountered what felt like the weirdest weapon interaction I've ever encountered: to use the sword you select a direction for the sword to point with the D-Pad (or left stick, but I recommend D-pad) and then move towards the target.
Enter battle... and immediately lose your sword forever as it flies out of your hands and plummets offscreen.
As it turns out, this is not a fighting platformer, it's a musical platformer.
After some further scene setting, you're into the game proper.
Fights in the game are effectively a complicated version of the memory game "Simon", with a C major scale's 8 notes instead of Simon's 4.
As an example, an early fight with a ghost involves replicating the notes and patterns that the non-vocal ghost is making. This is where using the d-pad is more effective than trying to use the left stick. You need to hit the right notes in the right order, and it's too easy to slide through a wrong note with the analog stick, meaning you need to start the pattern again.
For the most part, it's effective, and the music is quite lovely, but it's definitely a game I'm going to need to be in the mood for.
Part of the reason for that is that the bugginess of the UI extends into the game itself, with the game intermittently pixelating as if dropping to low resolution, and intermittent visual glitches.
During the battles with a ghost, the screen colours invert, and the soundtrack changes accordingly, and usually switches back after winning the battle.
However, after one battle, the colours and soundtrack started inverting and reverting non-stop, making the game virtually unplayable.
Unfortunately, the general bugginess took the edge off a game I quite enjoy otherwise, leaving Wandersong at:
December 17, 2023 - Day 350 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 371
Game: Mind Scanners
Platform: Steam
Release Date: May 20, 2021
Installation Date: Aug 31, 2022
Unplayed: 473d (1y3m17d)
Playtime: 1h15m
MInd Scanners is a 2D pixel-art game about psychotherapy in a dystopian society.
The game is set in a society where everything within the walled city in which you live is tightly controlled, while outside the walls, people are gathering.
This society is seemingly run by some kind of AI system, and that system has locked up your daughter for being mentally ill.
You take a job as one of the titular "mind scanners", with a goal of infiltrating "The Structure" to get to your daughter.
You're sent out each day with your little machine, which runs a "mindscan" on each target, allowing you to declare them "sane" or "insane".
If "insane", you play a series of minigames with each minigame targeting a particular type of "insanity" to proceed through a process of "curing" them.
I kept playing as long as I did in the hope of "rescuing my daughter", but the game ultimately became repetitive and boring, feeling like I was just treading water waiting for the next story beat.
This is another game whether the game didn't rise above the pixel art, and the subtext of the game just made me feel icky.
In spite of spending over an hour playing Mind Scanners, I wish I could get that hour back; it's a:
December 21, 2023 - Day 354 - NewPlay Bonus Review
Total NewPlays: 377
Game: Heave Ho
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Aug 29, 2019
Installation Date: Dec 21, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 27m
Heave Ho is a 2D platformer, primarily designed for couch co-op play, but that does have a solo campaign.
However, just calling it a "2D platformer" would be like calling Forza Horizon 4 a "car game", or calling Dredge a "fishing game".
Nothing prepared me for the sheer hilarity of trying to play this game; at some points I was sitting doubled over laughing, yelling at the screen for how ridiculous the game is.
Primarily, you play as a head with two arms attached to the side. Use the left stick to swing both arms (yes, that sounds counter-intuitive, but it makes sense when you play), and use the left and right triggers to grip surfaces with either your left or right hands (or both!).
Whichever hand is gripping a surface then becomes an anchor point to wildly flail your other arm and headbody around in a desperate attempt to try and grip another surface, as you try and navigate across the platforms to the goal point.
This was another game from my unused keys list, but as my eldest already had it installed in his library, I installed using family sharing instead of my key, in case I hated it.
Six minutes later I quit the game and redeemed my own key, because Heave Ho is hilariously:
December 22, 2023 - Day 355 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 378
Game: Death's Gambit: Afterlife
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Aug 15, 2018
Installation Date: Dec 22, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 49m
Death's Gambit: Afterlife is a 2D pixel-art soulsvania.
It's a updated version of the original Death's Gambit, where the dev team took the feedback they received about the original game, and reworked the game, while increasing the size of the game.
For reasons that I can't quite explain, particularly after playing so many soulsvanias this year, this somehow managed to hook me and keep me playing for 3/4 of an hour.
The game tells the story of a Tamil couple, Venba and her husband Paavalan, who have emigrated from Tamil Nadu, to make a new life in Canada.
Throughout the game, you proceed by preparing dishes from Venba's mother's tattered cookbook, frequently needing to solve what are, effectively, simple puzzles to complete each recipe.
There is so much that I'd like to say about this game, but to do so would spoil many of the emotional beats of the narrative.
It's not a long game; I completed it in a single sitting, and collected most of the achievements along the way.
Venba is a lovely, and occasionally heart-wrenching game; it is:
Niffelheim is a Norse-themed 2D survival crafting game with some RPG elements.
As part of my two remaining goals of attempting to review 400 new games by the end of the year, and to get my unredeemed keys list down to under 200 (current count: 201 left), I had no idea what this key was actually for.
At some stage I'd overtyped the title without noticing. Niffelheim it is.
The game opens up with a Viking funeral boat, aflame and disappearing into the mist, while a narrator intones about how my boat has been hijacked on the way to Valhalla.
I then found myself at a character selection screen with a choice between three burly male warriors, and a well-endowed Valkyrie.
My Valkyrie then found herself armed with some basic weapons, and a basic hut, and a series of quests delivered by a raven.
Other than that, you're in pretty standard survival game mechanics; kill things, cut down trees, gather food. The 2D aspect makes playing with a controller natural, and before I noticed, I'd been in-game for 45 minutes.
I found Niffelheim strangely compelling, so let's say that it's:
Godot 4.2 Game Engine arrives in style! (godotengine.org)
Earlier this year we stepped into the future of Godot with the release of Godot 4.0, and 4 months later we followed it up with Godot 4.1 which was full of new features and improvements. Today we are proud to announce the release of Godot 4.2, our latest and greatest offering to game developers looking for a free and open engine...