Month: August 2024

Indie Game Roundup (August 26, 2024)

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

It has been way too long since I’ve done one of these so I’ll probably start doing a series of shorter ones on a weekly basis until I get caught up with everything that I thought was really cool. I’ve just been too busy to do bigger posts like I was doing before but still want a place to log everything I like.

a purple woman named Cyan saying "we woke up somewhere new again..."

The big one has been the Locally Sourced Anthology I: A Space Atlas, a collection of 8 short games by various developers in Michigan with an outer space theme. I’m very proud to have helped with this anthology and I’m hoping to do more of them in the future. Do I get to put something I worked on in my “cool indie games” blog posts? Sure, why not.

Kitsune Tails has been a really nice platformer in the spirit of Super Mario Bros. 3. It’s challenging but the game has some nice options for people like me who aren’t as good at platformers.

A yellow smiley face in a maze of 3D red bricks

This new interactive liminal-space horror essay about technocapitalism and individuality sounds very cool, and of course, I get very excited about anything referencing Windows 95 screensavers.

top down view of soldiers in a hallway in a very blue screen. Text saying you must rescue hostages.
Screenshot from Star Combat

Star Combat: Cadre Class is a new turn-based strategy game for DOS. I got to play an earlier version of the game and it’s great.

Speaking of DOS games, the most recent DOS Games Jam wrapped up and there’s a lot of new DOS games there as well.

two women in a cabin and a text parser saying "Talk to Kimi"

Also inspired by DOS games, The Crimson Diamond is a brand new adventure game that is strongly inspired by Sierra’s The Colonel’s Bequest. It’s been in development for a while and I’m so happy to see it come out and doing well.

person walking in the woods next to a pond and a text parser saying "Pick berry"

There’s also another adventure game inspired by Sierra’s 80s adventure games. The Tachyon Dreams Anthology is a collection of 3 sci-fi adventure games that use a parser but are a bit more player friendly than those classic adventures were.

Other people talking about indie games:

Tony Warriner, of Broken Sword/Beneath a Steel Sky adventure game fame, has started doing a regular indie games blog and it’s really cool

Self-Promo Zone

Already did self promo at the beginning but I have an irc channel for indie and alt games/gamedev talk at AfterNET at #AltGames. If you do not have an IRC client or don’t feel like messing around with that stuff, you can easily join through the browser here. I’ll never be able to get people to drop Discord for IRC, but I personally prefer it. I don’t feel like I have to follow along with every single conversation and I’m not getting pinged all the time by notifications or the “Everyone” tag. Consider giving it a try! No registration required!

Also consider following me on Twitch!

Books Read in July 2024

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

I guess I should post on here more. I’ve been pretty busy pretty busy this summer but here’s what I read this last month. You can always follow me on Storygraph

Ariol – A Beautiful Cow: This was a collection of comics that one of my kids picked from the library. It was fine! I never heard of it before

Dragonflight: My first Anne McCaffrey book! I thought it was ok but suffered from some very boring stretches but it has some neat concepts and I liked the ending. I will read more by her at some point in the future.

Exhibit by R.O. Kwon: Big fan of this writer. Didn’t enjoy it as much as The Incendiaries but still thought it was very good. The marketing for the book was very odd to me because it felt like it was hyping it up as an erotic and fun novel and that’s really not what the focus was. Not a criticism of the book at all, just weird that the marketing chose to go with that.

Kindred: My first Octavia E. Butler book! Nothing really insightful to say about this one. Yep, it’s a great book and I’ll need to read more by her. By knowing what the book was about in advance, I sorta expected it to be kind of a slog but nope. It felt like a quick read to me.

The Long Game: My first Ann Leckie story. This is another one of the short sci-fi stories that is available as part of Amazon Prime so I read it. I don’t really remember anything about it and my storygraph says I gave it 3 stars so I guess I thought it was just fine. I’ll read more by Ann because I know this isn’t really representative of her writing and to be honest, I’ve kinda felt “it’s fine” has been the case with all of the stories in this Kindle series.

The Stars Too Fondly: Really fun sci-fi, gay romance novel by Emily Hamilton. I don’t really know if I had seen people discussing it on Bluesky (where I now follow a ton of writers) before grabbing it from my library, but I’m glad I did.

Servant Mage: Meh. Fantasy novella that still felt kinda boring in the middle and I didn’t really find the characters to be too interesting.

Yours Cruelly, Elvira: My Wild Life as the Mistress of the Dark: This is the autobiography by Cassandra Peterson, the actress who plays Elvira. I would have a hard time recommending it to people who don’t know who she is, but I really liked it. Went with the audiobook for this one, which I think was the right choice. I think it’s neat my library had it.

In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns: My first Elizabeth Bear book. To be honest, I have already sorta forgotten what it was about and had given it 3/5 on Storygraph, which usually means I thought it was fine but not memorable. I had checked it out just because it was something I could listen to for free as part of my Audible trial. I’ll read more by her though. I thought it was neat that the main character wasn’t white, it was a perfectly fine detective story, and I was kind of in a weird mood when I listened to it anyway.

The Y in Life: This was a self-published novel by a local author that I checked out from the library because I enjoyed the author’s blog posts about local bookstores and soccer team. It’s a weird one that’s kind of a mess and way too long but I still enjoyed it? Maybe I like when an author knows they are probably just writing one book and just put everything in there. Maybe I should read more self-published books even if they’re messy?

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain: I really liked the previous book in this world, The Empress of Salt and Fortune, but didn’t click as much with this. But it’s short, everyone else seemed to like it more than me, and I still didn’t even think it was bad, just not great like the first book. Still might read more in the series though since they’re standalone novellas set in the same world.