Short update this week. The point-and-click adventure I made should be coming out next week. it’s just a little browser game that will take about 10 minutes to play through. So nothing life changing but I’m still proud of it and have the adventure game making bug so I’ll keep plugging away at short point-and-click adventure games in Adventure Game Studio. I have two weeks off at the end of December so maybe I’ll make progress on a previously started game, or maybe not since it’s the holidays. I guess we’ll see! Maybe I’ll just spend the entire time playing Myst Online, which received an update this month.
If I do any game dev, it would be that clay animation adventure game I mentioned before. I was putting stuff up on Cohost for it but I think that’s it. It’s another 10-15 minute long game. The design doc was already complete and I had done a couple rooms, so I don’t think it would actually be too difficult to complete. Then again, everyone says this about their game before adding on another year of development time.
Last week there was some annoying discourse on social media about how no one makes innovative or experimental indie games anymore, but there’s actually a lot of greats folks pointing you to those games so I made a list of some.
This is going to be a very flawed list. I’m probably forgetting a bunch, unaware of others, I can only read English, and this is focusing on places and not specific people at places like PC Gamer and Rock, Paper, Shotgun who are doing great work and can be followed on social media, so I want to apologize to you all in advance since it’s incredibly frustrating to see people lament that “(type of game) isn’t being made anymore” when you’re yelling about them every week. I just needed to cut the list off at some point. Hopefully someone smarter sees this list and puts together an even better one on their own site. But I hope this will give you some cool things to add to your RSS feed reader of choice and maybe some new podcasts to listen to.
I’ll also add that since I am an adventure game nerd, this list is going to be leaning more on that genre. Some of these folks cover experimental games than others, but I think they’re all worth a look anyway. I also couldn’t be bothered to separate TTRPGs and video games but you know what, maybe consider giving something other than D&D a try. You deserve better.
Like I said earlier, I know I missed a ton. Please leave comments with links to who you follow!
After successfully getting through what one would call a hell week, I have put together another collection of blog posts I enjoyed reading. Maybe you’ll find something to add to your RSS feed reader. If you don’t have one, use one! It’s just so much easier to have them all scooped up into a feed reader instead of having to constantly check social media. I use Inoreader but there’s plenty of RSS feed readers out there. Apologies if there are lots of typos in this, I wrote it after only a few hours of sleep. But I must talk about blogs!
Books
Transfer Orbit recommends 14 SFF books that are coming out this month.
the Lunar Flaneur always has great reviews of books. I think it’s more of a focus on SFF books but not always. This time it’s a review of the graphic novel Glass Town.
Dev Logs
I follow lots of game devs through their blogs. Here’s what some are up to:
Edenwaith released a remake of the slot machine from Space Quest 1 for the Playdate.
It would mean a lot to me if you could give to Rob’s GoFundMe. He’s been so supportive of other folks in the past and his games over the decades have given me a lot of joy.
Tabletop RPGs
The BLOGGIES are open for nominations! It’s a yearly awards event to celebrate blog posts in ttrpgs.
There’s been so much talk about blog posts in the Prismatic Wastelanddiscord. Highly recommended if you love ttrpgs and blogs. Here’s some of the recent posts that I saw in there:
I love this explanation of how to play ttrpgs by post, including through Discord. I recommend doing this if you really want to play ttrpgs but are just unable to coordinate the regular meetup sessions because of real life.
Fool’s Pyrite gives their final impressions of ICON.
Video Games
Indie Tsushin has released its latest issue. The issues are readable in the browser and each one covers indie games from Japan and features interviews with game developers.
The Digital Antiquarian has a nice interview with interactive fiction writer Andrew Plotkin.
Press Play Gaming has been doing a ridiculous amount of GOTY lists this month, with a focus on indie games in every genre.
Renga in Blue did an incredible comparison between the original version of Colossal Cave Adventure and the Dungeons & Dragons campaign that inspired it.
Brain Baking says you should hang out with the DOS Game Club and I agree.
Are you feeling down because of the winter weather? David at startmenu talks about how playing old rpgs is comforting to him.
Websites
Obviously you know by now that I have lots of opinions on websites and why you should have your own. It turns out that a lot of other people do too!
Nora tell you to make a website, why, and how to get started.
Jared riffs on Aftermath’s article about building your own site to say that you must also visit other websites.
Not a new post but From The Hart explains why you should use a RSS feed reader.
A blog post I saw in the Prismatic Wasteland discord that I mentioned earlier, it turns out you can use Bluesky as the commenting system for your blog posts. While I have my own opinion on this and think you should have your own commenting system on your site to have full control over it, it’s still cool! Not trying to start discourse! It’s neat and I wouldn’t post it here if I thought it was bad. The post itself has the feature enabled so you can see how it looks at the bottom of the post.
Every week I slowly lose my mind as I see more takes about how no one makes interesting games anymore instead of just reading my posts and supporting the people that do. Did you know people are also already making GOTY lists even though there’s still a month left and great games being released every week? Weird shit! Here’s some of those great games! As usual, feel free to tell me about things you or friends recently made. Comments on here or through any of the ways listed on the About page are fine. I’m only one person and can only find so much. If you enjoy these, subscribe to the RSS feed and tell a friend.
Video Games
The AdventureX Jam has ended and now there’s tons of free point-and-click adventures for you to play on Itch.io.
Vaultron (Itch.io) is a free toy that lets you build underground cities and then you watch it come to life as elevators and trains on monorails start moving around in your city. I thought it was really impressive and hope it gets more updates.
Pym’s Daily Word Square Puzzle (Developer Site/Itch) is a brand new puzzle game for DOS. Each day reveals a new partially filled word square which you must complete. The game is available for free but the developer also accepts donations.
Botos do Diabo (Itch.io) is a short dolphin horror point-and-click adventure.
Michigan Tech University has a game making club and since I live in the state I’m obligated to report that they’ve just published a new set of games on their Itch.io page!
I wasn’t able to go to No Quarter because I don’t live anywhere near NYC but it sounds like there were neat things there, including an exhibit that involved lots of smaller games? Or something? I don’t know, I’m a dummy, but anyway it means we have new Bitsys from Rose and Adam.
PERSON – adventures in WORLD (Itch.io) is short and somewhat autobiographical walking sim but it’s made in the Doom engine. Or GZDoom I think? Don’t yell at me, I don’t know all the different Dooms. I just think it’s neat.
Frosty’s Snowed Under! (Itch.io) is a platformer made in PICO-8 for the PICO-8 Advent Calendar. I haven’t played any of the entries in the calendar yet but I’m happy that such a thing exists. I’m not familiar with it, but I guess this is a remake of the Commodore 64 game Frosty the Snowman/Frosty’s Busy Night.
A Body Is Subsumed In The Work (Itch.io) is a browser collage game created by Hyphinett using the Flatgame Maker plugin for Unity.
LocZine (Itch.io) is a browser-based zine made in the Hypercard-like tool called Decker that’s all about video game localization.
Escape From Castle Matsumoto (Itch.io/Steam) is a free game where two shinobis race against each other to recover stolen items and escape a castle. It reminds me of that old Spy Vs. Spy game from decades ago. The same developer used (I think) this engine to remake the adventure game Enclosure and experimented with remaking scenes in old Sierra adventure games. It’s a neat look!
Caves of Qud (Steam) 1.0 is out after being in Early Access for so long! I don’t have anything interesting to say about the game. It’s great. Lots of smarter people have already talked about it.
The Twine Cookbook (Store) is now available in print. All proceeds from sales go toward the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation.
Honor Bound (Steam) is an interactive novel by Harris Powell-Smith where you protect an exclusive boarding school and rebuild your life after scandal as a military bodyguard. Harris is a great writer and I really liked their previous interactive fiction writing.
IKEELYA (Itch.io) is a game where you play as a disillusioned hitman who has grown tired of his day job, and dreams of becoming an interior decorator. During the day you must do hits on people so you can buy furniture at night and eventually get side gigs doing interior design. The game is available for Pay-What-You-Want.
Cave Hikers (Steam) is described as a relaxing and humorous 2D interactive cartoon mockumentary that follows three characters through a cavernous world, on a quest to find the mystical “cave with an infinite ceiling”. I haven’t played this one yet but I really like the art and it has a demo if you’re interested in trying it out.
Ollie-Oop (Steam) is a game about a skateboarding dog. It looks cute!
TTRPGs
Shoot the Moon (or, Die in the Labyrinth) (Itch.io) is a ttrpg created for the Minimalist Jam by Adam Bell that uses the game of Hearts as its central mechanic. Players are stuck in a labyrinth built by the Queen of Spades and held together by the power of the renegade moon and must either escape the labyrinth or shoot the moon with a huge gun.
The Devil They Buried (Itch.io) is a new solo journaling TTRPG by Kienna Shaw following an outlaw revenant’s quest for revenge.
Tiny Tome 2 (Itch.io) is a book of 50 RPG treasures from 50 different creators. It includes complete games, variant rules, one-shot adventures, and many other things. The Itch page has a link to where you can buy a physical copy too.
It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve done one of these but I’ve made good progress on stuff since then.
The adventure game I’ve been making for the library is almost done. All the playtesting went well and I just have a few final tweaks left for the final version. It will be good to move on from this. I had a great time making it and learned so much but also deadlines are tough for me, especially when they’re for projects in my spare time. That said, a big thing on my to-do list in life was to make a game in Adventure Game Studio and I actually fucking did it. I had it as a goal for this year and it seemed unlikely until the work came in early this fall so I feel incredibly fortunate to have something kick me in the butt and finally do it.
Now that I finally cleared the roadblock of learning AGS and will be putting a game out there very soon, there will be more tiny adventure games to come. I’m still not 100% sure what I’ll do next. I have a half finished clay animation adventure game sitting around and I should probably do that one. I don’t think it will take too long and it would be fun, so it’s likely to be that. I have ideas for what I can work on after that but we’ll see where the next few months lead me. I’m also working on doing more streaming on Twitch and posting the VODs to my YouTube. I was anti-streaming for a long time but I think it’s actually good for me to talk to folks while playing comforting games so I’ll keep doing it.
Pretty much all of November was a rough month for me mentally so that wasn’t fun. I’m past it all now and doing much better. Don’t really know if I could have done much to prevent it since it’s election/SAD season/increase of work but happy to be past it.
Well, lol, sorry that ended on a bit of a downer note but I’m through the rough part now and doing better. Really!
It’s the first day of December and the year is almost over. How are you? I hope you had a lovely weekend. I’m tired and writing this too early in the morning. If you enjoy these roundups, tell a friend, subscribe to my RSS feed (I use and enjoy Inoreader), and consider doing your own roundup (like this one by Mike Egan) if you have a website. It’s hard to find stuff on the internet these days so being vocal about what we like is probably the best we can do right now. I also always like comments. What have you enjoyed reading lately?
Books
Classics of Science Fiction revisits the out of print book A Mirror for Observers and finds that it maybe doesn’t hold up.
It was an incredibly busy week for people to post about ttrpgs on their blogs and sites. That’s wonderful! It sounds like in the Prismatic Wasteland discord they’re doing a thing called Blog Fridays, which sounds fun.
Wraithkal does great ScreenshotSaturday roundups of Mastodon posts on their blog.
robotspacer helps us get into the Murder Club series.
Nathalie posts the transcript for a talk titled Creating for a Better Industry, which features lots of links to cool little tools for making games and personal websites.
Things That Aren’t Blogs
John Walker did two big lists on Kotaku recommending indie games. Here’s Part 1 and Part 2.
SpindleyQ has a NES emulator that replaces everything with cat noises.
