Month: March 2025

Moving Out

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Developer: SMG Studio
Publisher: Team17
Year: 2020
Genre: Arcade

Finished playing Moving Out with two of my kids a few nights ago, not counting all the bonus levels and objectives, and had a great time. In Moving Out you are a team of movers who must get everything out of a house before the timer expires. A lot of the humor and fun from playing the game comes from the chaos caused by moving everything quickly and the physics knocking everything around the house, since you are not punished for destroyed the home owner’s property. Later levels add to the chaos by throwing you into wackier environments. I imagine it’s got a similar energy as Overcooked, but I never played that one so I can’t say for sure.

top down view of a moving

What I really appreciate about the game are all the difficulty options that made it possible to play this game with my kids. My kids are 7 and 5 years old and there is absolutely no way we could have played this without the options to add more time and making items easier to pick up. The game still remained a challenge but at a much more manageable level.

My kids were also a fan of the character customization options. As you can see in the above screenshot, you have all sorts of wacky looks to choose from and it was also nice to see that your character could be in a wheelchair. It doesn’t have any effect on gameplay and is just nice from a representation perspective.

The character design choices also add to the 80’s Saturday Morning Cartoon look that the game is sorta going for through its art and music. Generally I’m incredibly bored with games and pop culture leaning into 80s aesthetics, which isn’t something this game is really doing, but the light touch of 80s Saturday Morning cartoon influence in this actually works very well.

characters moving through a field in space while a giant robot is looking at them. The field is littered with trash.

If you’re looking for a game to play with your kids, I would highly recommend Moving Out. It has a wide variety of options to make the game playable by folks of any skill level and the humor worked for my kids too. I think I actually got this game through a Humble Bundle, so you may already own it too!

Moving Out is available on Windows, Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One

Creating Games for the Ann Arbor District Library

~ mpklamerus ~ 3 Comments

I mentioned a few times that I helped organize a games anthology for the district library (anthology link on the library’s site here but I prefer you play the updated version of my game here) and even made a point-and-click adventure game for it, but I don’t actually think I actually did a post about it or why it happened? So for the sake of incredibly specific Michigan game dev history, here’s the deal with all that.

the logo for ann arbor 200, showing a map of the city and the years 1824-2024

Back on my birthday last year, in August, I got an email from the Ann Arbor District Library saying that they were interested in commissioning a video game or anthology for the city’s bicentennial celebration. The Ann Arbor District Library had been doing a series of commissioned works such as music, documentaries, interviews, writing, and other works to celebrate the city. They had proposed doing a small anthology of games, 3 in total, about a historical figure in the city named Dr. Alvin Wood Chase. He was basically the city’s version of Dr. Oz in the late 1800s and sold recipes for remedies to ailments that didn’t work and found some success doing so. The printing house he established is still standing today. You can read more about him at the link at the top. Each game would be about a different stage of his life and by a different developer. As an aside, I’m not actually the first person to make a game for the Ann Arbor District Library, that would be the text adventure games that Christopher Becker made for an Interactive Fiction program at the library.

a bearded man standing in front of a house
Dr. Chase’s First Adventure, by me

Originally I was just an organizer because I didn’t think I would be able to create a game since my family just had a baby, but then I got FOMO and asked if I could make a backup game. This got approved and with everyone picking a different era, development commenced. We had about two months to make our games, with each one having the goal of about 10-15 minutes of gameplay. Unfortunately one person had to drop out due to medical issues, but they’re ok now. It was a challenge for me since it was my first game in Adventure Game Studio, but I actually got it done. The other two games are great, one is a puzzle game about running a printing press and the other is an adventure game made in the Game Boy about the end of his life.

stacks of books in different colors
Dr. Chase’s Mean Steam Machine by Flyover Games

The games and anthology page were published on December 30th, right before the end of the year. I am so proud of this project, maybe even more than the Locally Sourced Anthology that I helped with and came out during the summer. Not because I think one is better than the other, but I got to finally check off making a game in AGS, a goal of mine for an incredibly long time. It was a delight to make a game for the Ann Arbor District Library, a place I love visiting. Most importantly, I got to show the game to my kids and one of them immediately found a few bugs that no other tester did, so I got to fix those bugs and add her in the credits as a tester. For whatever reason she wants to grow up and be a video game QA person so it was fun to be able to give her her first video game credit.

top down view of a bearded guy saying "Ah, another new morning."
Chasing Glory by Lilycore Games

Blastoff!

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Developer: Edmundo Ruiz Ghanem
Publisher: Edmundo Ruiz Ghanem
Year: 2001
Genre: Adventure Game

a woman standing in a purple convenience store
Reality-On-The-Norm has discovered gradients

My playthrough of Reality-On-The-Norm continues with the 8th game in the series. It was nice to play two entries in a row without having to fuss too much with getting them to work. This one has you playing as Elandra, who has appeared in some of the previous games, and you must help an amateur rocket builder. On average the series has been improving in the quality of the art and gameplay design. This one even features a really nice location select screen.

a screen containing a notepad listing "places to go" like a town square, launch site, and airplane graveyard
The game’s location select screen

I think the writing is the best in the series so far too! It’s genuinely fun going back to these and seeing topical nerd humor like an unironic All Your Base Are Belong to Us reference. Part of the fun of playing this series is that it’s a time capsule of a specific point in the adventure game community.

a woman talking to a man outside of a building and one of the dialog choices is "All your base are belong to us"
Folks, we’ve got an All Your Base reference

Another way this thing is a time capsule of the community is how many Yahtzee references it has. I posted the following screenshot without any context, because I forgot, and someone thought that there was maybe some in-community fighting happening but no, he had helped with the art in this game and someone in the team threw this reference in there as a fun joke. Maybe there was drama at some later point but it certainly wasn’t happening with this game.

view of the outside of a military base and the words Yathzee Sucks! is spray painted on the wall

I mentioned in a previous review that a dev saw my RON posting on Bluesky and this was that game. It was entirely positive, since I did have a good time playing this game, but I still imagine that it’s probably weird to see someone playing a game you made almost 25 years ago. They even mentioned that it was like doing an excavation on their 19 year old brain when I mentioned that reference. So generally I’ve kept any and all criticism off social media, as light as it may be, because who wants someone throwing rocks at something you made that long ago when you were a kid. The only real criticism I even have with this is just that it had some frustrating pixel hunting but that’s kinda it. I may have played an updated version too? It makes references to picking up items later and a walkthrough I found references picking up an item and going to rooms that I never came across.

A fun thing about it being a shared universe is that we’re starting to get more callbacks and it’s almost a sequel to the first game. I thought the epilogue and animated cutscene in an early AGS game was fun to watch. Even though I just complained about this game having some goofy design stuff, so far I think it’s the best one I’ve played and it’s fun watching a community learn how to make adventure games and referencing stuff that happened in this universe 8 games ago. Overall I had a lot of fun with this short game and would recommend it to others. Just be sure to play previous entries like the first game before doing this one.

Blastoff! is available for free on the Reality-On-the-Norm website.

Blog Roundup (2025-3-3)

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A day late and I still need to do an indie game roundup (I might just skip last week and put it all into this Friday’s post?) but here’s some more posts I enjoyed reading this week.

I really think other folks do the whole roundup things a lot better and it’s how I discover a lot of new blogs and other neat things, so here are some by videodante, Emily Price, The Works of Egan, Sweetfish, katey, and Aura. You should do one too!

Video Games

Steam Next Fest ends today, so this would have been more useful if I made this roundup yesterday, but maybe you’ll still find some games to add to your wishlist in these Next Fest roundups by startmenu, Indie Hell Zone, Adventure Game Hotspot, and Buried Treasure.

Emily Price reviews Misericorde Volume 2: White Wool and Snow for Unwinnable, which means I have just added the first game to my wishlist.

Not a blog post and you probably already saw it elsewhere, but EA has uploaded the full source code for Command & Conquer, C&C Red Alert, C&C Renegade, and C&C Generals + Zero Hour to Github. Hopefully it’s the beginning of a trend.

It sounds like a previously unreleased C64 game, the Scramble-like Magnum Force, has been found.

The dev of Balatro now has a blog!

Speaking of Balatro, damien has modded Balatro on the PC to have touch controls.

Not a blog post but I really liked this interview that the Space Quest Historian and Richard Cobbett did with Aaron Conners and writing the Tex Murphy games AND novelizations, which I’ve heard are sometimes better than the games.

Florence Smith Nicholls talks about the wild combination of karaoke, games crit, and games preservation in You don’t see me at the club? Well I don’t see you in the 2006 MMO Wurm Online. Since I talk about Myst Online to the point of me sounding like I’m shitposting (I’m not), I fully endorse this.

Someone wrote about the world-building in Riven: The Sequel to Myst, so of course I have to include it.

And then finally, because I’m never not on my Myst Online bullshit, did you know that the game is still online, available for free, and folks have monthly meetings in them? Here are the meeting notes for last Saturday’s All Guilds Meeting, where they discussed things like making new Myst Online content, the Mysterium convention, and upcoming events like making a dutch baby.

TTRPGs

We got a new ttrpg newsletter! This one is Carouse, Carouse! and written by a collective of folks.

Clayton talks about designing a community.

Technology

Probably preaching to the choir a bit with this one but I liked reading about Why Personal Sites Matter More Than Ever.

Will Smith from Tested talks about the end of support for Windows 10 and what you can do with your old computer if it can’t do the update to 11.

Other Bits

I can’t stop thinking about this Grape-Nuts ad

A new issue of ALOCASIA is here! It’s a free journal of queer plant-based writing.