I think I like doing these more on Sunday instead of Monday, so that will be the schedule for now. If you enjoyed these posts, please subscribe to the blogs you like on your RSS feed reader (or start using one if you don’t, I use Inoreader) and consider doing occasional link roundups on your site. Google search is abysmal now and this is kinda the only way people can discover new places.
It’s the first one of these in a post-Cohost world. What does that mean? Not much really. This is going to be a big one because I must clear out more the backlog in my list and people keep insisting on making games. Even that Geneforge guy who said there’s too many people making games keeps making them! What’s up with that? Always feel free to reply in the comments with either things you’ve made, or games you’ve been enjoying. I love comments. Anyway, here’s games.
Dodge 1000 Knives (Itch.io) is a free browser game where you must dodge 1000 knives. I’m bad at it but it’s good.
Raide
Raide (Itch.io) is a browser-based puzzle game where you put down train tracks for a train to move from a beginning to start point. I really enjoyed its short levels and artwork.
Backstreet Warriors (Itch.io) is a browser brawler game, like Double Dragon, made in PICO-8 where you must defeat 99 people to win.
The Queer Halloween Stories Bundle 2024 (Itch.io) is a collection of queer games, comics, stories, etc for $60, although there’s a bundle you can buy at a lower price too.
Pinball Spire (Steam) is a pinball game but with a Metroid-like structure. I watched a stream of it yesterday and it looked fun!
Cyclopean
Cyclopean now has a demo (Steam). It’s a first person dungeon crawler inspired by H.P. Lovecraft and I think the art style looks pretty neat!
Just so you can see how far behind I am, Strange Scaffold has released two games! CLICKOLDING (Itch.io/Steam) is a game where you clicked a counter while a masked man watches you and I Am Your Beast (Steam) is a fast-paced covert fps set in micro sandboxes. Both games seem like they have done very well, which is always nice to see for a studio like Strange Scaffold.
Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival
The Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival is open again (Itch.io). This is a Pay-What-You-Want online game where you carve some pumpkins and put them up for everyone to see.
Tiny Glade (Steam) just looks like a very lovely diorama builder where you create castles and cottages where no specified goals or win conditions. It also seems like it’s been a massive success from looking at the number of Steam reviews.
ODDADA
ODDADA (Steam) looks like an incredibly pleasant music toy that was recommended to me by Flyover Games. Just look at all the fiddly little bits you can play with and bright colors in those screenshots.
The Portal Tomb (physical book) is a tabletop rpg for 5 players and 1-2 sessions that uses Ogham runes instead of dice to generate a story set at a queen’s funeral.
As I was typing this, a new Indiepocalypse is now available (Itch.io). This one features future classics like SNAKEBYTE, a very good Metroid-like game where you explore a computer as an ASCII snake, EyeOS (I think I covered that one before?), and an arcade game called Be Not Afraid, But Run by Renegade Sector Games.
10BF.EXE (Itch.io) is a dual screen bullet hell but you can also capture spell cards and use them on your enemies.
Melon Head
Melon Head (Itch.io) is a new surreal point-and-click adventure featuring EGA art. I don’t even know how to describe it so you’ll have to check it out yourself. There’s a free demo if you’re interested.
Forever Space (Itch.io/Steam) is a remake of a previously made game by Pinhead Games. I haven’t played it but I’m a fan of their previous games like the Nick Bounty series and this seem the developer going in a horror direction.
Spaces are moments, not abstract or far away (Itch.io) is a free browser game described a poemware. I thought it was a beautiful space to explore and really liked the photography mechanic.
Hamayumishi: Night Parade of a Hundred Yokai (Itch.io) is an upcoming twin-stick shooting platformer by Nice Gear Games that I think looks really nice and it just got a demo.
Linker has a new game in developer that looks like a nice puzzle platformer (Itch.io). No title yet and it’s early in development but everything by them is great.
Here’s some things that aren’t games but I think you’ll enjoy:
If you are a fan of Hypercard then you’ll love Decker (Itch.io). It’s a free browser tool for making interactive documents and we just got a new version.
Wonderful game dev Big Hand In Sky has released 3 short stories that are Pay-What-You-Want on Itch.io: OVERLOAD, Name: [Here], and Looking at Clouds.
If you’re working in Zonelets, here’s a tool to make working with RSS a little easier.
And finally, here’s a couple of indie games that aren’t new but I finally got around to playing them and would recommend:
Here’s a remake of the classic arcade game Berzerk in PICO-8 (Itch.io). Everyone likes Berzerk!
Snoik! (Itch.io) is a twist on the classic Snake game for the Playdate. This time you’re switching between two planes to avoid hitting your tail.
Here’s my weekly check in on what I’ve been up to. So far this week has been less bananas than the last couple of weeks, which has been nice, and I’m finally settling into a groove with the kids back in school.
Cohost shut down yesterday and is now read only for the next few months before going down completely. I keep saying I’ll do The Post about the site at some point but hopefully I do make time for that, even if everyone else has already done it and better. It certainly wasn’t perfect but I did like going there and will miss it. I’ve been working on a gigantic blog roll so if you did post there and want your site added, let me know in the comments or social media. Having a giant list of sites to follow in my RSS feed reader has been nice.
Work on the adventure game continues. I’ve made a couple rooms and a character since last week so I’m feeling pretty good about progress. The design of the game’s puzzles is improving too. In theory it’s probably much better and more efficient to design the entire game before doing art for it but I just cannot function like that and it has killed previous projects so I’m sticking with what works for me. But at this rate I feel pretty comfortable about hitting the deadline. Getting better at Adventure Game Studio may be a potential hurdle but people have been very kind about answering my questions about the engine.
The Wall of Buttons continues to grow. It’s been fun doing goofy early internet stuff and then clicking around on other websites.
It’s the first day of October. Not a fan! Here are the records I listened to this week. A shorter post this time but that’s alright.
Same Eyes: Desperate Ones (2022, Bandcamp) I posted about this band before in a previous one of these. This is an Ann Arbor darkwave/new wave band and some other local folks like Warren Defever seem to be involved with the production. It’s good! It’s a little more darkwave than the previous album, which is something I like, but I found the songs to be just slightly less memorable, so they actually sorta rank at about the same level for me. I actually got this one for free when I bought the other album from them on Bandcamp, which was incredibly nice. I guess they have a 3rd album coming out soonish, or they’re at least working on it, so I’ll pick that one up too.
Sad Lovers & Giants: Feeding the Flame (1983, YouTube) Sad Lovers & Giants is a UK post-punk band that started in 1980. I’m not sure how well known they actually are, but they’re still around today and putting out new music. I don’t know them too well outside of this album and a handful of songs outside of this, but I really enjoy it and should probably listen to more of them. It’s a really strong album that maybe trails off a little towards the end but I’d recommend it to people who liked early 80s post-punk or bands like The Chameleons and Echo & The Bunnymen I guess? It’s probably not the best comparison but it’s what I can think of. I picked this one up at UHF Records in Royal Oak, probably about 12 years ago. For whatever reason I was always there and they seemed to have a great assortment of 80s post punk at the time, before record collecting picked up in popularity again to the state that it is now.
I still haven’t made my RIP Cohost post and I’m still not sure what to say about that, but ever since they announced the site was shutting down, I’ve been putting together a giant Google Sheet of folks that have websites and blogs that people can follow. If you were a Cohost user and come across this, please feel free to leave a comment on this post with the relevant info and I’ll add it. Even if you didn’t use Cohost, I think there’s a lot of cool sites here that you can look at and subscribe to on your RSS feed reader of choice.
Still going through Twitter and Cohost posts for my CompStoreVisuals account and reposting them here since that’s more permanent. I saw that the site for The Computer Store in Mobile, Alabama is down (tcs360.com) and there hasn’t been a facebook post in a few years, so I’m assuming the store is gone now. So I suppose enjoy these pictures of the dog and as a record of a place that’s no longer around.
I’m not sure when Cohost shuts down posting, other than it being sometime tomorrow, so I’m doing one of these right now before it’s too late. If you enjoy these, please consider doing your own on your blog and subscribing to the blogs you like on your RSS feed reader. Also feel free to leave comments with what you’ve been reading lately.
RobF, of various indie games fame like Death Ray Manta, has started a blog where he reviews the B-movie schlock he’s been watching every night. It’s great. Even as a bad movie enjoyer, I haven’t even heard of most of these.
Meredith Gran, of Octopus Pie and Perfect Tides fame, is doing more posts on her site that give updates on her Perfect Tides sequel and other cool things.
Dante’s post on Star Wars and Star Trek accurately captures my feelings and current relation to both franchises.
If you’re like me and having second thoughts about using WordPress after all the recent stuff that’s going on with them, this post gives you an option to move to.
Edenwaith talks about how you can implement Steam Achivements in the Mac ports of games made in Adventure Game Student, which may be very relevant to me in the next year.
Well, this is the last roundup I’m doing before Cohost becomes read-only, so if you’ve enjoyed these consider subscribing to my RSS feed? I’ve still got a backlog of games to post about but if there’s something cool you’ve (or a friend) worked on, please let me know either on social media or in the comments here. Or even just comment on this post with what you’ve been playing lately, indie or not, I always love to hear that too.
With Cohost winding down, some people have started to make games and toys featuring its mascot Eggbug. You can find some in this collection on Itch.io but I’m sure there’s plenty of other games too, like this game and this eggbug creation tool.
Speaking of Cohost, people there keep talking about how great Crypt Worlds (Itch.io) is. I haven’t played it yet but the devs have been making free games for a long time and it sounds like they could really use the support right now, so consider picking it up.
I’m not a racing person but Golden Lap (Steam) seems like a fun management game from the people who brought you Art of Rally.
Parking Garage Rally Circuit (Steam) looks like a Sega Saturn-ish inspired arcade racing game and the reviews for it have been very positive so far.
Gurk in Trouble
Ramón Wilhelm made a free point-and-click adventure game a while ago that I really enjoyed called Yip Quest, and he’s back at it again with another kobold adventure game called Gurk in Trouble (Itch.io). It’s free and playable in the browser too.
It was part of the $108 Adventure Game Challenge game jam, which got a bunch of entries. Consider checking those out on Itch.
Terminal City
There were also some really interesting adventure games that were made for the PowerJam3 game jam back in August too (see, big backlog of things to post). These games (Itch.io) were made using the PowerQuest plugin for Unity. PowerQuest is a tool just for making point-and-click adventures and kinda sorta feels like Adventure Game Studio from my limited experience with both. The one that seemed to get the most attention was Terminal City, a game that plays like an endless runner but with a text parser, but check them all out.
Devil’s Hideout
Devil’s Hideout (Steam/Itch.io) came out earlier this month if you’re looking for horror point-and-click adventures. I’m a big fan of Cosmic Void’s games and this is another great one.
Exophobia
Exophobia (Steam) is a retro-looking FPS that was released back in July that I enjoyed even despite some of my exhaustion of the retro FPS revival that’s happening (partially because they just look and don’t feel retro). This one is kind of a mix of early FPS like Wolfenstein 3D and Catacomb 3D and Metroid-style exploration games.
The process of copying over all my posts from Cohost before the shutdown continues, here’s some more things you might like to look at. You can find more of these posts here.
This blog contains a few photos of a CompUSA store.
Here is a short YouTube video of people buying Windows 95 on launch day at CompUSA and Egghead Software.
And here is a random photo of the kids section at a CompUSA. I think I just grabbed this from a google image search
Busy week here! After a rough start with the kids getting a cold at the beginning of the week, I’ve actually got a lot done.
The big thing I’ve been annoying about on social media this week is my wall of buttons that link to other pages. People from Cohost have been getting really into having button links since the site shuts down in less than a week and everyone is getting into personal pages since we want to continue long posting but not go to Tumblr, which I had deleted after they got into AI scraping and their CEO has repeatedly screwed up in a variety of ways. It’s been a lot of fun adding them and I encourage everyone to make a button for their site and let me know about it so I can include it.
The other exciting thing, which I can’t really say much about yet, is that Mystery Project is really taking off this week and I’m learning everything I can about Adventure Game Studio so I can make a game in that. I have also started working on art for it. It should be revealed in 2-3 months and is actually a very tiny project, but exciting to me.
