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Have a Small Snapshot of Detroit’s Indie Game Community from 2019

~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

I was looking through the notes app on my mac and just saw this big list of games in one doc. I’m not sure why. Given the amount of student games on here, these may have been notes I took of the indie games conference thing that Lawrence Tech University in Southfield was doing at the time. It was by no means a big event but it’s been 7 years (the notes are from April 21, 2019), so I thought I would dump this all here with any commentary I have, and a games historian can stumble across this in 10 years and pick out the interesting bits. I don’t think this will be of interest to many folks but I think it’s good to have it available anyway. The titles of the games are in bold and my commentary is in unbolded text.

Some of these folks are still making games, some not, and it looks like a few of the students here ended up going into the games industry so that’s lovely to see too. Not going to name them because that feels like doxing to me even if they’re success stories, but I still love to see people doing well.

MageQuit
https://store.steampowered.com/app/572220/MageQuit/

top down view of wizards shooting at each other

MageQuit is a multiplayer game where you duel each other as little wizards. A very fun game. I believe at the time this was in Early Access since the release date on Steam is October. I think it did well judging from the number of Steam reviews and it getting releases on consoles. It’s two brothers who make up the studio, I’m not sure if they’re still in Michigan, and at the time of this writing they’re working on a new game, MageQuit Dungeons.

Golden Treasure
http://www.dreamingdoor.net/

a giant dragon talking to a smaller dragon

Another cool one. They created a visual novel about dragons called Golden Treasure (Steam/Itch.io) that I would recommend. I think there were attempts to make a follow up to this but judging from the last news posting being in 2023, I don’t think this will happen. Hopefully I’m wrong.

Beat Blast
https://bigduke6.itch.io/beatblast

lots of wavy red glowing things heading towards a center

Pretty sure this one was a student game. I know I played it but don’t really remember my feelings on it. But since my memory is a bit crap in general, I don’t think that should reflect on the game. Given that it’s a twin stick shooter and looks nice, I should play it again.

Circular Logic
https://bunsengyro.itch.io/circular-logic

triangle flying in a maze

Another student game. The way I remember the game dev program at Lawrence Tech working is that all the students would split off into groups and make games. From looking at the credits for this one, maybe they could do solo projects as well?

RAD
https://knick-knack-games.itch.io/rad

green guy running through a city

Oh hey, this one is still in development! RAD, which changed its name to RAD-venture after Double Fine’s RAD was announced, is a collect-a-thon. I backed the Kickstarter for this….last year? Maybe the year before? It’s one of those games where it will come out eventually but I haven’t followed it closely enough to know when. But the early builds I’ve played, including the ones from this time seven years ago, have all been great. It doesn’t seem like there’s a demo currently available but you can play the student game version here. The student game version was not through Lawrence Tech.

A Killing in White
https://attemptingent.itch.io/akiw12819

top down view of someone in a house and some rebellious pans saying "is it such a crime to want to be used to make some damn pancakes?"

I remember playing this one! This one was a student game that I remember liking. I haven’t heard from Spencer in a while but I know they made a lot of other lovely games and interactive fiction that you should check out on Itch.

BroBots
https://fuzzistudio.itch.io/brobots

big green guy and a little guy using a giant laser to destroy spiky robots

BroBots! Another one that wasn’t by student, I remember liking this one quite a bit. It’s kind of a twin-stick shooter co-op game. I think the studio planned on doing more but I don’t believe that happened. I do remember it originally being $2, it’s the only game I’ve bought on GameJolt, but at some point they made it pay-what-you-want for everyone to enjoy.

Obelisk
https://amastroi.itch.io/obelisk

top down view of a guy with an afro fighting monsters in a dungeon

A student game doing a Binding of Isaac thing. I think I played this one but have no memories of it or the table.

Astray
https://stavnash.itch.io/astray

top down view of a guy next to a garden

As it says on the page, a student game. This was a short adventure game. All I vaguely remember is enjoying it.

Zicon Zero
https://opsage.itch.io/zicon

space ship in an asteroid field

Oh hey, one I actually remember playing. It’s an arcade space sim that was made by a large-ish team. I still have a little pin from this one. The teams were encouraged to make little things to give away at their table, I assume to give them experience tabling for cons, so I have various stickers and pins from some of these games. Maybe I can update this post later with photos of some of them.

[MEMORY_LEAK]

Had to double check with the dev who was working on this. It’s still alive and in development. It’s a turn based rpg inspired by Paper Mario. All I had in my notes were a twitter link but the dev has moved to Bluesky years ago at this point. No Bluesky account for this game but they do have one for their other game in development, Admit One.

WaveCrash!!
https://flyover-games.itch.io/wavecrash

two people shooting waves of blocks at each other

Oh hey, one I really know. Steven co-founded local indie game collective Locally Sourced with me so yes, I know he’s still around making stuff. WaveCrash!! eventually got a release on Steam if you only want to play games on that platform. He’s currently working on a puzzle game.

Unto the Breach
http://www.templargames.com/

top down view of a guy named conrad in a house saying "That'd be nice. Although...reading about history isn't as good as experiencing it firsthand. If we have the time while we're here, do you think we ccould check out a few places of interest?"

I don’t know if this one is still being actively developed but if you poke around the page you can see the developer has done a bit and I know he’s very active with local Warhammer and other tabletop communities.

Stardust Hyperdrive

top down view of a ship in space shooting at others

This was a top down arcade game for the Android. It doesn’t seem like it’s available anymore which is too bad because I remember liking it. I never had an Android device so I was always hoping it would get ported to other stuff but I don’t think it did. You can already read more about the game on the dev’s site, where it also lists the soundtrack. I also made a MobyGames page for it.

AstroYeet
https://jmarsh411.itch.io/astroyeet

top down view of a ship dodging asteroids and lasers

Hey, I remember this one. It’s a top-down runner-like arcade game where you dodge asteroids and lasers being shot at your ship from the ships chasing you. Josh is still involved with the local game dev scene, I think through IGDA Detroit.

Interstellar Symphony
https://whitestar505.itch.io/interstellar-symphony

two robots dancing on a stage

Another student game, this was a cute arcade dancing game by a team of students. I have a sticker or business card for it somewhere.

Sagebrush
https://store.steampowered.com/app/864100/Sagebrush/

low res house at sunset

Great game (also on Itch) and it eventually led to other projects like Cellular Harvest. Nate now works at New Blood, where he works on games like Gloomwood. This one wasn’t a student project. The showcase/convention also had commercial games and projects by non-students there.

End of the Line
https://beefystar.itch.io/playeotl

I’m not actually sure if this one is still in development, doing game dev as a hobby while also being a parent is tricky, but I really liked what is there. He’s also made other games on his solo Itch page.

There was also a System Shock mod at this thing from a non-student. I’m not sure how that happened but I love it. I tracked down the mod and it’s called Lazarus Decλy. My notes had a link to a Facebook page but that’s no longer active.

a guy on a pirate ship with a cannon firing cannon balls
Student game Misadventure

There’s some others that weren’t in my notes but I found through some digging on Itch. Some more student games at the showcase include:

  • There’s GlowPunk, a student group project game.
  • Misadventure is a short platformer where you are on a pirate ship. I remember it doing some fun physics stuff and the team just being very happy that folks were checking out their game they made.
  • Isa’s Edda is a 3D platformer I know I did not play, but some of the same folks went on to make a first person adventure game Farewell Call that I remember liking.
  • Saviour is a cool one where you are navigating a space in pitch black and relying entirely on sound.
  • Prison of the Damned is a first-person puzzle student game that I remember being at the showcase but did not have time to play.
  • I do remember really liking Crime and Nunishment, a top-down game where you are a nun shooting at nuns. It had a really cool art style that slightly reminds me of the 90s fps ZPC. I have a sticker from their booth.
top down view of a nun shooting a monster
Crime and Nunishment
inside a block with a smaller block inside it
Aesthetisphere
vaporwave statue and rubiks like block
Vaporstride

Another pair of projects that I didn’t have in my notes but suddenly remembered were the pair of first-person vaporwave. My memory is that it started as one but then had creative differences and split off into their own projects. So here are A E S T H E T I S P H E R E and Vaporstride for you to play and enjoy.

Anyway, those are my notes. Like I said, this is probably going to be boring to most folks but I wanted to document it anyway. Feel free to correct me if I’m misremembering this stuff or left any games out. These are my memories of a games event from a long time ago. I just thought it might be good to preserve this stuff somewhere. A long time ago I made this Itch collection of local student games and some of them may have been in this showcase as well.

My Youngest Turns 2 Today

~ mpklamerus ~ 1 Comment

As it says in the header, he turns 2 so there’s no roundups this week (also my midterm fried my brain). In celebration of him and his love of buses, you can help make the world a better place by advocating for mass transit where you live and maybe also pushing a cool toy car off a ramp.

The Adventure Game Assessment Thing

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Recently a group launched an Adventure Game Aptitude Test as a one-day event where people logged on to play an adventure game while being on a webcam to make sure they don’t cheat. It turned out to be the game Maniac Mansion, which needed to be completed in four hours which…..ok. I think this was all meant to be a goof, which is perfectly fine and good and this post isn’t a dunk on that, it just got weird when a few games outlets and The Gamers started having takes on it past “haha, fun goof.” These takes seemed to be a combination of “wow, adventure games were so obtuse/difficult/unfair back in the 80s” and “wow, gamers can’t hack it anymore.” and neither of these is accurate.

These games were meant to be played over long stretches, with players thinking about puzzles when not playing them, and discussing solutions with friends and family. No one was beating Maniac Mansion in four hours back then. Maniac Mansion, at least in my opinion, is not even an unfair game. You still have to think about puzzle solutions and stuff for four hours straight. That’s exhausting. You’re still meant to step away for a bit to process it. These games were just not built for marathon sessions like that. As someone on Bluesky said, you can also complete a crossword puzzle in a couple minutes but you generally don’t.

I also think adventure games, even new ones, are generally more fun with played with friends over Discord, except when I want to be moody or depressed by myself when playing something like Norco or Kentucky Route Zero.

If I do have a criticism of the adventure game assessment, I do think it’s stripping the game from it’s context and putting it in one that it really isn’t meant to be played in and if you’re going to do something like that, you should probably give some setup unless you’re trying to make up a narrative for people to run with. Yeah, some of them have bad puzzles and I think softlocks are annoying, what else is new. My hot take about those is that I actually think a lot of the early Sierra/Infocom stuff holds up better than the late 80s/early 90s stuff because it’s so easy to whip through the game again and it’s much more straightforward about it being a treasure hunt for points or whatever (being extremely reductive here, I know it’s not that simple) where the later games are quite a bit longer and telling more elaborate (and better IMO) stories, but then you’re hit with these really frustrating interruptions where you may have to restart the game and it really hurts the storytelling. This is also why I’m a bit defensive of mid-90s Sierra, which I feel like adventure gamers generally dump on but I like. Oh well.

Anyway, all of this is to say, I will happily play weird French adventure games with friends over Discord.

Monsterdon

~ mpklamerus ~ 2 Comments

I’ve actually started enjoying my Sunday nights again and it’s all thanks to the #Monsterdon tag on Mastadon. I know the social media network isn’t for everyone but if you do use it, every 9 PM EST people follow the #Monsterdon tag to receive news on what update folks will be watching together, I believe it’s always available for free somewhere like Tubi or YouTube, and comment/riff on it. It’s a nice time that helps relax me before the work/school week, and I forgot how much watching b-movies can improve my mood. You can see the previous movies they’ve watched on this Letterboxd list.

ChatGPT Really Cooked Some Brains

~ mpklamerus ~ 2 Comments

It feels like the new argument from LLM users is that “Well yes, they create a lot of waste, but so do other things.” Recently an active member in a specific Discord I generally like (the Discord, not this person) argued that it’s ok to use ChatGPT because video games are unsustainable too. In case you don’t understand why this is ridiculous, one is a form of art and the other is a plagiarism machine that contributes massive amounts of pollution to marginalized communities, drives up the cost of computer hardware, constantly makes stuff up, and tells kids to commit self harm. These are not equivalent things.

I think there’s an argument that video games could be more sustainable, absolutely. There’s also folks like Fireflower Games, who donate a percentage of proceeds to environmental efforts, and the Solar Server, a website for games that is powered entirely by solar power. This is not what LLM users care about though. It’s similar to when people say “No ethical consumption under capitalism” to say that it doesn’t matter what they buy because it’s all bad so why should they bother even trying, keep buying stuff from the worst people (btw, boycott Microsoft).

There’s also an argument that not all games are ethical. If you’re making video games for the US Army so they can recruit kids, you should immediately quit your job. Generative AI also falls under this since it’s a tool being used by fascist governments to generate misinfo, another reason to never use these things.

But even if LLMs weren’t telling kids to kill themselves and polluting communities I would be sick of them. Imagine being so dull that you’re going to use a machine to do the fun part of making art? Or doing research or programming, yes, I think both of these are fun. It’s endlessly irritating to me that people will say LLMs for art are bad but not for coding. Programming is not any less worthwhile or creative than coding. In fact, there’s a whole book I would recommend if you want to know more about creativity in programming. Even if you only cared about productivity, it doesn’t seem to help that either. In addition to that, you’re now building a group of coders at your company who don’t know anything about programming and can’t work with the code base you have. Nice work!

On a final note I’d like to say that I accidentally shared something recently that used Claude for coding and someone sent me a DM to let me know. I truly appreciated this! I never want to share any art or games where the creativity has been stripped out when there’s so much I can share that hasn’t been.

Anyway, yeah, it’s a grumpy post but there’s so much harm in the world right now being caused by ChatGPT and the like that I think it’s the ethically right thing to do to call this usage out.

DREAMM 4.0 is Now Available For Your Lucasarts Needs

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The bespoke emulator DREAMM has now reached version 4.0! DREAMM is an emulator focused entirely on games from Lucasfilm Games/Lucasarts. “Why would I use this instead of ScummVM?” you may ask, well, this includes tons of stuff that aren’t adventure games like Jedi Knight, X-Wing, Tie Fighter, and that sort of stuff. It’s also more focused on emulating the games to play how they did at release, with the original menus and not the various other tweaks that ScummVM makes. It’s all by Aaron Giles, who worked at Lucasarts back in the day, doing a lot of porting work, and I guess a modified version of this was used in the recent Rayman release.

The big update this time is support for some late 90s Lucasarts games, all the Lucas Learning stuff, and Monopoly Star Wars and Willow, which I don’t believe were published by Lucasarts but are obviously connected to that world. Monopoly Star Wars is not a great game but I did play it quite a bit at the time. The Lucas Learning stuff is interesting because none of it is available today and DroidWorks, a neat 3D game where you build a droid and walk through levels solving puzzles, has been a massive headache to get working on modern computers for a long time. The other ones in here that I’ve played before are The Gungan Frontier, which is basically a sim game with the Gungans from Episode 1 and Pit Droids, which is kind of a Lemmings/Chu Chu Rocket-like.

Anyway, it’s really neat that this exists and it’s completely free. You can check out all the games it supports here.

Felt Sad About the World So I Went to the Art Museum

~ mpklamerus ~ 2 Comments

After feeling depressed about the US starting yet another pointless war, I tried to take my mind off things by going to the Detroit Institute of Arts. If you didn’t know, residents of Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb can get in for free because of the millage we’ve passed.

mural of auto workers in an assembly line

Every time I go, I love to see the murals in Rivera Court by Diego Rivera. This is just part of one wall of four. Love that some of the most famous art in the city is by a Communist. You can read more about it here and it’s very funny that they had a plaque about him in the 50s denouncing his politics.

three sarcophagi

My oldest has been into Egyptian history lately so we looked at the Egyptian art they had.

self portrait of vincent van gogh and a postal worker painting by him

They’re still remodeling the museum so they put a lot of the more known works together in a smaller exhibit such as their Van Gogh paintings.

sign for the Contemporary Anishinaabe Art exhibit that ends in April

They had a really nice exhibit that I was happy to see before it wraps up soon.

painting of two punk rockers titled Punk Rockers Nancy and Andy by Norval Morrisseau
photo of Iggy Pop singing by David dominic, Jr.

It was a little surprising to see a photo from a concert I’ve been to. Maybe this means I’m getting old. There’s also a dvd of this concert and I make a brief appearance for a few seconds while Iggy Pop stands next to me and sings.

Flyer for something at Belle Isle called Gays Eating Garlic Bread at the Park. It says to bring your own bread

It looks like I missed the Gays Eating Garlic Bread at the Park by about a year.

the outside of the Detroit Shipping Co. at night while it's snowing

The day ended with me eating Ethiopian food at Detroit Shipping Company.

Maybe not the most exciting post for some folks but not all of them can be about video games. If you’ve got one or two near you, maybe visit some of your local museums and relax for a bit.

A Brief History of Gobliiins

~ mpklamerus ~ 2 Comments

I was really excited that Gobliins 6 recently came out on Steam and Itch and wrote way too many words about why I love it on the No Escape forums. So I’m doing the normal thing and expanding on that post even more. If you haven’t played the Gobliiins series, it’s a weird French point-and-click adventure game in a series that started in 1991. The rest of this post will be about why I think the series is interesting and some of the quirks but the TLDR is: it’s good! You don’t need to play previous entries.

three goblins standing outside a house
Gobliiins screenshot from MobyGames

Anyway, it’s a series where you control a group of goblins that you switch between to solve puzzles. The entries vary on how many you play as at a time, and it’s technically an adventure game but they typically follow a level-based format where you have some specific goal and you solve puzzles to accomplish that goal before you move onto the next level. The original three games were created by Coktel Vision and designed by Pierre Gilhodes and Muriel Tramis. Muriel has a FASCINATING career. She’s known as the first Black woman video game designer and many of her games are focused on anti-colonialism or erotica. The Gobliiins series is not about either, but Pierre and Muriel did eventually do a game called The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble, which has all the goofy humor of the Gobliiins games but is anti-colonialist. It’s a weird game but I love it. Most people in the US who know of these games probably know about them because Sierra bought Coktel Vision and published their games here. They even renamed the third game to Goblins Quest 3, to make it sound more like King’s Quest/Police Quest/Space Quest, which is so goofy to me since it’s this bonkers French game but there you go.

two goblins outside a castle. One is holding a bomb
Gobliins 2 screenshot from MobyGames

Eventually Coktel Vision was closed and Pierre and Muriel split off to do their own things. I don’t think they ever had a falling out because they mention each other a bit in interviews and he did art for her book. I think they were just tired of games. Then in 2009 Pierre got the rights to the IP and made Gobliiins 4, which is…..ehhh. The 3D art is not amazing and it takes a long time to really get going, but it’s there I guess. My understanding is that the game improves quite a bit in the second half of the game. You cannot buy this one anywhere today and it’s abandonware. Muriel got a special thanks in this and I think consulted a little but wasn’t really involved.

a goblin standing on a floating pirate ship
Goblins 3 screenshot from MobyGames

And then in 2023 he did a Kickstarter campaign to fund Gobliiins 5, which was made in Adventure Game Studio and has 2D art again. It’s great. It’s a return to form for the series and even with the janky setup (it’s split into four launchers because it was a solo project by an older guy learning a new game engine), it was a treat for fans. You can now get this on Steam and Itch.io. This repeated again two years later with another crowdfunding campaign for 6, which just came out this week. It was nice to see Muriel Tramis come back for this one to help with puzzle design and I hope this means she is back to making games again.

3 goblins standing by a dragon skeleton
Gobliiins 4 screenshot from MyAbandonware

So what are the quirks with the series? Well, every entry in the series has a different number of i’s in the title based on the number of goblins you rotate between. So Gobliiins 1 has you switching between 3 characters, Gobliins 2 has two goblins, and Goblins 3 just has the one but you occasionally have other characters you play as anyway. Gobliiins 4 and 5 are sequels to the first game and have you playing as the three characters from the first game again and Gobliins 6 is a direct sequel to 2, where you play as the two characters from that one. Despite all this weird lore stuff, it doesn’t really matter. It’s just people walking around doing puzzles and goofy slapstick stuff happens.

three goblins at a birthday party
Gobliiins 5 screenshot from Steam

If I were to recommend a game in the series to folks, I’d probably say to start with 3 or 5, depending on if you want something old school or not. It’s very hard to recommend 1 because it’s the only one with health meters where you lose health every time your characters get hit, which is when all the funny stuff happens, and uses a password system. The health system gets dropped with the second game and from here on, the goblins can get beat up as much as you want. The puzzle design gets better with each entry too, which 3 having much better puzzles than 2. The other weird quirk with the old ones is that people generally prefer the floppy disk versions over the cd-rom ones, because the music changed and people don’t care for it as much (I think it’s fine either way). You can pick up the original trilogy on GOG, which features both the floppy disk and cd-rom versions of the games.

screenshot from gobliins 6 showing a variety of characters in a bar
Gobliins 6

Anyway, this is way too many words about a weird series of French games but I like my weird French DOS games so there you go.

Round 2 of the TTRPG Blog Awards The Bloggies Has Started

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I’ve mentioned it before but The Bloggies is a very, very low stakes and silly competition that some folks in the indie ttrpg community do where they take some of the best blog posts that have been nominated by that community and pit them against each other in a vote. No one takes it seriously and it’s just a fun excuse to revist blog posts. I’ve been having fun following along and now you can too. Check out all the links, read the ones that sound interesting to you, and vote if you feel like it.

Here are the categories:

Advice: tinyurl.com/y6z7b5tn

Critique: tinyurl.com/4x8erzrr

Gameable: tinyurl.com/bpaz4bcb

Theory: tinyurl.com/2s3fwehe

Meta: tinyurl.com/ymnbudv2

Some Nice Places to Find Abandonware Games

~ mpklamerus ~ 1 Comment

I just realized I had a lot of sources I cycle between for abandonware games and thought it should be something to share, since this is just a blog and not a real games website, and I can post whatever I want. Abandonware, software that is no longer easily available because it is not sold anywhere by the publisher, is frequently a thing in games unfortunately and it doesn’t help that a lot of people just define it as “well this thing is old, so I can put it up for download even if it’s still for sale” which isn’t how preservation works! Anyway, here’s some sites I like that put care into what they upload, update them to work on modern versions of Windows, and take down the downloads if they get rereleased.

The Collection Chamber is the one I look at the most. It’s updated on a monthly basis and has a wide variety of stuff, with a focus on 90s games for Windows that you cannot easily run in DOSBox. It has so many games from the multimedia era that I find fascinating.

Zomb’s Lair has not been updated in a long time but hosts a lot of 90s computer games packaged for modern Windows as well. One of the most interesting ones to me is VNC: Virtual Nightclub, which was apparently an adventure game by the folks that made Burn: Cycle and was sold only through the Sci-Fi Channel phone line, so it was incredibly hard to find anything about it for a long time. I need to do a longer writeup on it sometime. It’s not “good” but it’s a fascinating time capsule of how we viewed the internet and virtual reality at the time.

Mr. Abandonware has organized a collection on the Internet Archive of DOS games packaged to run on modern windows, and it includes a lot of major games. lt’s kind of wild how many games that were commercial and critical hits just aren’t available for sale anywhere.

SentienceSnakes164 has a collection on the Internet Archive as well of games packaged to run on modern versions of Windows. This is more focused on 00s era games, mostly licensed ones that have been pulled from sale, but there’s some oddballs like early Monolith stuff and lesser known FPS like KISS: Psycho Circus.

There’s probably another post in me where I highlight freeware remakes of retro games, but I do want to give a shoutout to this one of Lode Runner: The Mad Monks’ Revenge. This was a game by Sierra that I really liked at the time and this remake adds likes of nice quality of life features.

Finally, MyAbandonware is a fascinating site to watch. It’s just constantly uploading stuff I never heard of. While it’s not focused on updating games to work on modern versions of Windows, they occasionally provide an update. This isn’t a criticism, no one could reasonably update all the games this site uploads.

That’s all I’ve got for this post. Feel free to add others in the comments as long as they aren’t uploading games that are still being sold.