#bitsyjam100, the final bitsy game jam by the creator of the free bitsy game making tool, has just started and will run for the next few months. Obviously other folks will be organizing bitsy game jams after this but this is the final #bitsyjam. I will try to make a game for this one with my kids (I only participated in one bitsyjam before this a long time ago), and would like it if you (points out of the screen towards you) joined me.
indie games
DEMON’S TILT/XENOTILT thoughts
As part of my Pinball Era I have been playing a lot of pinball video games as well, which includes both DEMON’S TILT and XENOTILT. Both are pinball games inspired by the Turbografx/PC-Engine games Alien Crush and Devil’s Crush and like everyone else that’s played them, I think these are some of the best modern pinball video games out there.
At a very broad high level, they have the same format of there being three segments of a pinball table that you hit the ball up. Both games have two gameplay modes, with a main arcade mode and a secondary mode that adds a bit more complexity and new areas you can knock the ball into for boss fights, but the game is more difficult as well. The biggest difference is obviously the theme, with DEMON’S TILT having a gothic horror theme and the XENOTILT being more sci-fi horror. XENOTILT also has more complexity to it, like machine guns you can activate if you have both flippers up and nudge the table down.
Like I said earlier, both are great! I love the art and music, which feel like if the Turbografx had just kept going and getting minor updates but folks kept making weird 80’s games for it. The games also feel good to control, with table physics that feel real in context with that world. I know it can seem goofy to talk about the controls in a pinball game but more games than you’d expect goof this up and make flippers that feel off, or a nudge mechanic that just isn’t worth bothering with. The only bit that I don’t really care for is the machine gun mechanic in XENOTILT, which feels a bit clunky to activate, but one you have to get comfortable using once you play more in the advanced mode. They’re pretty fair games too. The game does expect you to use the nudge mechanic but I think it’s generous enough that players feel comfortable using it without really worrying about tilting the table. I think the games could have explained the tables rules a bit better but you figure most of it out from playing anyway.
If you haven’t played either game but you are interested in trying one, just pick whichever one has a more interesting theme to you. I think XENOTILT is a little bit better, with every element of the game being done by someone who has more experience making pinball video games, but both games are some of the best in the pinball video game genre anyway so it doesn’t really matter. I also personally like the sci-fi theme and soundtrack in XENOTILT a little more, so that one happens to be one I go to more often.
I have kinda weird feelings about pinball video games, where I either like them if they strive to be very realistic, like Pro Pinball Timeshock, or really out there like these games and Alien Crush. When the tables are in that middle ground where it’s half realistic table and then there’s stuff flying around and maybe you play an arcade mini game, I can’t stand it. Or it’s possible that most of the original tables for Pinball FX are just bad, which is why I have this opinion. I do remember liking 3D Ultra Pinball, but it’s been so long since I have played it. Playing both of these games has made me interested in revisiting that series and playing other pinball video games, which will probably lead to disappointment but I guess we’ll see! I just love pinball!
DEMON’S TILT is available on Steam, XBOX, Switch, and Playstation 4. XENOTILT is on Steam, Switch 1/2, XBOX, and Playstation.
Domino Club Delivers Boffo Games With Latest Blockbuster Jam
The anonymous collective DOMINO CLUB has just published 10 browser games for home computing devices as part of their Drive-In Jam on Itch.io. The video games cover a variety of genres, from interactive fiction to character creation games. At the time of this writing I have only played a few of the games but I loved the writing in the interactive fiction games hey chat, are we cooked? and hotwife chronicle. Unfinished Minecraft Clone is one that I was super into the vibes of and found one of the endings, but I feel the need to poke at more because it says it has multiple endings and I’m unable to find the other one. I really enjoy platformers where I kinda have no clue what’s going on and I’m trying to find secrets in them. I guess it’s only kinda sorta a platformer but close enough. There was also a late arrival, Creature Feature or A change has occurred and now nothing will ever be the same again, a character creator for fans of films like The Fly and you can make little guys like this
Excuse the weird headline, I just like the word “boffo.” I will probably spend the evening playing the rest of them and I hope you check them out too! If you haven’t played the games in previous jams, consider checking those out too!
Wonderful games collection Cartomancy Anthology is now free
This will be a very short post but the games collection Cartomancy Anthology is now free on Steam and Itch.io. It’s a games anthology where you pick the game you want to play by drawing from a tarot deck. I originally got it from backing a Kickstarter a while ago but I’m really happy it’s free so more folks will play it. So many game developers I’m a fan of worked on it and I highly recommend checking it out!
My Favorite Halloween Game is Online Again!
The Annual Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival is a cute online game by the designer of another game I love, A Short Hike. You explore a small town, carve pumpkins, and do other Halloween stuff! It’s only an online game for the month of October but you can play offline all year. Every year they add more stuff and even from playing for just 15 minutes I already found something new. I suppose it’s possible that it’s a thing from last year that I just never saw but it just shows how much there is to do in the game. I love playing it with my kids, who are also big fans of this and A Short Hike, and something that’s been really nice as the game has been adding additional adventure gamey segments you can engage with (or not, it’s all optional!) is the ability to enable/disable the horror elements. If you want, you can even switch between night and day time if you have a preference.
I don’t think it quite counts as a MMO, it’s probably too small and there’s probably a different and more specific term for an online game with a smaller player count, but it’s a lot of fun seeing other ghosts floating around and interacting with the world. There’s no text chat either and I suppose it could be possible to grief by making obscene pumpkins but I haven’t seen it.
I don’t want to talk too much about what’s in the game since a huge chunk of the fun to me is the exploration and thinking “Wow, they even put _____ in here?” but it’s got a nice mix of exploration, more Video Game stuff, and other activities that are just more creative and chill. There is a very brief moment I’d like to give a shoutout to because it made my kids laugh so much last year. There’s an adventure game section where you do puzzles, and if you play on the cutest mode, there is a door you can click on that will slowly creak open, positioning itself to be a jump scare, but then a cute pumpkin pops up and does a baby laugh before the door slams shut. This extremely brief moment alone made my kids so happy every time we played and that’s the magic of video game baby!
It’s an impressive amount of work for a project that you can play for free, but you can pay $2 to unlock the ability to wear hats and I think it’s worth doing so this game can be supported.
The Annual Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival is available on Itch.io for Windows/Mac/Linux.
Game Devs of Color Expo Starts This Week!
GDoC is a yearly virtual conference I love to watch and I highly recommend buying a ticket to watch the talks happening and support the conference. I’ll let the website describe GDoC since it does a better job than I could
“Game Devs of Color (GDoC) is a non-profit organization dedicated to amplifying and empowering developers of color in the gaming industry. Since our founding, we’ve focused on elevating talented creators and their innovative work, providing platforms and opportunities that help developers of color bring their unique games to life and connect with the broader gaming community.”
Even if you aren’t a game developer, I think there’s a lot to enjoy with the various interviews and panels, and you’ll be supporting a really cool group!
Ectocomp 2026, the Halloween Interactive Fiction Jam, is Coming Up Soon
ECTOCOMP is a yearly interactive fiction game jam celebrating the month of Halloween. It looks like a chill jam and has a very good AI policy (it’s not allowed), so give it a look on Itch.io. There’s even a category for folks who want to speed write a game in four hours or less if you’re someone like me who cannot devote lots of time to a game jam.
pleasuredrome is an Erotic Game for the Sickos (complimentary)
Developer: DOMINO CLUB
Year: 2024
Genre: Visual Novel
System: Browser
Sometimes I go back to previous game jams run by DOMINO CLUB, the anonymous game dev collective, and look for games I haven’t played before. The latest one of those is pleasuredrome, a game made for the Bodies in Motion jam they did in 2024. This one is a short browser game that tells a story about a dystopian future where prisoners have sex to survive. It’s hot! You do not have to do any sex mini games or anything clunky like that, the story is told by you walking around a world. I love how grungy the art is and the recommended listening of Metal Fingers In My Body by Add N To (X) adds to that feeling. I think it’s the only game they made that’s set in this world but I’d like to see more of it. Anyway, felt compelled to highlight this one because Bluesky is whining about mainstream games again and people would just be happier if they looked at Itch.io more often so here’s a recommendation.
pleasuredrome is available for the browser on Itch.io
Snake Digits is a PICO-8 Game That Innovates on the Snake Formula
Developer: PUNKCAKE Délicieux
Year: 2026
Genre: Arcade
System: Browser
I’ve been a fan of PUNCAKE for a while now, a collective that regularly releases smaller games in all types of genres, so it was exciting to see that their latest game was for the PICO-1K Jam 2026 because I also love PICO-8 and that game jam specifically. This is a take on the classic Snake game that I haven’t seen before. As you can see from the gif, you move around pushing numbers of the same amount together in groups and once it’s big enough, it’s added to your score. So for example, pushing together four 4’s will make that group disappear and add it to your score. Something that I think is a nice little touch is that the game is a little more forgiving about touching walls than your average Snake game since you have a lot more going on in this one. It’s a neat twist on the Snake formula and I think you should check it out in your browser along with other games in the jam. If you’ve been curious about learning PICO-8, you can also view the code and learn from it!
Snake Digits is available for free for the Browser and download on Itch.io and PICO-8 website.
The Zium Railway, the Latest Virtual Gallery from The Zium Society, contains great art tanked by bad programming
Developer: The Zium Society
Year: 2026
Genre: Multimedia Program
System: Windows
The Zium Railway is the latest in the series of virtual galleries published by The Zium Society. I had been a fan of the series for a while and it has been fascinating to watch these grow from more straightforward galleries (but still impossible to create in a physical space) where you walk around a virtual world and look at pieces of art, to this latest one where you ride a train around a world and enter virtual worlds created by artists for you to explore. I liked it, which makes it incredibly frustrating that I don’t know if I can recommend it. It turns out that the main hub world had relied on heavy AI usage, which was not disclosed but does come up on the dev’s blog where they made an obnoxious post about how Valve and Hideo Kojima should hire them and has a romantic view of company towns. It’s just completely rancid and unfortunate since the artists on the project had all done a great job. It doesn’t appear that the artists were told about it until it was too late, judging from how frustrated some of them seem to be. I hope the artists release their things separately like this Aqualung Caverns one, which I loved. I loved the external exhibits and even the main world design was nice. I had run into bugs but overlooked it since I could work around them with the in-game options to teleport around. I suppose I know why there were so many. I guess I can’t really say I regret donating money for it since the money is being split among the artists but it’s a bummer.
Sometimes on social media I’ll lament the death of multimedia cd-roms and other programs that combine art and music in interesting ways without there being a series of win conditions you’re supposed to meet, but I think there’s space for it by doing virtual exhibits. I do hope that it’s something other folks will consider doing things like the Zium series, folks who won’t crash out on the slightest bit of pushback on AI usage and again, praise company towns on their blog.
After this had come out, I went back and loaded up The Zium Garden to play with my 6 year old since it was one of the few that runs on Mac and she had a great time. Kids sometimes just like to have interesting spaces to explore without things running around trying to kill them. Which just sad that I can’t bother with these in the future due to the wildly unethical way that AI companies are run, steal so much content from others, and poison marginalized communities with data centers. Something brilliant was started due to the efforts of so many talented collaborators and then thrown in the bin.
The Zium Railway is available for Pay-What-You-Want for Windows on Itch.io but, well, you saw the post.