Local library posting again but it’s wonderful to wake up and see that proposals A and B passed in Ann Arbor. This means that a parking lot that has been sitting next to the library for over a decade will be transferred to the library where they can build a new, larger library that will also include affordable housing. My limited understanding is that it had a vote in 2017 to make it a park, which it was never suitable for nor did the city or the citizens group that pushed for that vote ever do anything with it. As relatable as I can find “no really, I’ll get right to doing this task any minute,” I’m glad that it will belong to the library. The amount of misinformation being spent and put out by this group saying that the vote was to destroy parks was intense and I was worried it wouldn’t pass. It turns out it wasn’t even close though.
“We’ve replaced a parking lot with a library and affordable housing” is my dream scenario for any city and a great thing to wake up to.
I was hoping the proposal for Livonia to build a lot of new buildings for the city would pass but didn’t expect it to and it didn’t. It’s Livonia, which is a lot more conservative, and I knew that a monthly increase of $10-15 per month in taxes would be a tough sell.
But I’ll take the new downtown library in Ann Arbor. Congrats to the city!
Shoutout to the Ann Arbor District Library archives for no reason other than they’re just a lot of fun to search. I’ve posted before about The Cybertub, but it’s fun to just browse the tags and search to find old computer history. The World Wide Web tag is a lot of fun and I can search for local businesses like Borders Books and Music (who started in Ann Arbor) and find tons of old ads and stuff like that. If anyone has any libraries that have easily searchable archives like this, please link them to me!
After the defunding of public media happened here, I subscribed to my local Detroit PBS station’s Passport streaming service that people have been recommending on social and this thing is alright! It’s just $5 a month for a bunch of things that are probably exciting to only me. I didn’t realize that it had so many local Detroit shows for streaming, including talks at the Michigan Theater going back to 2015. I recently watched the Pet Shop Boys: Dreamworld concert, which I thought was great. I also started watching British mystery shows, since I guess that’s something you have to do if you have access to PBS.
Anyway, good service. I also supported my Detroit NPR. I sure wish we could just tax rich people to pay for this stuff.
This is my first summer participating in the Summer Game at the Ann Arbor District Library and I’m hooked! It’s a yearly event organized by the library, and the 15th one in its current run, where you can get points through a variety of activities and use them to get prizes like shirts, little toys, stickers, etc.
Activities to get points can include:
Entering codes you find around the city on signs at buildings, front yards of people participating,
Codes can also be found at events held by the library
Getting badges, which are challenges like finding specific items in the library’s catalog and plugging in info from newspaper archives, which I believe will be used to help the library later.
And of course, reading
It’s turned my oldest and I into point goblins and we see a code on the side of a bus or at the top of a building and lose our shit. We just started a week ago and she already has the points for the flamingo stuffie at the shop that opens in the middle of July, so anything else is just a nice bonus for her. I’m hoping to get a nice t-shirt and poster. It’s just a really nice way to get you to explore the library’s branches, the city of Ann Arbor itself, encourages reading, and educates people on everything the library has available for checking out.
If you live in or around the city of Ann Arbor, I cannot recommend it enough. You do not need to be an Ann Arbor resident. I’m not, and I was encouraged to join by the director of the library. Many of the activities are virtual too so you don’t not need to drive into the city every time you want to participate.
This year the family and I attended the Ann Arbor Comic Arts Festival (also known as A2CAF) at the Ann Arbor District Library and it was great! We’ve been going for a few years now. It’s a free comics convention at the library aimed towards children but they get some big guests every year and it’s nice to have an event focused completely on comics. There’s some comic conventions in my area that I haven’t gone to in a long time, partially because they’re incredibly crowded and covid, but also because they’re all just focused on pop culture stuff now. Whenever I leave A2CAF, I feel excited about comics as a medium again. It’s the same energy I get when I go to my local zine fests and I think it’s because all of these events are very focused on how anyone can make comics. I think it’s also good for my kids to be exposed to that DIY attitude, although I would strongly recommend the event to local folks even if they aren’t parents.
We also signed up for the Summer Games challenge that the Ann Arbor District Library also does. I’ll probably do a big post about this later this year since it’s really interesting. I’ve never done it before but it’s been fun so far. You do NOT need to be an Ann Arbor resident to play.
Also shout out to my five year old who I thought had a more nuanced question planned for Raina Telgemeier and Scott McCloud at the Q&A but instead yelled “HOW DO YOU DO THAT?” into a microphone at the Michigan Theatre.
Libraries are the best. Go support them. I think I’m turning into someone who is getting shirts from all their local libraries.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Since Cohost has now been confirmed to be winding down and will be read only until the end of the year before shutting down, I will start posting here (hopefully almost daily) with all the stuff that I posted on the CompStoreVisuals account there. I think most, if not all, of this should already be on the Mastodon account but I wanted to have something more permanent for the photos and videos I’m posting. Apologies for what will feel like computer store spam for a while. The “Thoughts on Cohost” post will arrive eventually (TLDR: Not a perfect site but I’m sad) but until then, enjoy?
This photo is one I actually took a long time ago on my phone. The place is now gone.
Sign for Scrubbin Bubbles Westland, Michigan, United States
A lot of neat stuff has come out in the last two weeks and it’s the funny number day, so here’s another one of these indie game roundup things of things that I enjoyed. If you released a thing and I missed it, feel free to reply in the comments.
Craig Maloney Craig Maloney passed away on April 2nd after battling cancer for three years. I never met him in person but enjoyed talking with him online and reading his posts on his blog. If you would like to see his writing or the games he made, there’s links to everything on his page.
New Domino Club games! A new batch of Domino Club games has been released. Domino Club is a collective that releases games anonymously. Each batch of Domino Club games features incredibly interesting experimental stuff. They’re the best!
Palestinian Relief Bundle A charity bundle just came out today with all proceeds going to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. For $8 or more you can get hundreds of games. I’m happy to have my game MindExplorer in there.
New Husky Game Development Games Husky Game Development is a game dev group at Michigan Tech University since 2004. They’ve uploaded some new games to Itch so go check them out!
Tiny Circumstance Tiny Circumstance is a really cute and technically impressive Bitsy game.
Broken Roads If you’re in the mood for some more Fallout after watching the new tv show (I enjoyed it!), consider checking out Broken Roads, a post apocalyptic rpg in the Australian Outback. Reviews for it are currently mixed but maybe you’ll be into it?
Crowdfunding
Here are some crowdfunding campaigns that I found interesting:
Devil’s Hideout is a new point-and-click adventure from the developer of games like Twilight Oracle and Blood Nova.
Free Stars is a new Star Control game by the original designers in everything but name. The game even includes all the aliens from those original games.
Not much from me this time. I continue to play lesser known games on my YouTube and Twitch channels and a previous post discusses a game I’m working on. I also have a list on Itch that I update every day with games I really like
While digging around for local software companies in Michigan a while ago, I stumbled across this ad in the first issue of the Atari magazine Analog for an educational software company called T.H.E.S.I.S. in Garden City.
From looking at the ad, it seems like it’s mostly educational software but there’s a couple of games as well lie CON*PUTATION and TONAL ENCOUNTER. For a longer time than I’d like to admit, I thought there was basically nothing about this company and struggled to find anything. I don’t know what changed in those last two years, but it seems like I was just researching it poorly and it turns out that actually, most of their catalog is available for download.
And then it looks like they were also referenced in this catalog of Atari educational software makers, which you can download here (link opens a pdf).
This was all I knew of for a while and assumed there was just nothing else, until a couple of years later when I decided to take another swing at looking up this company and it turned out I was just doing a poor job the first time. Searching for Tonal Encounter gave me a page on Atari Mania showing that the game is missing but the additional info that it was developed by Linda Schreiber.
It turns out, she has worked on a ton of games. This was a delight for me to find as someone who has an interesting in local game developers. It looks like most of the games that T.H.E.S.I.S. made have also been preserved as well. It’s really nice finding out that a company you figured was lost forever, was actually mostly preserved and you just didn’t do a good job researching them. IN MY DEFENSE I think it was made harder by the company’s name. It does look like a couple of the games by them are still missing but it is significantly less than I had assumed a few days ago. There’s still a few missing like Tonal Encounter, Math Facts, and Hidden Words, but most of them seem to be on that Atari Mania page.
Not really sure what the lesson learned from this whole experience was. I need to look harder when researching lost games? But I’m glad it has a happy ending.
Credit goes to Karen and BogusMeatFactory in the Michigan Games History Colletive discord for finding the InfoWorld clipping and educational catalog. It’s a little discord I started where I’ve been dumping Michigan game developer history research before writing about it somewhere more public facing. It’s not the busiest discord but you’re more than welcome to join here if you have an interest in Michigan game dev history.
In an effort to cover more Michigan and game dev history on here, I thought I would mention the game Voyage of the Mayflower. This was a game designed by Ken Ludwig and published by Cadmean Corp. in Ann Arbor in 1984 for the Commodore 64. The game is actually playable in the browser on the Internet Archive.
Screenshot taken from MobyGames
The designer of the game also uploaded the design and marketing notes to the University of Michigan’s library, which anyone can read here. Ken is currently a lecturer at the University of Michigan and in 2021, Austin Yarger interviewed Ken for a WolverineSoft virtual meetup about the game and its history. They even play the game for a little bit.
