Thursday, March 30, 2023, 16:27
Open Game Source: Fight or Perish
Fight or Perish was a Gauntlet clone I found on osgameclones.com. I downloaded it almost two years ago but never got around to checking it out. It was created by Bill Kendrick at New Breed Software. He had a bunch of game project that I'd love to play with. His game Bobobot was the subject of the first Open Game Source article. Fight or Perish was more of a prototype than a finished game.
Monday, February 27, 2023, 19:22
Brick Monsters: Phantom Fungus
The latest Brick Monsters release is available from drivethrurpg.com. The phantom fungus is a fungus creature. They were created as a low level invisible creature in 3rd edition. Two builds are included as usual. The builds are very different. Even if you don't have all the pieces, the instructions might inspire you to create something with the bricks you own. The mpd file is included to allow you to conveniently order the parts using bricklink.com.
Sunday, February 12, 2023, 05:39
Open Game Source: Lady Beetle
Lady Bug released to arcades in 1981. It was a maze chase game like Pac-Man but with movable turnstiles to allow you to alter the maze. I was never much of an arcade player. I didn't see the reason to keep paying to play a game when you could get a game on a console and play forever. So I never experienced it but a remake for the Love engine caught my attention.
Bernhard Mueller used some work from Cosimo's earlier attempt to recreate the game in Love. The code was very clean and successfully recreated the arcade. I found it odd that the player gets blocked if they are slightly off when taking a turn. That was apparently in the original as well but based on videos I found either it didn't happen as often or the player was better at the game than me.
Saturday, April 16, 2022, 18:16
Postmortem: Goblins: Rise of Gurg
After my successful entry to the Seven Day Roguelike Challenge, I found out about the Dungeon Crawlers Jam. The original Bard's Tale series was a favorite of mine. I even set about recreating the Bard's Tale Construction Set in open source. The construction set wasn't very good and I slowly added features to make it more Bard's Tale like. The Bt Builder engine still lacked a complete example game so perhaps this would provide the push to create one.
Thursday, March 17, 2022, 19:46
Postmortem: Shallow Stone Solar
For several years now I've wanted to try the 7 Day Roguelike Challenge. Often when it occurred to me, I already missed it. This year I committed to completing it. I even took a week off which got changed to half-days due to important meetings. Still many people complete it without taking time off I imagined.
Saturday, December 18, 2021, 18:21
Open Game Source: Anagramarama
Anagramarama was a polished jumbled letters game. While not my preference in gaming, I appreciated the quality. Unfortunately it's web site was gone. No updates had been made since 2013. There were a few forks on github but those also had little activity. The game could stand as it was but was in danger of being forgotten.
Sunday, September 19, 2021, 16:16
Open Game Source: Inertia Blast
On the Commodore 64, players enjoyed the game Thrust by Jeremy Smith. I never owned the system nor played the game. When I first installed Linux I stumbled on a remake of Thrust. It was brutally difficult but I enjoyed the game. At the time I ran it under svgalib, an old console graphic system which required root access. Recently I decided to track down this old game.
Saturday, February 13, 2021, 09:21
OBS Studio
Pinewood Derby was generally a highlight of Cub Scouts. Unfortunately the pandemic had changed everything. This year we had to do a virtual Pinewood Derby. Thankfully OBS Studio allowed us to pull it off.
Thursday, December 31, 2020, 12:15
Pixel Critters
My youngest's birthday was coming up so I asked what he wanted for a mini build and he didn't know. He wasn't as interested in Lego as my oldest. He had recently purchased some Pokemon cards so I suggested making our own cards instead of a build. He loved the idea.
My plan was to use DriveThruCards. I had never used the site but have extensively used DriveThruRpg.
Monday, November 09, 2020, 08:43
Open Game Source: Pinball Disc Room
As part of the Disc Room Game Jam, JW released a tutorial on creating a simple Disc Room. To learn more about Godot, I recreated the game. The movement of the player was a little different but otherwise the game was about the same.
During the tutorial, JW explained that the safest area in the room were the corners. To prevent the player from hiding out in the corner, a disc rotated around the walls of the room. I pondered other ways to prevent the players from being in the corners. A tentacle creature which would push you back into the room was considered but I settled on a pinball theme with flippers.
