In 2012, the designers of the Space Quest series of adventure games, Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy a.k.a. the Two Guys from Andromeda, ran a Kickstarter campaign for creating a new game in the Space Quest vein. The campaign was narrowly funded. And now, a decade later, in September of 2022, SpaceVenture was released to backers. Read more
Adventure Jam 2022 took place in June and had moved on to its new home on itch.io. Due to a lack of inspiration and mental energy, I was unable to participate myself this year, but I've thoroughly enjoyed playing all the entries that I could... close to a hundred of them. My own preference is very much in the classical point and click style, with a few excursions, and you'll find that reflected in my picks of course (I'm not claiming objectivity here). Here's this year's cream of the adventure crop, in alphabetical order: Read more
In January and February of 2022, I ran a Kickstarter campaign for a new retro style point and click adventure game Blood Nova. As one of my responsibilities is to create the macOS and Linux builds, I thought that, just for fun, I'd look into creating a build for MS-DOS too. Having worked on it as a side-project for a few weeks now, I'm confident that such a port is possible. This post is intended to explain a little about the process and the challenges involved. Read more
There are multiple ways to do pathfinding. One commonly used method is having a navigation mesh or a graph of nodes and then running Dijkstra's algorithm or an A* search on that. In fact, A* is what I used for my adventure games until It's Flot. Instead of a coarse mesh, the graph had a node for every pixel. With low resolution games, there can be just a few thousand nodes to check which can be done even on moderately powerful hardware in a fraction of a second. Unfortunately, for It's Flot, being in full HD, there could be a million or more walkable pixels, leading to a huge slowdown. In certain cases, it could take several seconds to compute a path. So to make the game playable, without having to replace the assets, I replaced the pathing algorithm with one I devised myself. I'm sure I didn't invent something new, but as somebody asked, here's a short description of how it works. Read more
Even compared to fixing bugs in 25 year old DOS games, this is possibly the most useless thing I've done all year, yet to me also one of the most fun. During my time off for the holiday season, I set about making my most recent games run on two decade old hardware. Read more
