joe wintergreeneveryone boost my posts so more servers see my server or whatever the fuck
| game stuff | https://neogeographica.com |
| OSS repos | https://github.com/neogeographica |
Joel Baxter
@joelbaxter
- 38 Followers
- 193 Following
- 245 Posts
vga256today's software preservation task
one of the great crimes of the 21st century was that Mark Jones' (Core Design) Darkmere - an isometric adventure-RPG for the amiga - was poorly visually documented by the usual places like lemonamiga/mobygames/etc.
perhaps for that reason alone, few remember just how incredible mark's pixel work is. using a tightly compressed palette of 16 colours for title screens and 32 colours in-game, he produces some of the best-lit scenes i have ever seen. all hand-dithered, no less.
it's one thing to paint beautiful pixel art stills for circulating on social media; it's entirely another to build them as modular assets to be used in a game. mark's ability to tackle both jobs is a masterwork.
thankfully, mark is his own best archivist, and kept a treasure trove of screenshots from the project. he provides an extensive commentary on the creation of each sprite/tile and the overall style of the game, as well as his memories of designing and building it.
(daggerfall fanatics may recognize some of the assets - trees and mushrooms - re-used in that game!)
read his entire writeup on Darkmere here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20171104143619fw_/http://www.mjonesgraphics.com/darkmere.html
https://play.date/games/pocos-maze/ is the winner so far and it's been fun to see her work through the basics of navigating an avatar to a goal. She's definitely picked up some game-isms through osmosis; first time she saw a room with tiny icons of a key and a lock, she was instantly on-mission.
Other suggestions welcome! 3/3
It's hard to find something in her wheelhouse so far though. The lists I've seen of "Playdate games for kids" include things that involve quick reflexes, lots of reading, puzzle-solving, etc.
https://play.date/games/root-bear/ gets some play but the time-pressure/accuracy part gives her the willies. 2/3
A game-playing switch has flipped in my almost-5 daughter; she wants to get hands-on instead of just watching me. This helped me decide to pull the trigger on a @playdate . Obviously I want to fool around with it too, but it has kid-potential. 1/3
Looks good I think! I'm super pleased with their communication and craftsmanship.
I did find a low-res image of the art, so I asked Sticker Ninja if they could make a sticker from it, same size as the old one. They were honest enough to reply: eh not a good enough image for that.
At this point tho I was enjoying having an "unreasonable effort for a small result" side project. So I vectorized the small image, worked it over to remove artifacts, and rendered it out larger. Then I went back and forth with the Sticker Ninja rep a few times to get the size and border cut correct.
Small story to give props to https://stickerninja.com/ :
A decade or so ago, I stickered up these laptops with a "computer club" sticker that I got somewhere (a little nostalgia for my old Apple II days).
I'm getting a @tuxedocomputers laptop & had the urge to sticker it the same, but that particular sticker isn't for sale anymore anywhere.
Ernie SmithSo, the other day, Gumroad announced it was going “open source,” which got a lot of attention.
That same day, Wired wrote a story about Gumroad’s founder, and his association with #DOGE, that perhaps didn’t have the same impact.
Let’s fix that.
https://tedium.co/2025/04/06/gumroad-open-source-doge-drama/
new @tedium
E.g. I've been using this to get a new episode of the Magnus Archives horror-fiction serial ( https://rustyquill.com/show/the-magnus-archives/ ) dropped in my queue every few days -- starting way back from the very first episode they did many years ago.
Anyway, https://recastthis.com/ is great! Been using it since late 2023.