The DIYGamer Archive

  • Reading time:4 mins read

A few years ago, on the tapering end of my active involvement in game journalism, I spent around a year contributing to a budding indie game blog called DIYGamer. It kept my attention for a while, forced me to write more than I otherwise would have, and drew my eye to many interesting new game projects. Then I found other things to do, and I drifted away.

I just learned that the site was discontinued about a year and a half ago, and that it was taken down… well, recently. I swear it was up a few weeks ago.

Luckily, having been bitten many times by the vanishing website bug, I previously archived all of my articles as originally published. (Seriously, everything that I write for soon goes out of business. What gives?) Here, then, is a roughly organized record of my time with that site. Later I may update the links buried in this site. Or maybe not.

EDITORIALS:

INTERVIEWS:

REVIEWS AND PREVIEWS:

NEWS:

THE GAME-MAKER ARCHIVE:

Air Fortress

  • Reading time:8 mins read

The Goodwill by my house is a well of pleasant surprises, from a $3.00 unopened, factory sealed copy of Torchwood: Children of Earth to a well-kept VHS copy of Dark Crystal. Yesterday on entering I noticed a glass cabinet by the register. The first thing that leapt at me was Spider-Man for the Sega Genesis. Decent game; I have the very similar Master System version. I don’t need it. Still, they had Genesis games! On closer inspection I also saw a stack of NES cartridges. The spines faced away, so I could only see the top game — some sort of top-down racer. The cashier was busy, so I waited.

On the way out I flagged down the lady and asked to flip through the games. The selection did not inspire me. there was a Wheel of Fortune game. There were two copies of another racing game. There were a couple of licensed games. And then at the very bottom, a well-worn rental copy of Air Fortress. That was it; though I had only played it in emulated snatches, I knew that I wanted to look deeper. The game was fairly obscure; it had a strange structure and mechanics; it was by eventual Nintendo second party Hal Labs. It’s just, when you’re flipping from one eccentric ROM to the next it’s hard to focus on any game for too long. Having the physical cartridge would give me an excuse to do so.

Air Fortress is a curious game, and obscure in more than one sense. Its director, designer, and programmer Hiroaki Suga didn’t seem to do much else. He ported the second Eggerland (or as we know it, Lolo) game from the MSX to the Famicom Disk System. (Later the first Lolo for the NES proper would compile the best levels from all of these earlier games into a single megamix for Western audiences.) He was in charge of New Ghostbusters II, and wrote music for a pinball game and a Game Boy version of Shanghai.

His game was released in severely limited quantities. The history of the NES being as opaque as it is, there are many conflicting version of the story — but according to one version Hal produced just 20 copies to sit alongside the NES test launch in 1985. In 1987 Hal pushed it out again for a larger official print run of 385 copies. As the story goes, people had to order the cartridge directly from Hal Labs — and in turn Hal would throw in a wall poster. Finally in 1989 the game entered regular production, and even was selected for a major Nintendo-sponsored game-playing competition — but its time was past and it never really gained traction or widespread recognition.

So check this out. The game is at least as old as Zelda and Metroid, and it feels like a postmodern indie retro game. It starts off with a Zelda-style story scroll that you’d swear was deliberately ripped off of that game but which was more likely parallel development. The character is named Hal Bailman because, well, Hal Labs and… Bailman? I don’t get that part. It’s a cool name, though.

The game has, for the time, an eccentric structure; it alternates between side-scrolling shooting segments and… well, not platformer areas. And it’s not quite action-adventure. Let’s just call it action-adventure platforming, though, to make the point and move on. During the shooter segments you bulk up on the game’s two kinds of power ups (of which we will speak more soon), then the adventure-platforming segments are where we see the real Hal-style contextual puzzle level design come into play.

The hesitation in that last paragraph comes from the game’s unusual mechanics; in the platformer sections Mr. Bailman has two main moves: shoot, and fly. He also can walk along the ground, slowly. The D-pad is used for all motion, and both buttons shoot. One shoots a standard projectile; the other shoots bombs. The effect of this control scheme is a little like the dual-stick, dual-trigger setup of modern first-person shooters — except minus a dimension.

There are two on-screen counters: one for energy, and one for bombs. These two counters correspond to the two power-ups. You can use the bombs at any time, and they can be replenished; they work sort of like the missiles in Metroid, except more so. Some things can only be destroyed with a bomb, and some things are better disposed of with one. Energy is an interesting thing, worthy of its own paragraph.

Energy serves two roles: not-dying, and fuel. Think of the way breath meters work in so many water levels, where a character’s life will drain to represent depleting oxygen — and often the less life the character has, the less breath available for submersion. Similar concept here, except we’re talking up instead of down. As you fly, your energy temporarily depletes — making you all the more vulnerable. As you sustain injury you lose freedom of motion, and you need to think harder about what you’re doing.

So there’s a minor juggling act. Next let’s add gravity and momentum, so the player needs to master the physics of the jet pack — all while avoiding injury and keeping an eye on fuel.

While we’re speaking of momentum, let’s conserve it — meaning recoil. When the character shoots, floating around or otherwise, he is repelled in the opposite direction. The game makes use of this property alongside everything else to construct clever, deliberate logistical problems. Say, you float down a well with spikes at the bottom and along the left wall. To move ahead you need fly below an underhang, just pixels above the tips of the spikes — yet that narrow passage is blocked by a robot sentry. If you shoot the sentry without thinking, chances are you will fly back into the spikes. If you lose control of your flight, chances are you’ll graze the bottom spikes. If you dawdle to think about it, chances are your fuel will run out.

So the levels are nice. The build-up of new concepts is very slow, and indeed there aren’t many to play with — but then the game keeps throwing in new loopholes. When you beat the first fortress and destroy the core, you continue a screen or two to the right and board your little, er, space scooter, which has somehow found its way to the exit. Presto; on to level two. When you beat the second fortress, the screen begins to blink and shake. After way too much time wandering you realize the place is going to blow up. There’s no countdown timer; you just have to intuit that things aren’t right, and bolt back to the entrance fast as you can. Otherwise, game over!

The game’s map designers had more storied careers than its director; the head one, Akio Hanyu, went on to program several of the Kirby games and the first two Smash Bros. games. The others worked on Sylvalion and the GBA e-Reader. (Remember that thing?)

Aesthetically the presentation is all over. The game looks bright, simple, and appealing, but hardly sophisticated. Then you look closer and you notice the backgrounds. What could be a flat color or repeating pattern, and in another game would be, will instead be a complex web of cross-hatching or dithering, the scratches getting denser toward the walls and more scattered in the center of a room. The character seems to have all of four frames of animation, but does he need much more? The same uninspiring music repeats through the whole game, or at least seems to; only the space opera bombast of the main theme really stands out.

Should you die, and you should, the game has a password continue — a short one; maybe only half a dozen characters. Considering its vintage (again possibly pre-Icarus), that’s novel stuff as well.

Air Fortress is a progressive game from an era when that didn’t make much sense. It trades spectacle for concept — and the kind of concept that only someone who designs games or has been playing them for long enough to look at them analytically (much longer than they had existed at the time it was made) would really notice or appreciate. It’s actually a very simple concept, that raises several questions about the assumptions that go into most design — and that works largely because of the game’s careful, didactic level design, that helps to illustrate how very simple the concept is yet how complex its ramifications can be at any given moment.

That concept? That you have a jetpack and a gun, and that every simple little thing you do has consequences. Physics and the energy system make sure of that. I mentioned how the controls bring to mind modern first-person shooters. The energy system calls to mind the “shield” innovation in Halo, and the attention to the physics of every motion is still fairly novel after twenty years.

As I play Air Fortress I think of Fishbane and Hero Core. This might well be their contemporary. The decisions here sort of make the game feel like a modern literate gamer’s idea of 8-bit design, with the benefit of a lifetime of hindsight and with the limited resources and attention span of most indie designers. It’s designed just far enough to make its point, play with its notions, and move along.

These days, that’s all I ask from a game — and it’s all I really have the patience to absorb.

Cactus declassifies Ultra Mission

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Everyone’s favorite painter of cognitive dissonance, Cactus, has just revealed his latest opus, a sort of dark and droll puzzle-Robotron called Ultra Mission.

Your task is to rescue the hostages through any means necessary. Use WASD to move; use the mouse to aim. Left click is shoot; right click is kaboom. You can destroy pretty much anything. The trick is to destroy the right things, and avoid being destroyed in the process.

As a Cactus game, it’s pretty tough and tends to reward thinking outside the box (as it were).

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Gideon Simons’ Rise: Sea of Static

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Or, if you will, “An Invader’s Traumatic Platform Experience”. This is a curious one. Inspired by a game jam about experimental graphical styles, Run, Dino! Run Like the Wind! designer Gideon Simons (aka QuiteOddGames) has blessed the world with an art platformer that seems to borrow more than a page from La La Land’s warped psyche and then runs that vibe through Jeff Minter’s personal indexing system.

The soundtrack is a constant, irregular hiss; the landscape is made of cubes and small dots. The dots are basically spikes; touch them and you die. You walk on the cubes. As you walk and jump, the landscape subjectively shifts and melts around you. Bits will bend up to become land; bits that were land will bend down off the screen entirely. Sometimes when you jump a pocket will form , surrounded by spikes. Scurry in before you land and the world’s “jaws” snap shut on you.

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Teppoman 2 Jumps ‘n Sneaks ‘n Runs ‘n Guns

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Ikiki, an artist new to me yet well-known in some circles (and hugely active between 1999 and 2005), has reappeared from the woodwork to deliver one new major and one minor opus: respectively, Teppoman 2 and Nozumou.

Both games have sort of a covert SNK flavor to them, which comes across slightly in the design and greatly in the soundscape. The music and effects often have a King of Fighters feel, and with its mix of shooting, platforming, and humor Teppoman 2 will call to mind Metal Slug. Yet something about the game also also reminds me of P.O.W.: Prisoners of War — maybe the sounds, or how you recover weapons from enemies, or the limited ammo.

Anyway, Teppoman 2 brings a new perspective to the run-’n-gun by combining some advanced platformer elements and a slight stealth component.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Daray Manning’s Baggage

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Undoubtedly Rockford Illinois’ premiere indie game developer, Manning betrays his Cactus/biggt heritage, as well as a touch of Eugene Jarvis, in his skewed-n-crackly platformer study Baggage. The game is one of those hardcore S&M things, where you die a dozen times just to work out how to get past an obstacle. The generous aspect is that modern indie convention of infinite lives and just trying again without a pause. Yet the game does a good job of instilling a certain dread, both though its difficulty and through its presentation.

Just about every line could use a carpenter’s level, resulting an a dissonant Dutch angle effect. Likewise, every solid surface is filled with an ever-changing static and the background (and sometimes the foreground) is filled with an ominous orange fog. Your character is tiny; the levels are comparably large on the screen. Each has a sort of strange, one-straw-short-of-familiar shape to it. Ostensibly helpful text scrolls across the screen, though it spends more time taunting or giving inane protips or generally being bleak.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Cactus takes you to Norrland; reservations open

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Space Fuck! and Krebswelte designer Cactus has joined Messhof in the realms of insane public display art games.

Last Friday, Cactus debuted the Swedish love letter Norrland at an art exhibition at Kulturbygden in Sollefteå. The game seems like an inscrutable collection of minigames that illustrate various aspects of Swedish life and culture, filtered through the mind of Cactus and a sort of Atari-meets-Grindhouse visual scheme. Wonder at the hunting, the fishing, the sexual uncertainty.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

David Shute’s Unnatural Selection makes you squirm

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The Small Worlds designer has unleashed a new wayside-n-wayward opus, Unnatural Selection. In this game, you grab a handful of worms, introduce them to new environments, and hope for them to evolve into more grotesque and dangerous life forms. Shute promises sixteen different creatures, and notes that “the last few are pretty fiendish” to find.

I guess it’s a kind of a sandbox puzzle game, both in that you’re free to experiment at will and in that you’re mostly playing in the sand. Sand and drainage ditches and rotted corpses. It’s all high society here.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Bits and Pieces aspires for brain food

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David R. Lorentz has reinvented the Action 52 zombie-on-a-pogo-stick game Bits and Pieces as a… well, sort of a monster hell platformer. You play as an amorphous bodiless glob of protein, described as a head but presumably more like a brain, who wobbles and bounces through patterned fields of monsters in search of glutamate.

The action switches up from level to level, as the game introduces unexpected nuances to its apparently simple mechanics. For instance, tapping “jump” again the moment you bounce on an enemy results in a super bounce that can send you about the height of the screen, allowing some interesting vertical sequences that call to mind the ice beam segments in Metroid.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Chris Delay’s Game Jam Indoctrination

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After some apprehension, Chris Delay, the head of Darwina studio Introversion, took part in the June TigJAM UK meet-up. Apparently over the past year a large community of indie game developers has sprung up around Cambridge, which encouraged Delay to take part. Ultimately he designed three games for the jam, each based on a vague theme drawn out of a proverbial hat.

His topics were “White Holes”, “Sega Dreamcast VMU”, and “Mouse input only”. Out of those three themes Delay created the particle graphics demo White Holes; the Ed-Logg-does-Pac-Man action game Trapper; and probably the most interesting of the bunch, the plate-spinning art game Balancing Act.

In Balancing Act, you spin plates that represent personal values such as family and friends; wealth and success. As the game progresses, it becomes impossible to balance everything so you have to start picking and choosing the plates that most matter to you.

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The Hands of Time

  • Reading time:4 mins read

by [redacted]

I keep noticing the parallels between the modern indie scene and the old shareware boom from the early 1990s. For those who missed that train, in the period after the Great Crash of 1984 and before the PC was powerful enough to run much more than King’s Quest, there was a sort of DIY phase in the Western game industry. Even the biggest PC developers, like Sierra and Origin, were a bit provincial, and in the arcades Atari Games and Midway were struggling just to be noticed amongst the flood of Japanese imports — so from a mainstream perspective there was slim opportunity for a young designer.

Much as with modern indie games, the answer was to skirt the mainstream, and distribute games through dial-up bulletin boards and word-of-mouth. There are a few differences, though. For one, the shareware boom happened in an era when one or two or a small handful of people could still produce a major, mainstream game. It was getting rarer, but for context the average Sega Genesis game had only half a dozen key staff. So for aspiring game designers, it was not unreasonable to look at shareware as a sort of a potential back door into the industry. Indeed, that’s where we get id Software and Epic Games.

Another thing is that around the turn of the ’90s the PC was sort of a blank slate. 256-color VGA was still fairly new, and Sound Blaster digital sound was a revelation. A 33-Mhz processor was a firecracker, and extended RAM was a luxury. So suiting the geography, most PC games were either simulations or slow-paced adventure games. When Carmack and Romero found a technique for smooth scrolling, it was a breakthrough worth pitching to Nintendo. Yet much as Atari was uninterested in Nintendo’s hardware, Nintendo saw little potential in the PC game market.

With mainstream developers slow to take advantage of the platform, it was also not unfathomable for a handful of clever young coders to be at the forefront of technology and design. So it is that within about five to seven years a bunch of industry outsider nobodies dragged the platform, and along with it the entire medium, up by its bootstraps. The explosion in graphical accelerators comes entirely out of do-it-yourself designers trying to make a name for themselves, trying to be just like the big guys who they admired in the 1980s.

This, of course, created a culture clash. The PC gamers who had been there the whole time reacted poorly to the insolence and the brashness and the overall style of these upstarts. They liked PC games just fine the way they are. The PC wasn’t just an open-platform game console; it naturally lent itself to a different, slower and deeper, psychological space. And the aesthetic that these newcomers were injecting — sure, it was making the PC more popular for gaming. Yet in its Miyamoto-fueled reverie it was also drowning out demand for the kinds of games that attracted PC gamers to the platform.

There are exceptions, of course, but broadly the shareware boom was an attempt by North American designers to answer the mainstream success of Nintendo and Sega using the only available tools — which meant bending the tools to make them work more like the game consoles of the day, and using those tools to mimic Japanese design aesthetics. Though the movement started small, the best efforts were so revolutionary and so popular that they attracted competition like a four-star restaurant in the bad part of town, gentrifying the PC, driving up development costs, and making the platform much bigger than Shareware’s original form of distribution.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Composition Piece

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Today Theta Games, of Ceramic Shooter – Electronic Poem fame, released another poetic, music-related take on a familiar genre. As you start Composition Piece a blocky, distinctly indie-game, protagonist sits down at a much higher-resolution piano and, well, resolves to write a piano piece for a certain Qing Ge. The platforming action that follows, as described on the Theta Games website, serves as a metaphor for the creative process. You move to the right, avoid obstacles, smash through barriers, and seek input from your musical peers.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

Hydorah: Retro Face, Progressive Brain

  • Reading time:1 mins read

The first thing you’ll think of when you see Spanish developer Locomalito’s Hydorah, and the way you’ll probably see it described, is a Gradius tribute game. After you spend a few minutes with it, you’ll realize it feels more like Darius — the power-ups and weapon types, the progress map, the look of the shield, the wide and narrow playfield.

The save system is curious, and at first feels like it comes from the SNES era. Again that’s deceptive, as it’s a rather progressive mechanism. You have a total of three chances to save, that you can spend between any two levels in the game. So there’s a sort of self-pacing reminiscent of some recent console shooters like Ikaruga or Gradius V, that gradually offer more lives and more credits, the more hours you put in — except it’s more organic. As your skills improve, you can play further without saving, allowing you to conserve your save points for longer and gradually allowing you to expand your range.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )