Blog by Steven Don - latest posts
SEGA's arcade classic Congo Bongo was ported to various home computers, and the IBM PC was not left behind. The IBM PC port (on a self-booting) floppy disk was quite well done, in fact, and seems to be the only port that includes all four levels from the original arcade game. Nowadays, it can be played in DOSBox in glorious 4-colour CGA. It can be quite a tricky game to play, so I've created a…
Five years ago, I met and befriended a young man from the eastern European country of Georgia. He had come to the Netherlands seeking asylum. This was because he is bisexual, which is just not accepted there and he was in fear of his life. The authorities looked at a piece of paper that says that it is safe for LGBT people in Georgia, and told him that he would be sent back. I helped him evade…
I'm hoping to practice and improve my pixel art skills. To that end, I'm aiming to do at least one of the Pixel Dailies a week (assuming there is a theme that inspires me) and archiving them on my site. I'm not a graphic artist by any stretch of the imagination, and quality may vary wildly. Consider these experiments and exercises. Pixel art, as I see it, is digital art where the pixel structure…
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. I'm going to start out with some background information about the…
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 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…
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…
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. As I started development of my homegrown adventure game engine in the early 2000s, people were most commonly running Windows 98…
Some 25 years ago, I first released my game Cosmo Chicken and last updated it in 1998 to version 1.6. Earlier today, a quarter of a century later, version 1.7 was released. Why? Because it had a bug that made the game crash DOSBox when running in there. I doubt anybody will ever play the patched version, but it's a matter of pride for me to fix my bugs no matter how old they are and it was an…
Like last year, I participated in the $105 Adventure Game Challenge (well, last year, it was technically the $104 Adventure Game Challenge). This year's assignment was to create a graphical adventure game from scratch in 14 days with the theme of "An Escape". Despite already having made two jam games with that theme ( Escape from DIMANSION and Jeffrey Jetsam ), I obviously couldn't use those games…