gamedevjeff

GitHub - RobertSundling/ADVGEN Contribute to RobertSundling/ADVGEN development by creating an account on GitHub.

Back in 1991, I wrote a fully functional text adventure development system for DOS. I never ended up making any actual games with it, and it's now been untouched for almost 35 years.

Just for fun and historical interest, I've decided to make it and its source code freely available on GitHub. Enjoy!

A screenshot of the PC/GEOS based AOL DOS Client at the sign-in screen

if you remember when AOL ran in DOS you might be old now

#retrocomputing

a screenshot of Touch Type Tutor for Windows 3.1, with the player winning GAME MODE. An ASCII character model is exclaiming "Weeee!""

oh huh, he made a Windows 3.1 version of this too?

A new version of the Tex Murphy mouselook patch is available, which adds a new Reach key and fixes a couple of bugs. Thanks to LOADHIGH for the tipoff.
github.com/moralrecordi...
bsky.app/profile/did:...

Reminder: it's good to test on real hardware: my neighbors have now experienced the joys of full volume DOS PC speaker music/sfx. Not just through the little beeper that it was reduced to in later years, but the actual full-sized speaker type :)

PSA: If you're here following creative people and used AI image generation to create your profile picture, or cover art for a small game: please do better. The bar is is so low, almost anything is better than that. You could even hire someone if you do have a budget. It's not too late to change.

GOG Are giving away some more adult games (not all p*rn) in protest/movement against censorship in gaming by payment processors. They're up for 48 hours so be quick! items.gog.com/freedomtobuy...

Chronicles IV: Ebonheim is a classic dungeon-crawling CRPG with nuanced character building and brutal, turn-based tactical combat.

Wishlist today at store.steampowered.com/app/3919080/...

This is why you cannot trust YouTubers and publishers in the retrogaming space. This 2025 megadrive game presented as "better than most snes game" has assets traced over existing sprites (Wild Guns and Shinobi III) and AI-generated backgrounds. Garbage game, garbage company, garbage shill youtuber.

Finally wrote up a proper article about the Pro Audio Spectrum 16 NuBus, its unused OPL3 chip, and my quest to make use of it.

wafflenet.com/pas16nubus.h...

A rocky desert landscape, flooded with an effervescent blue liquid. Aliens float around the landscape. On the left side, a large arm appears to be reaching out of the ground.

First new post on The Obscuritory in three years.

I wrote about The Tone Rebellion, a bizarre alien strategy game steeped in folklore and symbols that's about reclaiming the past rather than conquering it.

obscuritory.com/strategy/ton...

A few days ago I released a patch which replaces the unhinged movement system in Tex Murphy: Under A Killing Moon with mouselook + WASD. Turns out the sequel is pretty much the same, so here's a mod for The Pandora Directive.
Feast your eyes on this side-by-side comparison
github.com/moralrecordi...

I got sick of the bonkers control scheme in Tex Murphy: Under a Killing Moon and patched in mouselook + WASD.

(This footage looks shocking if you've suffered through the normal velocity-based mouse controls, honest!)

github.com/moralrecordi...

I fully understand why this isn’t a thing anymore and it’s a waste of everyone’s time, but I wanna play a demo for a game and then mail a check to someone so they can mail me a computer game

The ArduinoX86 386EX HAT connected to an Arduino Giga

Controlling a 286 with an Arduino is so last week. We control 386's now.

#retrocomputing #emulation

An Installer Built to Stand the Test of Time. (A little reference to Civilization's tagine)

📺: Age of Empires: Gold Edition, Ensemble Studios, 1999

hey just gonna put this out there but if anyone ever wanted to pay me to work on programming language development and or compiler/VM development i would theoretically be very interested in such an offer 👀

a beige CRT is showing Borland C++ 3.1 running in msdos with its classic blue and gray user interface. Some C code is showing on screen.

part 2 of MIDI IN to PC SPEAKER, now with 6 note polyphony boogaloo:
youtube.com/shorts/M...

Metroidbrainia: An in-depth exploration of knowledge-gated games · Thinky Games Thinky Games presents a definitive guide to metroidbrania games: What they are, how different games explore the idea in their own way, and a list of our favorites.

MetroidBRAINIA? Yep, that's right! Here's our excessively deep dive into our favorite new genre.
thinkygames.com/feat...

Having a whale of a time getting the winch to pick up a crate multiple times and have it stack without one or both shooting off into space or collapsing into a singularity. It's behaving much better now but "funny" that this was supposed to be a quick thing to add 😅 #lowpoly #gamedev #debugging

A snap of Hired Guns for Commodore Amiga running on a crt TV and reporting that has been designed for optimum performance running on machines with 2MB of graphics memory. This configuration benefits from 410K of extra sound effects.

Enhance me, baby. 🔥

every time I get a new MobyGames credit I become more powerful. Add me to your video game credits. I can do some free, crappy pixel art for your game or some testing

Blog Roundup (July 13, 2025)

Big progress on my Playdate game this week: you can now talk to the egret. The egret is not very chatty tho #Playdate #PlaydateDev

A screenshot of a review for The Zen of Kayaking on itch.io by user BrownPants, which reads: On a particularly rainy day for summer I decided to sit down and replay some old Commodore 64 text adventures. After finishing one of my favorites (The Lost World) I searched through itch.io for something contemporary and found some contenders; but it was the amazing pixel-art cover and title of The Zen of Kayaking that grabbed my attention, and with that discovery I set off on an amazing journey in my trusty red kayak. I spent about 12 hours over the course of a week completing this journey, often progressing well until a seemingly impassible block sent me paddling cautiously back and forth, turning over every rock and probing the limits of items and puzzles only to step back for a time until some away-from-screen brain noodling resulted in an Eureka! moment that sent me scrambling back to the game. Each puzzle has been well thought out, as has their solutions. One specific puzzle early on had me questioning my reading comprehension skills; but I managed to maintain an aura of Zen, solve it, and move sheepishly onward. The writing is quite beautiful; the descriptions paint each scene vividly, and set a lighthearted adventure tone as the journey unfolds. And what a journey! To say more would be spoilers, but know that if you play this game you’ll experience quite a day! When my own journey came to an end I had scored 118 out of 122, managed to not use the hint guide, and had amassed such a collection of inventory items my brain is still trying to come up with usage ideas for another play through that might net me the missing points. If you love playing text adventures, or are even new to them, be sure to pick up this game, you won’t regret it!

A new review for The Zen of Kayaking (2024), some very nice words from BrownPants! Thank you for playing 😌 - The game is on reverse-sale ($10 instead of $5) for the next 20 days: pixel-turkey.itch.io/the-zen-of-k... but can also be had for less via patreon www.patreon.com/pixel_turkey

Michael Klamerus

I don't have anything on sale on Steam but all my games on Itch are free (the paid ttrpgs have free community copies)

michael-klamerus.itch.io

ok this is mildly glitchy and but the "sprites" are integrated into the scene correctly. now i can texture and displacement map them!

Thinking about that time in the 3rd grade, my friends and I passionately stuffed the school library suggestion box with about 100 slips of paper requesting computer programming books be added. We were asked to leave for being a nuisance, and we never did see any new programming books.

I don't understand people adding generative-AI greetings to their twitch stream chat. Most creative people are not interested in LLM generated content, find it impersonal if not completely repulsive.

The title screen for "Bi-Fi Roll: Action in Hollywood" (1994). The main character, Lukas, stands with his arms folded below the Bi-Fi Roll logo and beside a clapperboard reading "Action in Hollywood". A film reel of scenes from the game runs down the side of the screen.

A scene from "Bi-Fi: Action in Hollywood". On a sci-fi set, the main character Lukas is talking to a man whose bottom half is trapped in a small hatch. There is a conversation menu with three options: "What are you doing in there?" "Want me to heave you out of there?" "How can I help?"

A scene from "Bi-Fi: Action in Hollywood". Lukas is on the set of a movie featuring dinosaurs. He stands in front of a T-Rex three times his height. The T-Rex is wearing red glasses. A sign by the doo is similar to the design of the Jurassic Park logo, and reads "Dino Zoo".

A scene from "Bi-Fi: Action in Hollywood". Lukas is standing in the doorway of the studio cafeteria. A couple of people are seated on the tables. The mouse cursor is hovering over a Bi-Fi Roll in the player's inventory and the action line reads "Eat Bi-Fi Roll".

I translated "Bi-Fi: Action in Hollywood" (1994) for MS-DOS, one of the more ambitious and fully-developed promotional games of the era. Huge thanks to @sonneveld.bsky.social for helping me with the technical aspects on this one. archive.org/details/bifi...