New from me: Talking to some of the folks on the frontier of porting retro games to PC, and saying 'fuck AI' while they do it

Ancient 4D - some UI optimisation work paying off 🥳 - using a texture atlas, I'm able to draw these buttons, including scale-9 base, icon + (tinted) text caption in 1 draw call. Using SDL3. #gamedev #noai

Final hour before the sale ends ! (unless you're reading later)

REPTILES/DINO02.GIF

Deluxe Poly - bitmap layers were lacking an alpha channel - the tiles a bitmap is built from get initialised to index 0 but were opaque. Only unused tiles were invisible. Was pretty simple to add a second channel and now bitmap layers can layer layeringly on top of things 🥳

While only 200 rolled off the assembly line, the technologies learned by this extreme all-in-one were put to use in Sharp's MSX series.

Deluxe Poly #wip - Did some mockups of tool icons (not all of them work yet, and there's space for more). Also made the icons smaller, and buttons bigger which I think looks cuter and more accessible against miss-clicks and bad eyesight (flipping my old age frailties into improved UX !) #pixelart

Live with more background art! www.twitch.tv/deivore

fm synths

The Crimson Diamond is 25% off for the Steam Summer sale, only a few days left! 🌞 store.steampowered.com/app/1098770/The_Crimson_Diamond/ Game + soundtrack bundle is also on sale! Get yourself 40+ minutes of music composed on a real Roland MT-32! 🎶🎹

ABSTRACT/BIRDSH01.GIF

A wise man once said, "The hard part about promoting your textures is that you can't just post the textures because then people have the textures already." Dunno who it was, but it is a deep and fundamental truth. Behold, a folder! #indiedev #indiegame #pixelart #gamedev #customlevel #madeinkrita

All of the vector drawing tools now have bitmap equivalents. A good bit of progress today !

Deluxe Poly - started working on bitmap layers today for a traditional #pixelart workflow. I'm essentially starting over with a new toolset. First goal is to store bitmap layers efficiently, and get a basic 1-px dot pencil tool with working undo/redo and load&save to disk. Then grow from there!

IT’S MOVE ME MONDAY!!

I'm super proud to share my first interview on @sarna.net on the development of MechWarrior / Battletech video games - this time with Scott Goffman who worked on MW2 as an artist and it features *never-before-seen storyboards* - link below www.sarna.net/news/how-mec...

CGA screenshot Alley Cat #CGA #msdos #retro

I recently realized bots were always taking the last role in the list when joining my discord server, so I added this last one. Today, a bot joined... and it took it 😂 Great way to find & ban them asap ahah

New assets dropping on Friday! This modular cave kit (work in progress) fits my previous modular kits perfectly and can be used for a wide genre of games. As you know; it'll be completely free, for everyone.

Ancient 4D - more UI ! -- I've added a 'button' that can talk to the panel it lives on (when clicked I'm just logging its 'id' to the console). Since the "button" is currently just a cyan rectangle, next up will be to give it access to graphics/fonts and make it look nice and have word(s) on it.

Thunder Helix - new scenario! + game is ON SALE store.steampowered.com/news/app/190... #gamedev #flightsim #lowpoly #pixelart #steamdeck 🚁

Ancient 4D - I'm happy that I was able to embed the render output 'panel' into the mock-up main UI. Also added scroll-bars & drag-scroll for moving around the image (zoom will be added later). A bunch of architecture prep-work slog paying off to make this stuff happen with ease 🥳 #lowpoly #retrocgi

Bring back this form factor cowards ! We only need 128 KB of RAM to computerize satisfyingly.

Pondering the expense and embarrassing enshitification of a 2026 laptop just so I can "migrate" into the room in our house with A/C and actually do some work, instead of going insane from creative understimulation. Hard to put a positive spin on this NGL 😅

unreal tournament 2003, level editor, screenshot (circa 2005) web.archive.org/web/20051028...

Thunder Helix progress / imposter syndrome update

I needed a break from UI stuff, so I let my hair down and, uh, completely remade #NovaSquadron 's missile VFX. The usual ~1 minute video wouldn't do this insanity justice, so here's 3 minutes of the INDF and CLE absolutely wrecking each other's navies. #gamedev #indiedev #screenshotsaturday

Tinkering with my "fmComposer" a bit more. Added support for songs with both FM and PCM in them, and as a test swapped out the fm drums of this Desert Strike theme remake for samples. The UI is still pretty clunky, it needs a FM/PCM mixer, but I'm excited about some hissy Genesis-style beats 😎

I'm deeply apologetic for the latest Thunder Helix update being so bloated in size. I will work harder to get the size down in future to match what other games are doing, and to avoid excessive bandwidth consumption and the number of floppy disks required to store it 🙏 #gamedev #flightsim

#C64 #Delphian progress: this is still a bit rough, but here's the latest video clip. From planet surface to space, and back again to landing on the planet and walking around. Needs a bit of optimisation in places, then comes a hyperspace jump!🙂

Thunder Helix got a fan made guide video! I'm speechless! 🚁 m.youtube.com/watch?v=OZ4-...

Thunder Helix v0.631 is now live on the 'preview/beta' branch - featuring this new 'Special Acquisitions' scenario mission. #flightsim 🚁

Microsoft Flight Simulator for Windows 95 (1996)

idk maybe people can go back to putting their games in little plastic bags

Ancient 4D - render output is now directed to an SDL window instead of a .png file, and I'm using threads now to improve the CPU render times. #retrocgi #lowpoly

Thunder Helix - each game scenario has a bit of randomisation to keep things interesting. Naturally part of that is custom mission briefing text. Had fun writing these - and keeping them short. #gamedev

Thunder Helix - last item on my list is a ridiculous pallet of gold bars. #lowpoly

Thunder Helix gets another MacGuffin item to liberate from the enemy - this time the top of a tank. If they didn't want it to get stolen, they shouldn't have left it in the middle of that heavily guarded base 🤷‍♂️ #lowpoly #gamedev #flightsim 🚁

realms of the haunting, official website, excerpt (1997) web.archive.org/web/19970605...

An incredible thing I realized I have the power to do is actually purchase this very cool looking game I’ve been eyeballing for years now! You should do the same if you have any fond memories of the golden age of flight sims.

Ancient 4D - render output is now directed to an SDL window instead of a .png file, and I'm using threads now to improve the CPU render times. #retrocgi #lowpoly

It's #TextureTuesday and my popular Downtown Dystopia texture set is also in the @itch.io Summer Sale! shallowthinking.itch.io/downtown-dys... If you were holding out at $5, it's a measly $4 now. The complete pack is 20% off too. #indiedev #gamedev #pixelart #noai #brutalist

Game is out! Free on itch if anyone wants to play. It's similar mechanically to The Return of the Obra Dinn, Type Help, and Her Story. #GameDev #IndieDev

Ancient 4D - phew 😅 - finally got an event driven vertical scroll bar working - due to the event based architecture I'm using, it was proper "first you have to invent the universe" stuff for the longest time time, an endless supply of pre-requisites. But now it's done !

This is a work-in-progress addition coming soon to my already available and already very fun game Thunder Helix - which is definitely ON SALE right now ! #flightsim 🚁 store.steampowered.com/app/1906230/...

Found a peculiar mouse focus issue in SDL3 and reported it. Not done any github / FOSS things for ages so it was scary, but I really like SDL and that compelled me to try to help out. github.com/libsdl-org/S...

This is a work-in-progress addition coming soon to my already available and already very fun game Thunder Helix - which is definitely ON SALE right now ! #flightsim 🚁 store.steampowered.com/app/1906230/...

Been saying this on exit since 2024 !

hehehe, yoink ! #lowpoly #gamedev #flightsim 🚁☠️

Thunder Helix - working hard on a new scenario "Special Acquisitions" where you need to fly in and steal a special item from an enemy base. Got the basics of the mission working now. I plan to create a few more items to keep it interesting, not just a crate every time. #gamedev #lowpoly #flightsim 🚁