New game dropped! Ball, Fall, Dungeon Crawl is a drop-merge roguelike where battles are fought by merging balls together. It was fun expressing mechanics (like stumbling in to a trap or combat exhaustion) purely through the playing field. Check it out at joshuagalecki.itch.io/ball-fall-du...
Drew myself some stones this evening. A little different than my typical pixel art style. Since this was a larger resolution meant to be downside, I tried to make it noisier rather than clean. youtu.be/HOnRdhV6Y-8
Hello indies! It's almost Thanksgaming 2025!
If you have an unknown indie project in dev or just released, please could you email me at jwalker@kotaku.com with the subject "THANKSGAMING 2025", and a store page and YouTube link? I'll put as many as I can on Kotaku.
Rules next. Reposts appreciated!
For we who come after, Pixellated Playgrounds (@bsushi.bsky.social @jgalecki.bsky.social) just dropped a Clair Obscur episode. I love this show! www.pixelatedplaygrounds.com/bookclub/cla...
And such a good soundtrack! We've bought a lot of OSTs for the cast, but not all of them get into the weekly rotation.
I'm still obsessed with Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim (2000). I took a look at it through a game design lens and tried to figure out what made it tick.
Sunday afternoon reading :)
www.pixelatedplaygrounds.com/sidequests/g...
Last month, @bsushi.bsky.social and I talked about @zapdot.com's Cipher Zero - a puzzle game that explains without using words. It's a great study in elegance and minimalism in game design. Check out the game, and hear our thoughts on it at www.pixelatedplaygrounds.com/bookclub/cip...
*I mean, the Villagers have needs and stress like any other hero. They can break. They can break and make extremely poor decisions, like punching a high-level wizard in the face. Always funny to me when that happens, even if the angry villager is quickly incinerated.
I had planned to introduce non-hero Villagers to the game, but adding farms (and wood cutters and quarries) made this seem like the perfect time to add them in. They don't gain any wanderlust, so they almost never go on quests, but they'll happily* till the fields all day long.
Players like production lines, things like iron ore -> iron ingots -> iron armor. If the Guild is all tooth and no (logistics) tail, it's hard to set that up. So start hoeing that dirt, Magnus the Mighty.
This one is a bit of a design pivot. With the game's original vision, I didn't want to include resource gathering at all. "Fighting > Farming" was one of the design goals. Taking a closer look at the game, though, I think it was too far outside genre expectations for what a colony sim should be.
Beneath a Dead City update 0.3.0 has been released onto itch! This update introduces Villager NPCs, resource gathering, and a tinier and cozier map grid. Also, more arson than ever. Check it out at joshuagalecki.itch.io/beneath-a-de...
A recent Steam review on Neongarten made my day: "The shape rotator's Luck Be a Landlord... this is a great extrapolation."
There's a good chance I end up stealing that phrase. It's great to hear that the game delivers the experience I was trying to design.
The 1.2 update for Neongarten is out! This update includes new starting Scenarios with different sets of starting buildings and perks. Finally, you can build that dystopia around a stack of Actual Trees or Toxic Waste Dumps like you've always wanted.
Game dev's been busy. I've been working on a prototype. You know those terrible and soulless kids videos on Youtube? Imagine a malevolent AI is forcing you to make them all day, every day! New office horror game in the works.
@tinymassgames.bsky.social has completed another season and with it - another round of releases!
tinymassgames.itch.io
Here's a little thread of the games that released as part of our latest season - Season 10! 🧵
#GameDev #IndieDev
Latest culinary obsession: kielbasa and kimchi. The kimchi works like a spicy, better-tasting sauerkraut. Love it.
Something I've got in the hopper - a tiny 16 pixel x 9 pixel rhythm-based dungeon crawler. Part of Season 10 of Tiny Mass Games!
Thank you to everyone who came out to watch my first play session of the full release of Neongarten! @jgalecki.bsky.social, you put together one hell of a game!
Neongarten has been released! Come check out my cozy little cyberpunk city builder, where the food is 99% guaranteed to be free of dolphins and people.
Neongarten releases in three days! To celebrate, my podcast (Pixelated Playgrounds) did an episode covering the game. It was fun to chat with @bsushi.bsky.social and do a deep dive on my own work. Check it out! www.pixelatedplaygrounds.com/bookclub/neo...
Neongarten is releasing in ONE WEEK on April 22nd! Check out the best cyberpunk citybuilder ever made*! (*of games by me.)
Warped Door is doing great work looking at interesting games you otherwise wouldn't have heard of. Check them out!
New trailer for Neongarten! This shows off the new building models and the great new lighting / art direction. www.youtube.com/watch?v=mx1E...
Next up, we have some of the Corporate buildings and a few of the more pleasant parks. The Corporate buildings were all designed based off of the Art Deco art style, like the Niagara Mohawk building in Syracuse. Meanwhile, the parks include my favorite dystopian building name: "An Actual Tree".
Neongarten has gone through a huge art upgrade, and now the dystopian future is 200% prettier. I'll be showing off the new art over the next few days.
Starting out, we have some lovely apartments next to your typical futuristic factories, making oil, food paste, and thousands of tiny spider robots.
Beneath a Dead City, a colony sim / story generator is now out on itch! I'm far from done with it, though - I've got lots of great ideas where to go with its dynamic storytelling. Cool ideas from DotAGE, Dungeon World, and Sunless Seas.
joshuagalecki.itch.io/beneath-a-de...
One of my top 10 this year. A gem.
We created an interactive guide to the Steam Winter Sale: wintersaleexplorer.com
