Best Games - Wave Race 64 Some games just feel right. There isn’t really much to Wave Race 64, when you get right down to it. The big, beautiful, 3D sequel to a simple Gameboy jet ski racing title. There aren’t really that many tracks. There are only a few riders and they aren’t very different from one another. There are stunt and time trial modes. You can play split screen multiplayer. On paper, a pretty uninspiring package for a racing game.

There is a few pieces of text in Street Fighter III : Third Strike that I find fascinating. They aren’t important to the game. They are mostly semi-nonsensical pump up quotes. One bit of text might have a typo in it. None of that is why I find it fascinating. It’s the technique that I love.

I wrote about the Calgary Arcade Jam last week. Well that got me inspired. I’ve been working on an arcade style game for a while. That meant I have had to create a whole lot of systems and processes to make 3D meshes look and move like 2D sprites.

https://itch.io/jam/arcade-jam-2026-cgda/entries Yesterday I got the chance to participate in a game jam. This time I wasn’t jamming, I was judging. I played all the games and talked with all the teams. It was sort of fun to see a game jam from this angle.

For a while I had most of the control issues with my game worked out. You could run around and the screen would scroll at least as smoothly as a 1990s era arcade machine or console. I had introduced most of the same constraints, so I was met with the same results. The simulation of the game could move with sub-pixel precision but the graphics could only move in full pixel increments. That meant that some movements would look smooth, but moving in some directions, particularly diagonals would sometimes lead to a stepping or jitter.

I hit a strange milestone recently. This is both the most stories I have had out on submission and the longest I have had multiple stories out on submission. Let’s be completely honest, most, if not all, of them will be rejected. Now that’s not a defeatist attitude, that’s just the way this game goes. Most stories get rejected. Sometimes several times.

Turning an entirely 3D, triangle based, game into a 2D, pixel art, game takes a lot of fakery. Up until now, a lot of that fakery leaned on a few scripts and processes that were largely CPU based.

Best Games - Return of the Obra Dinn It’s the sort of premise that could only come from an indie developer. At a larger development studio or publisher, Lucas Pope and Obra Dinn never make it past the first pitch meeting.

Work continues slowly on my game. I have reworked a lot of my Blender to Godot flow. I have simplified some of my shader setup so that my CRT effect lives completely independent of any graphics it’s modifying. I have added menus, proper pausing, and a save/load functionality, though most of that hasn’t gelled to anything close to final.

For my birthday I decided to gift myself not having to post something this week. Shit. I just did, didn’t I.

Best Games - Punch-Out!! Punch-Out!! only exists because of a mistake. By 1984 Nintendo had already released three Donkey Kong titles and one Mario Bros. game. I don’t know if you heard, but the Donkey Kong and Mario games did quite well. Well, most of them did. I don’t believe Stanley from Donkey Kong 3 is really a household name. I wonder how that one sold.

For the first time in quite a while, I have several stories out on submission. If you have never sent stories out or submitted stories to a publisher, just sending the stories out means almost nothing.

The game I am working on uses an orthographic perspective… orthographic perspective is sort of an oxymoron. Maybe orthographic projection. Orthographic camera? It tries to look like an old game, and so, it uses old game graphics limitations.

You know that thing where people ask ‘what’s something that you could talk for an hour about without any preparation?’ I think I have two of those. One is old video games.

Recently I started combining all of my distributed experiments and gameplay tests for my game. That meant reorganizing a lot of the half baked scenes and projects that I have been working on into one unified project. Of course, that instantly broke everything. I have a slightly complex shader and viewport structure, and trying to combine that with other scenes that have things like basic menus, startup screens, pause menus, swapping levels, etc. caused all sorts of blank screen and screen size problems. Long story short, it broke my shader. The good news is that I made all of the shader and viewports setup. Since I was the one who made it, I was always going to be the one who had to fix it. So I did. It wasn’t easy, but I have now reworked the entire project so that I can run all of my menus and scenes in a really clean and efficient way. There is one main scene that runs all of the time and all of the child scenes either get loaded and unloaded, or set to visible, on the fly. All of my shaders and filters are on this main scene so that any popups menus or UI can run independent of the 3D portions of the game, but they get the appropriate filters applied. So yeah. game stuff is still happening and it’s still happening slowly.