Digitiser: The Game: Development

Part 25 - 24th December 2021

This feels like chipping away at a resilient mystery egg, on which cracks appear outside of the work area. I continue on the theory that the shell will eventually break somewhere, and when it does, I am braced for a disappointing toy.

The text renderer is progressing, though making text disappear afterwards is most of the work. The pixel font is uneven, and the sub-byte twiddling that enables forty columns isn't finalised, but there's now one less major diversion on the route to an actual game.

Which seems like a good moment to plug those who have finished actual games. Firstly Quang, who's second self-developed Game Boy title is now up for pre-order. I'm no collector - I don't even have a console which can play D*Fuzed - but this original puzzler seems too good to keep in the box.

If obscurity equals rarity, then Simon Daly, also unknown as chip-fork, is destined to be sealed in a fancy plastic case. Please take a look at Last Christmas Ever, before he becomes too valuable for air holes. It's a free, in his own words "vaguely interactive fiction".

Squint through the jank then you might see Raymond Briggs's dryly surreal twin, from the alternate 80s world where nuclear doom wasn't quite such a pressing concern. The ZX Spectrum version feeds delicate pencil colours through a neon teleprinter, if that's not punk enough for you.

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