Lucas Pope: Indie games visionary makes pen-pushing feel like an exciting career choice

Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games. Five months in, the column has left me wondering why I've burned so many of my hard-earned Register tokens on stuffing my rig with powerful hardware. Darkest Dungeon is a 2D, side-scrolling roguelike and Kenshi's graphics are straight out of 2009 – neither take …

[baud]

Return of the Obra Dinn looks very interesting, it's been on my watchlist for quite some time. Alas, so many games and so little time...

[ColonelClaw]

Couldn't agree more with this article - especially the bit about spaffing way too much cash on gaming hardware that gets completely underutilised; I have a 2080Ti, and trust me, The Binding of Isaac runs like a dream on it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just hoping for a Linux version of Return of the Obra Dinn. Very keen to play it, Papers Please is fantastic.

[ThadiasVonBasterd]

if you have it on steam you could try running it with proton? it looks to work for most people

https://www.protondb.com/app/653530

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't buy games with no Linux support :)

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Also avail on GOG...

I have to. I love 100% offline installers. https://www.gog.com/game/return_of_the_obra_dinn

[Anonymous South African Coward]

Every so often we get a Mike Singleton* who will single-handedly design, code and publish epic games which will capture and immerse the player in another world.

And it is heartening to see that it is not always FPS games, but other genres as well.

*Lords of Midnight and Doomdark's Revenge

[The Indomitable Gall]

That's an odd comparison on several levels.

First of all, the 80s were full on one-man dev teams, like Mike Smith (the Miner Willy games), Andrew Braybrook (although he was part of a software house, most of his genius games were solo coded) or Jeff Minter. With 16, 48 or 64k to play with, it was pretty easy for one person to fill all the memory in a few weeks' work.

But Mike Singleton... well, he did some clever maths-based programming to make games that most people wouldn't have thought possible -- even now part of me wants to believe that Lords of Midnight on a 48k spectrum is just a Mandela effect.

We're now living in an era where technological marvels are beyond the reach of the sole coder, and what indies like Pope are doing is finding ways to use what's already there efficiently to build compelling story-driven games without having to worry about the tech.

OK, so Pope did have to write a custom shader to get the "dithering" effect for monochrome shading, so it was far from a totally non-technical project, but the comparison just seems weird to me.

[TonyJ]

"...With 16, 48 or 64k to play with, it was pretty easy for one person to fill all the memory in a few weeks' work..."

Or 32k in the case of my own erstwhile BBC B+

I think as well, it's worth remembering that because of the severe limitations of the hardware back in the say, the games had to be very playable, as well as generally being quite unique, in order to allow gamers to look past those sometimes obvious limitations.

Elite (the original on the BBC) was a masterclass in what could be squeezed out of them. When the original sourcecode was released, it turned out that there were no unused spaces (made the code verrry difficult to read) - every line was full to the brim because it was literally the only way to fit it all in!

[SonofRojBlake]

"Mike Smith (the Miner Willy games)"

That's Matthew Smith.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Smith_(games_programmer)

[Goobertee]

Old fart just visiting

I've never been a gamer (ignoring Flight Simulator) but have been a programmer in a variety of roles for almost half a century. Your comments--impressively readable to someone who isn't in the business--are interesting and have me curious about what I'm seeing. My grandson is replacing his motherboard and some other components, so maybe I can scrounge enough the hardware to at least see what is going on.

The Linux comments got me, too. I had forgotten there was another OS in common use.

[Anonymous South African Coward]

Re: Old fart just visiting

Go for Linux Mint should you want to give Linux a try.