Category: Video Games

50 before I’m 50 – Release a video game

Warning: This blog post is long, winding and probably doesn’t make sense, but explains the last few weeks. If you just want to play MonoScale, click here.

One of the 50 before I’m 50 that I have technically done before is release a video game. Using Blitz Basic in the early 2000’s, I made a bunch of games. You can read about them here. Though, sadly, the games are no longer available to download (I must have removed them at some point). Sadly lost to time.

I’m older, and a bit more experienced in programming, so embracing my new-found sobriety, as the nights draw in I thought to play around with game development and try to make a video game.

Not wanting to let it drag on forever and to give myself some sort of deadline, I entered a Game Jam. Game Jams are you’re given a limited length of time to release a game. And like the time I signed up for a 5k, I signed up for a game jam without really any sort of experience in game engines. I’d played around with Godot a bit, but I was not too experienced with it and regularly hitting walls. There’s a physics based joke in there.

Anyway, I found a Game Jam I was interested in the concept of – a 1-Bit Jam. As well as a theme where the limitations were to graphics, it also gave a couple of weeks development time. I’ve seen game jams that last for 48 hours and they just do not sound fun. So I signed up, joined the Discord server, and readied myself for making the game.

The Idea

Before the Jam started there was a vote for the theme. As well as the restrictions you had to make a game surrounding a theme. I can’t remember all the potential themes, but the two that I remember were “Silhouette” and “Tower”, purely because I had an idea for each of them. Silhouette may get made later down the line, as I really like the concept, but Tower won.

As for an idea? Well, sadly I went for the obvious. I was ravaged with COVID and was watching the Olympics at the time. I got really into the Speed Climbing. I was fascinated by the speed they were scaling the walls. A simple climbing game was what I thought, climb the outside of a tower incredibly quickly. Rather than climbing, I thought of a grappling hook system, where you’re against the clock to climb a tower quickly.

With an idea in my head (actually two), I hoped either Tower or Silhouette won. Tower won, so I begun development.

Development

Although I’d been playing around with development in other items, I felt using Godot was the best tool for my needs in terms of familiarity and features.

The difficulty going from WordPress to game development is that – even with the current state of the community and the irrationality of certain actors – I’m fairly confident WordPress is never going to introduce a physics engine. Even though Godot does a lot of the heavy physics engine work (things like “apply force to this object in this direction” are one commands), it can be tricky for somebody that focuses on PHP and MySQL to get their head round.

Godot development uses “Nodes”. These can be anything and everything. So for example, they can be players, enemies, power ups etc. You code every interaction needed for the game. In this game, I had a couple of base nodes – the climber, and hooks.

The climber can fire a grapple. This grapple would have a max length, and the player cannot fire a grapple if one is already active. If the grapple is attached to a hook, then the player is pulled towards the grapple. In reality, a force pushing the player towards the hook is applied. Once the player reaches the hook, it is released.

It sounds complex, but the force direction and application is two lines of code, so I don’t have to calculate anything!

These nodes were then put into another node, a Tower node. Which adds a background and detects the player position. The hook node was set to randomly generate and pushed out onto the wall.

At the moment it felt like a wall, so I want to make it feel like a tower. This was relatively easily to do, as I looked at games like Nebulus to see how that was done. A brickwork pattern was applied to the background, and when the player hit collision areas located in the left, right and top of the screen, the tower scrolled left, right and up.

Look at all the collision detection!

Hooks were interesting, as to maintain a look scrolling the hooks was needed. This again was looping through each hook and moving it left, right or down. Should the hook scroll off the bottom of the page it’s deleted from memory and a new hook is spawned at the top of the page. Oddly, even though there were approximately 100 hooks on a 1500 x 1500 pixel area, there was no real slow down, and although you could get parts where hooks are clustered together and other parts of the tower are barren, it worked pretty well.

Finally, I had to introduce a lose state (which is the player falling off the bottom of the screen) and a win state. The win state was a bit of fun, a simple ending animation should the player go off the top of the screen when the height climbed was over 100m, the time recorded and a return to the title screen. This is where game development gets difficult as nodes are in effect wrapped into one other. A main game node (containing the player, hooks, HUD and background), a title screen (containing information and the high score) and an ending scene. One advisory I saw about Game Jam entries was “make your game fairly easy”. Send the punter home happy, show a lot of your content early and often. I imagined most people would have played my game at maximum two times, so I set the height of the tower at 50m (I struggled to complete it at 100m) which should offer enough challenge, but not too difficult.

The game was actually built relatively quickly – I did use ChatGPT to format things I didn’t really understand but no AI was used in the art or music assets. I think in total about 10 hours to take the idea to completion.

Polish

Once the game was finished in it’s most simplest form I began thinking of ways to polish it. The first was improving the sprite work.

I found a tool – Aseprite – for the sprite work. I felt confident enough in my abilities to do some basic sprite work (soon to be misfounded). Sure enough, after about an hour and a bit I managed to get a basic tower built and graphics. It’s incredibly powerful, Aseprite, but not really had too much time to play with it.

One thing I did struggle with was the people, as I’m not great at drawing people. I used – oddly – the arcade version of Track and Field as a guide, and it didn’t turn out well. Poor Gwyn the Colourless was not looking well. In the end I left him looking a bit odd and weird in the game, as I did with Princess Blanc (the character you “rescue”). But we’ll leave it at that.

The evolution of the “falling” sprite for Gwyn the Colourless. I didn’t like the second draft, as he looked odd and too similar to the “going up” sprite.

One thing I am proud of is the tower effect. One thing I was worried about was the hooks and the fact they didn’t stand out on the tower. Thankfully with Aesprite it was easy enough to create a dithering effect, and the hooks were made a bit bigger and bolder so they stood out a bit more.

With the dithering, it also allowed me to put a round effect on the background. This was done with an overlay so it looked more like a tower that scrolled around the screen.

After the graphics was the music. I am not musically inclined so I approached the Discord asking if somebody would help me out. Thankfully somebody offered to help me out so that was fine. With the sound effects, I’d been playing around with Pico-8 recently and it has a snazzy sound effect editor. After a bit of time I had a game over, fire and connection sound effect ready to go.

Finally, I made a title screen, somewhat of an ending and cleaned it all up. The title screen I was most impressed with thanks to the starfield I created, that allowed me to drag and drop it into other scenes, set the width, height, offset and density, and put it elsewhere.

LOOK AT IT SPARKLE!

There were other ways to polish it. But I wanted to get it finished by the end of Wednesday 9th October, as I’ve two days before submitting it. Come the 9th, lateish in the day, I uploaded it and submitted in preparation for the game jam. The second suggestion was making your game playable online, rather than relying on people to download it. Thankfully in Godot you can compile your game to web so a quick upload to itch.io and the game was ready to play online. About 5 uploads in total for various reasons (the music wasn’t looping, “Fullscreen” would reveal my tower secrets, etc etc), but I got there in the end, and it was published on the 10th.

The polish work was the 20% of the 80/20 rule. Whilst the main game took me about 10 hours, polishing was around 15 hours.

Should you wish to play MonoScale you can do so at the link below. Let me know how you get on!

Post “Launch” Debug

There were things I wasn’t too happy with the game. I found it frustrating and it came up time and again in testing. I did think about reducing the height but I thought having an average time of 2 minutes to complete it is fine.

Nevertheless, it probably is too difficult. A new version would probably be slightly easier, with a bigger hitbox for the hooks.

Come Friday 11th October when the Game Jam was over the voting began. At this point you have a period of time to vote on other games. Here’s a bunch of feedback I received as well as the general comment of “It’s too difficult”.

An idea that was suggested on was camera work. I liked the end condition of throwing yourself off the top of the screen to win the game, so I wanted to keep that, but the scrolling up as you go up is a bit wonky. I’m not sure what to do here but one suggestion was maybe a zoom out if the height is under the 50m target height.

Quickfire ideas that I both a) like and b) take on board are the following:-

  • Sound levels are a bit off. SFX are a lot louder than the music (anybody who has watched me on Twitch will know that’s no real surprise).
  • A cylinder warp effect on the tower would definitely make it look more cylandrical.
  • Give the option to immediately retry the game, rather than push folk to the title screen.

One of the surprising bit of feedback was that Michael Klamerus featured it in his Indie Game Roundup on October 11th. I was not expecting any coverage outside the Game Jam itself. He praised the art (which is always a nice thing to hear as I feel like I can’t draw). Once again though I’ve heard the comment “I’m bad at this” which I’ve translated as “The game is too hard” for people who are incredibly polite 😊.

Also, checking the stats I’m somewhere on Indienova, but I don’t know where as a search has proved fruitless and Google Translate only goes so far.

Finally, the nicest feedback I received was that it would make a perfect mobile game.

All of those are suggestions for what I’m wanting to do when I have a bit of time.

The Game Jam & Results

During the voting phase, you’re encouraged to vote on other games. Here’s some games I really liked were:-

One of my favourite games was “The Skyscaper Plagiarism Agency“, which is a simple one bit game that requires you to build towers to match another tower. Really good fun and it showed – was in the top 10 of the most fun games out there (Gameplay it came 7th). Would be fascinating to see a full version of this without the 1 bit limits.

Bab.le was a Wordle clone I quite enjoyed. You have to build longer and longer words. Again, an original take on the tower concept (granted, the idea of “Tower of Babel” isn’t exactly unique, but the execution was great). This game also did well. In the top 50 for both originality and gameplay.

Witow Hero was a thunder god playing on a tower, so had a basic kind of guitar hero clone, but the graphics and the music really appealed to me, as it was a gameboy aesthetic.

Spire Bound was another great game: a fun little Metroidvania game that had a nice pacing and you were never really truly stuck. Gameplay it scored well (again another top 50 game).

Finally, Escape Tower was a fun escape tower with an amazing soundtrack. Did get lost, and it wasn’t truly 1 bit in my eyes (there were discussions on how games should deal with transparency, and it confused everybody, so I don’t really blame the author, however it’s something that affected a lot of games, and that was the game jam’s fault).

Anyway, how did I do? After the voting period was over I scored the following:-

CriteriaScoreRank (out of 340)
Gameplay3141
Theme454
Originality3.273157
Art3.091171
Music2.727178
Uses 1 Bit graphics4.545198
Overall3.439153

Overall, it was a fairly average game that scored slightly above half way. Happy with that overall. It wasn’t the most original of course and it had some limits but after the first week it did seem to drop off in terms of popularity. I knew art and music would be my weaker areas (there were some areas I didn’t like about the music), so not surprised about that.

I was a bit miffed with the “Uses 1 bit graphics”. I’m not sure what knocked me down a point or two? Maybe I missed some pixels and they were dark grey, as opposed to black, or the side dithering? I don’t know.

There were things I should have done better. If I enter it next year it is to change the colour scheme. MonoScale doesn’t stand out with all the black and white entries. Maybe go for a Game Boy palette?

You can see MonoScale, or not, as it doesn’t stand out…

Conclusion

Overall, I really enjoyed my first game jam. Even if it became a bit all consuming at the end of it. The last couple of days I was pretty much finishing work and doing 2 to 3 hours on MonoScale, but I wanted to get it done and over the finish line in a state that I am proud of it. And I am. It’s not GTA7, but it’s my little indie game.

There’s a base for a game – a MonoScale 2 or “Deluxe” version, using the feedback shared above, and adding a few bits I didn’t have time for.

Finally, I’ve also found a new hobby. I already have game #2 on the go, which I hope to release before the end of the year. There’s a bit less pressure on me for that one.

That however is being worked on with less time pressure. Will shout about it when it’s done here, or you can follow my itch.io page here.

The Video Games I Fell in Love With in 2023

2023 in video games was brilliant wasn’t it? Seems to have been a very strong year, with a load of franchises that have had stellar returns.

Like last year, I’ve decided to use a bit of a lull as most of us wind down for Christmas to look at the video games I played in 2023. Especially as the post Crimbo Limbo will have a bunch of sales. I think every one of these is worth a bit of your time. I’d also like to highlight last year’s list, especially as the game at number 2 and number 3 (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredders Revenge & Trombone Champ), I still play. Overwatch 2? I don’t touch.

Similar ground rules as last year – It must have been released in 2023. It can be a compilation or a collection or a remake, but it need to have had it’s first release within the year of 2023. Oddly the games I expected to feature didn’t, and some that I didn’t expect to see, including number one, came out of nowhere.

But let it be known, every game below here is worth your time. I occasionally list the negatives about them but often these are outweighed with the positives. I’ve played more, but those games didn’t really grab me (with the exception of one – Portal – that I finished this year but 95% completed it a while back). Here is a full comprehensive list of games I completed on my TwitchyRhys Twitter profile.

Games I Enjoyed Playing in 2023

As always, this post highlights the games released in 2023. However there are a bunch more games that I first seriously played in 2023. Here are games from previous years I played this year.

  • The first completed game for me was a gifted game from a friend of mine (Fee). Gris (PC*) was excellent. An arty platform game that with a story about loss and grief. Gris (pronounce gree) is nice and short and just beautifully animated.
  • I was intrigued with Brutal Legend (Xbox 360*), which promised the writing of Tim Schafer mixed with the comedic chops for Jack Black. A mix of action adventure and real time strategies. It starts really strongly, but gets lost half way through. A love letter to metal, the gameplay is solid but couldn’t decide as a game what it was, and the story is okay. Will make you smile though.
  • I played my first game from the Yakuza game this year. Yakuza Kiwami (Xbox One) was a cracking introduction. A great story that I got absorbed with, and Kiryu’s fighting style that felt very “Virtual Fighter” means that I’m not going to turn my nose up at this franchise anymore. Didn’t think I’d like this franchise. I was utterly wrong.
  • Maybe my game of the year, The Case of the Golden Idol (PC*) – along with the game of the year for me – scratched the “Obra Dinn” itch. A 1800’s murder mystery game where you have to piece together a story about a Golden Idol, it’s powers, and how each person who came into contact with it had their demise. Ignore the rudimentary art style, this is a fantastic deduction game. I’m already looking forward to the sequel being released next year, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s my Game of the year next year.
  • Another franchise I never dabbled in, I played Shining Force CD (Sega CD) on my fantastic little Ambernic device (seriously if you’re a retro head this is the best £150 I spent all year). And it’s brilliant. No real story but a fun turn based battle system that sees you play as the entire Shining Force. It was for a couple of months my “play for 20 minutes” game, and the Ambernic helped achieve this when travelling.
  • I’m going to talk about a game later that would have been potential Game of the Year but it didn’t nail the landing. Let’s talk about a game that really did nail the landing. I’ve never gotten on board with the 3D games of popular Nintendo Franchises however I played and completed Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo 64) for the first time ever. I found it occasionally a bit of a slog, but holy hell the last dungeon was brilliant. If a game is remembered by how you ended it, then I really enjoyed this. I don’t however have the nostalgia trigger for me to consider this the greatest game ever that many of my peers did. Good, excellent, and you can appreciate it, but may not be for me. It’s my Taylor Swift of video games.
  • A love letter to the early 80’s arcade games – Donut Dodo (PC) has been an inspiration for a potential project I’ve been coding on my downtime 👀. A fantastic Donkey Kong/Bomb Jack high score challenge, it’s just made with love and well worth picking up for cheap. If you do, please let me know how you get on. If you don’t, my god, listen to the soundtrack at least. It’ll get into your head.
  • FAR: Lone Sails (PC) was a interesting atmospheric platformer with driving elements. You have to pilot a steampunk train across a post apocalyptic landscape. Why? Nobody knows. Beautiful looking, though.

Honourable Mentions

There were a few games that didn’t quite make the top 3, but are well worth picking up. Here’s my honourable mentions for the list.

Like Zelda, I never really gravitated to the 3D Metroid game, but when Metroid Prime: Remastered (Nintendo Switch*) came out. I thought I’d give it a go. It was okay in all fairness. However, I felt there was far too much walking around lost, and I did end up very confused. It was okay, but not Super Metroid, nor Metroid Dread.

The Murder of Sonic The Hedgehog (PC) was a wonderful find! A free release from Sega on April Fools day, this gag turned out to be a fun, tongue in cheek visual novel featuring Sega’s most famous character. Just really good, with a solid murder mystery plot, and best of all – it’s free. A bog standard PC can run it and well worth playing through over the course of two hours.

En Garde! (PC*) was on my top games for 2023 for a long time, but ultimately lost out. A fun little reactive swordfighting game with a lot of interactive elements (think Batman: Arkham games for combat style), you play as Adalia de Volador, a swashbuckling hero with a tongue as sharp as her sword, as she takes down the odious Count-Duke and rids him from her town. The game has a fun style and a wonderful sense of humour. The problem? The difficulty level ramps up heavily on the last battle which left it a sour taste in my mouth. Shame, as it’s well worth exploring.

3. Super Mario Wonder (Nintendo Switch*)

This was a surprise.

I must admit, whilst I enjoy the Super Mario 2D franchise (again, another series I don’t really enjoy in 3D), the endless stream of “New” Super Mario games got a bit tiresome, without much in the way of innovation. It was always my least favourite franchise in the Mario Maker games. Over time however, friends who’s opinions I respect kept saying “you need to play Wonder! It’s the best 2D Mario game since Super Mario World” I wasn’t sold but eventually I relented.

3 levels in, I was smiling. It took familiar Mario tropes and with the Wonder Flower powerup, turn it on it’s head.

Guiding the plumber and his friends (yes including Peach & Daisy – no more damsels in distress here!) through 6 fairly open worlds to collect the Wonder Seeds and save the Flower Kingdom from Bowser, Super Mario Wonder is brave. It does innovative things time and again and then discards them never to be seen in the game. And the music? God it sticks with you. Classic Mario tunes.

My only complaint is that it’s probably slightly too easy for my liking, but you can go through the game and miss stages and paths, so there is a fair amount of replay value.

Also it must be commended in being the first Mario game that accurately depicts what happens when you eat random mushrooms (albeit with the “Wonder Flower”, which is probably cannabis).

2. F-Zero 99 (Nintendo Switch)

This was very nearly #1.

A game franchise I felt had been abandoned for too long, and I’m sure I uttered to myself “Wouldn’t it be cool if F-Zero had a battle royale racing game?”. Well Nintendo delivered with F-Zero 99.

I’ll be honest, I was hoping it would have been a new iteration of the franchise (or using F-Zero X instead), hence why it’s not my game of the year. However this has had some fun experiences. Connecting with streamers, playing in races, and just having carnage. On my Twitch channel I play a lot of Wreckfest and this is similar. A fun, pick up and play racer where you can race 5 races or 5 hours of racers. The best multiplayer racing experience on the Switch since Mario Kart 8, and come just at the end of the life of the console. It’s also a testament to the game that out of all the games here, this is the one I’m still playing.

It both respects your time and tempts you with one more go, the likes of which I haven’t felt for years. And it’s free. Please Nintendo, give us a new entry in the F-Zero franchise.

1. Chants of Sennaar (PC*)

I like games that make me feel intelligent.

I often call this my “Brits in Benidorm” simulator. Chants of Sennaar sees you play as a hooded protagonist thrust into a world full of simple puzzles. The only problem? You don’t speak a word of the language. Piecing together what is being said, eventually the language opens up to you. Only for you to then discover that the Devotees (the first race you encounter) are having a bitter dispute with the Warriors. And they have their own language, and are not speaking to each other.

As you begin to figure out each language you learn what’s important and what’s special to each race. There are differences, but there are also similarities, and eventually you become a walking Duolingo between all races which leads to a satisfying conclusion.

There are stealth mechanics (my least favourite mechanic in video games) but they are quite small and easily navigable. A beautiful game with a great soundtrack, this indie title is well worth picking up and playing through. My game of the year for 2023.

Previous Years: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2022.

For the love of The Last of Us

And all other video games

One thing that has filled my heart with joy recently has been a lot of people enjoying the drama series The Last of Us. For full disclosure: I’ve never played the game, nor seen the TV show, but I live vicariously through tweets such as this one from Dan Walker, who doesn’t strike me as a gamer.

Video games, for me, is the only piece of media I regularly consume. I don’t read. I rarely watch movies (I watched Terminator 2 for the first time last Sunday – it was great). My TV viewing is comfort viewing of Red Dwarf & Phoenix Nights, along with sport and game/antique/cooking shows. That’s really it.

Video games and me

Video games however are my comfort art form, and I always feel like it gets a bad rap. They provoke emotions in me like no other art form. Be it the pangs of nostalgia from playing Tehkan’s Bomb Jack which takes me back to playing it in Rhos-on-Sea seafront arcade with my grandparents, to the endorphin rush of solving another three fates in Return of the Obra Dinn. It has been my comfort blanket for such a long time. Even during lockdown – when we couldn’t go anywhere – me and pals regularly met up in Sea of Thieves to consume (real and fictional) grog. It beat a Zoom call.

That’s just the games that don’t necessarily have the strongest narrative but evoke happy memories. Stories in games have really gotten better and better. The twisting narrative in The Detective for the Commodore 64, through to the RPGs of the Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger games, all the way to modern day classics like Mass Effect, Horizon: Zero Dawn. Stories can be told, with wonderful deep characters and meaning. I enjoy the interactivity, but I understand many don’t. Which is why you’re catered with the compelling stories in walking simulators, such as Firewatch and To the Moon.

I always take it a bit personally whenever it isn’t given the due I feel is deserves. At the time of writing I’ve 3 games on the go. A short blast in RC Pro-Am on the Nintendo, and two story driven games (Metal Gear Solid & Red Dead Redemption). If I said I had three books on the go, nobody would bat an eyelid. Or spending a weekend watching three shows? That’s fine. But I do feel at times occasionally I have to justify spending a weekend resting playing video games. Maybe it’s in my head a bit. It’s for kids, it’s violent and rots your brain, etc etc. Things like that. I’m reminded however of an OkCupid question of “how would you feel if your partner spent the weekend playing video games?”. I feel like no other art form would ask that question.

The main culprit I find is in mainstream media. Not in terms of attacks but, it doesn’t really penetrate into the public consciousness like other things. Take for example quiz shows. When was the last time you had a video game question of reasonable difficulty on The Chase or Pointless? However when was the last time you had a question on TV. Or a film. Or books. There’s probably a reason financially, but another reason could be the folks who are in the positions of power don’t really understand it, and haven’t grown up with it.

Video games in other media

Which is why I welcome TV shows like The Last of Us, as hopefully exposes more people to the art form. Like Marvel, that began it’s success with comic book fans watching their movies, I suspect HBO have made the decision to commission the compelling story because it would get fans of the show to watch first, causing a groundswell, and then get people into the story (the story – if it follows the games – is apparently excellent. You should listen to the Playthrough Podcast that deep dived into both games, and only really criticising the actual game).

With the success of The Last of Us, I hope some of the people who may not have been exposed to video games much, play the games, or indeed other games. I hope other franchises get converted into video games as there are so many stories to tell to new audiences. People missing out on the gripping finale of the reaper invasion in Mass Effect because “they don’t play video games”, I don’t know, just makes me a bit sad.

I’m sad as it’s people who willingly shut themselves off from an art because they don’t understand it or dismiss it for kids. Like people who don’t listen to Rammstein because they don’t speak German. I’m probably a massive hypocrite in this regard as I do the same with books, TV and movies.

But I don’t care. I’ll just get back to John Marsdon galloping around Blackwater in Red Dead Redemption. I’m getting to the the good bit.

The Video Games I Fell in Love With in 2022

So, with a view of doing more blog posts on this blog, I’m bringing back an easy form of content. My top video games of 2022. I’d previously done in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019, but then took a bit of a break. Well, it’s back!

I’ve played a solid amount of games this year. Not as many as the pandemic years, because I stopped my Twitch channel for a couple of months and it’s been sparodic since it’s return. But thankfully using my Twitter list I’m able to remember what I played and beat.

There is one rule. It must have been released in 2022. It can be a compilation or a collection or a remake, but it need to have had it’s first release within the year of 2022. Which made it incredibly tough as the vast majority of the games I played weren’t released in 2022. Nevertheless, he persisted and I think I’ve a list. In true clickbait style – number one will shock you (seriously, it’s been panned)!

Games I Enjoyed Playing in 2022

With that said, I’ve played a lot of games for the first time that weren’t released in 2022, so I wanted to highlight those games and just share some thoughts on them.

  • Ironically Day of the Tentacle (PC) was probably my favourite game I played this year. Funny, clever and accessible. Well worth checking out this Lucasarts classic if you’ve never played it before.
  • The Wolf Among Us (PC) had probably the second best story of a game I played this year. It was a game that changed and moved me, and well written characters actually made me change the way I did things made it well worth hunting out and playing. From an alcoholic social worker to a badass cop, in a fascinating story.
  • To The Moon (PC) was the game that had the best story I played this year. An emotional journey that looked at life, death and medical ethics that made me bawl my eyes out at the end. Well worth the 4 hours it takes for you to complete it.
  • Vanquish (Xbox 360)* is probably not known for its story, but a shooty shooty bang bang game in the vein of Bayonetta. Cheesy 80’s dialog and the hardcore shooting action that became my pick up and play game for a good wee while in the late summer.
  • Pocky and Rocky (SNES) – Switch Remastered Version Here* was another find that I really enjoyed sinking time into this year. A fun little shooting game that got a serious high score challenge on the Retro Asylum Game Club, which was excellent to play along with. Tough as old boots, mind.
  • Milkmaid of the Milky Way (PC) is a fun Lucasarts style game that I discovered this year. Well worth hunting out if you like that sort of thing. It took me about 2 hours to complete and was not “click everything on everything”, which is nice.
  • Miles and Kilo (PC) was a long time in 3rd place, until I realised it was released a few years back. If you like Wonder Boy for the arcade, this will scratch that itch.

Honourable Mentions

  • I was drawn to Kleebuu Craves Fruit Salad (PC), which is one of those weird twitchy platformers. Cute, but unsettling at the same time. And less than an hour long. So yes, worth playing.
  • Not a game as such but the Atari 50: the Anniversary Celebration (Switch)* is well worth it if you like your retro games. I’ve been playing a few games this month (Tempest 2000 where have you been all my life). But the real joy is in the documentary. Turns out people did a lot of drugs in the 1980’s. Who knew!?!?!
  • Finally, bit of a selfish one and it won’t get anybody interested who isn’t but Cricket 22 (Xbox One)* is a fun little simulation and scratches my cricket itch. It doesn’t fill the gap of how I would do a cricket video game, but it comes close-ish. Just please don’t expect FIFA.

My Top Video Games of 2022

A screenshot of Trombone Champ. It features a cartoon man playing the trombone, along with white horses in the background and the horses are various sizes, there's nine of them. Also rainbows.

3. Trombone Champ (PC)

This was probably the toughest to pick. It’s a shallow game with very little replay-ability, however as no game has had me guffawing like a loon than Trombone Champ. It’s DDR with a mouse, making you play the trombone to pieces of classical music. The first time playing Hava Nagalia on the trombone I couldn’t breathe for a good 30 seconds after I finished.

It’s daft, it’s graphics aren’t great, there’s very little to it, but it was the game that got me over a bout of depression and gave me the confidence to start streaming again, so – for that alone – it’s wonderful.

Plus there’s a hacking community around it, and the video of Liz Truss’ resignation speech being set to trombones is joyous.

Trombone Champ is only available on Steam

2. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge (Xbox One)

And this is the first of this year’s picks chosen by nostalgia.

Shredder’s Revenge was a love letter to those who grew up with the heroes-in-a-half-shell in the late 80’s and early 90’s, and was more of the same but better. Published by the same talented group of people who rebooted Streets of Rage 4 so successfully, this game takes Turtles in Time from the SNES, gives it a bit of longevity, brings it bang up to date with progressiveness that makes your average Daily Mail reader blush (April O’Neill is no longer the damsel in distress, but a badass reporter working alongside the Turtles, Splinter & Casey Jones) and wraps it into a neat package.

It’s side scrolling beat-em-up action, which is seeing a nice little bout of resurgence. But the beauty of this game is it takes away some of the things that sucked about it (ever drained the last of your energy by doing a power move? Yeah, no, that doesn’t happen now), and feeds the nostalgic elements.

References to the TV show with cameo appearances, the NES & SNES games (the world map and “Big Apple 3pm” levels are the most obvious), and even Street Fighter with some special moves, Tribute Games gave me a heck of a nostalgia inhalation that is well worth your time.

Oh and the soundtrack is banging too.

This would probably be my number one game, without caveats. Check it out.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredders Revenge is available on Steam, Xbox, Playstation & Nintendo Switch

A screenshot of Overwatch 2, featuring character Ramattra who was introduced in Season 2.

1. Overwatch 2 (Xbox One)

I really didn’t want to put this top. I really didn’t.

Overwatch – since it’s launch in 2016 (my game of the year then) – has been steadily getting worse. The game became a hive of toxicity and just not fun, and the constant tinkering for balance kept you on your toes. After one too many smashed egos with my main (ya girl Brigitte) I put it down.

Overwatch 2 has been panned. It’s gone from a loot box model to a game pass model, and made the base game free to play. You’ve dropped one character – so it’s teams of 5v5 rather than teams of 6v6, and also the launch was ridiculously slow.

It’s still toxic, and can be not fun at times, as you grind through the levels to get a Genji skin that looks cool but you never play as him. It’s not without its problems.

And yet, outside of Mario Kart, no game I have had more fun with is Overwatch 2 this year.

I dunno, maybe nostalgia, maybe just how much it rocked my world, how much it kept me sane during lockdown, a pick up and play on your lunch break adventure that overall was fun. I’ve been able to get the band of us back together and play. It has been a great way to catch up with mates.

It’s still roughly the same game, and familiarity may not be to everybody’s tastes, but if you were a fan of Overwatch 1, and dropped off it because of the community, maybe dip back in again?

Though try with your friends first.

Overwatch 2 is available on PC, Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo Switch

So those were my top video games of 2022. Have I got any glaring omissions? Or have you picked up any based on my recommendations? Please leave your thoughts in the comments!

* I have placed a few affiliate links in here which are highlighted with wee asterisks.

How I Stream On Twitch

I’m a rarity amongst my friends in the mid 30’s – I stream on Twitch. I started mainly to cut down on drinking, but it’s made me connect with some amazing people, become better friends with people I already knew, as well as earn a little bit of money.

In recent weeks, with the Coronavirus issues, people have been looking to get more into Twitch streaming, and asking me how I did it. I’d thought I’d teach you how I do it. Here is a guide of how I did it.

Starting for “Free”

Before starting, I’d recommend getting things up and running as quickly as possible for free. I started with Retro Gaming with a stream of Championship Manager 93. For this I simply needed an emulator, ‘acquired’ copies of the game, and Open Broadcasting Software. Open Broadcasting Software (henceforth referred to as “OBS”) is a piece of software that has Mac, PC & Linux alternatives and allows you to put together a “scene”. This scene can pull in any window on your machine, images, your webcam, as well as any audio associated with it. You can then immediately stream by connecting the software to Twitch (here’s a guide on how to do it). Test everything is working (you can run test streams) and then go live!

My OBS for when I stream ZX Spectrum games (in this case Manic Miner)

Your first streams won’t have many viewers, that’s fine. I think my entire first 2 months of streaming I had less than 1 average viewer per stream. If you can bring people in that can be useful (my first regular viewers were people I knew outside of Twitch). But you should use this time to speak and get comfortable, which is why a game like Championship Manager is great as it’s slow paced and you can talk about what you’re seeing. Things like that. People may show up. People may not. But you should decide if you enjoy it, which is why I say a game like this is perfect. You can stream direct from Xbox/PS4’s, however they don’t have features like webcams, and it’s far easier to connect when you see somebody.

Investing in Streaming

Decide you enjoy it? Great stuff! Now let’s spend some cash

My entire streaming setup (outside of games & consoles) cost me about £250-300. I had some elements already (like the computer), and I did use some tokens to take some of the damage off, but this is what I bought.

When all the gear arrives, in between your console and your TV put the Elgato Capture Card and your console. You’ll want to capture the signal to put it into OBS, there are millions of ways to do this and my way is rather complicated (but works for me!). So I’ll not share it. However you should have something that looks like this.

I don’t usually put the streaming card this side of the laptop, but you can see how it is structured with the grey HDMI cable being the input (from the Raspberry Pi) and the black being the output (into the monitor).

Notice the fact that what I’m watching on the screen (top screen) is not running at the same time as my stream (bottom screen). This is deliberate as there will be a delay. Also it’s a good idea at this point to run as lean as possible – close all programs, drop the bitrate of the video (I stream at 760p standard definition as for retro stuff & my ugly mug it’s fine) and generally try and run the games in the resolution they were intended in on your monitor.

Bots

A Chatbot is a good thing to have in your stream. They can do basic moderation, help sort out spam, and respond to events as well as provide commands. You can see this in action by going to my stream and typing in commands such as !social, !discord & !prime. Or just write a few messages relatively slowly (so not to set off the spam filter). Here are a couple of ones.

  • Streamlabs Cloudbot – probably the simplest to set up, and I’ll talk more about Streamlabs offering in another part.
  • Nightbot – Popular with some elements of the community.
  • Phantombot – What I use. Self hosted (so you have to pay for server space). Complex to setup, but I love their dashboard and it is open source. Plus it allows me to tinker and improve it however I wish.

Dashboards

You can also setup a dashboard. Dashboard are what you look at whilst streaming. It can tell you things like the bitrate (how your internet connection is), how long you’ve been streaming, how many viewers you have watching and anything that’s happening on your stream.

The Default Twitch Dashboard

Some dashboards I’m familiar with are the following.

  • The default Twitch Dashboard. If you watch it disable your video, as I found it make things all a lot slower.
  • The default Twitch Dashboard on Mobile – again can be useful and easy to setup, running the dashboard on your mobile. I started with this.
  • Phantombot’s Dashboard (this is what I use). I found it light and didn’t take up as many resources as the default Twitch Dashboard.

I’m not sure about any other Dashboards, but I’m sure there are plenty more. If you set up a dashboard switch off viewers. It can be distracting and disheartening when you’re performing to an audience of zero.

Alerts

One thing I quite like is Alerts. They help improve interaction between you and your streamers. These are little animations that pop up when things happen on your stream. Two of the most popular ones are the following:-

  • Streamlabs Alerts – I have this, and has a wealth of tools available to handle alerts for anything from followers to subscriptions.
  • Soundalert Extension – This will allow users to donate bits (more on Bits later) or use channel points to play sound effects on your stream.

Maintenance

It’s up to you, but I put my streams up on My YouTube Channel whenever they are finished. Streams last on Twitch for a couple of weeks, but can be exported with the click of a button in Content > Video Producer.

Anything you clip, or one of your users clip last permanently though.

Growth & Monetization

And so the big one, how do you grow or monetise it? Well let’s start with growth.

Growth kind of happens slowly. It’s a good idea to have a community or things you can latch onto to help. If you can bring viewers to Twitch in some way (say if you have friends that enjoy games) that’s an easy way. Other than that, my three tips are.

  • Share the love: once finishing streams “raid” a random person. Raiding is passing on your viewership to somebody else. Some people switch it off as it can be a bit overwhelming, but if you have a few viewers, find a streamer of a similar/larger size, and raid them. Be friendly and chatty and hang out for a bit – I try to end a stream earlier than you wish to make sure that I can have a small chat.
  • Jump on hashtags: Some such as “#SmallStreamersConnect” and “#StreamFrens” retweet go live notifications – though you may want a dedicated Twitter account.
  • Sit and watch other streams: Some of my earlier viewers came from people I had previously watched. You can do that.

Some communities exist that can help you grow. These are things such as the following:-

And finally onto earning. Well you cannot earn straight away, you need to become a Twitch Affiliate, to do this you need the following:-

  • 50 Followers on Twitch.
  • Stream on 7 Different Days over the last 30 days.
  • Stream for 500 minutes over the last 30 days (8 and a bit hours).
  • An average of over 3 viewers on your streams.

It sounds like a lot but it’s quite easy to get, it took me about 2-3 months to achieve but if you are committed you can do it quicker. Becoming Twitch Affiliate allows you to earn using the following ways.

  • A share of the ad revenue.
  • “Bits”, small donations when something cool happens (usually works out at 1 bit for $0.01).
  • Subscriptions.
  • Affiliate income from games – rarer.

Subscriptions are the best way to earn as if you have Amazon Prime you can get Twitch Prime as well, which allows one subscription to somebody that’s not yourself on a monthly basis – you can read a guide on how to subscribe to a streamer with Twitch Prime here. So ask your friends to subscribe to you!

The only thing that is lacking is that it doesn’t auto renew, and designed to be a service where you share the wealth. A good alternative is my side project Streamer Sub Alert, which allows you to generate a link that you can put on your profile, or activated via a bot which allows people once subscribed to put a calendar reminder into their calendar to resubscribe. Paid subscriptions do auto renew though.

And how much can you earn? Well, it’s a slog, I’m after 9 months about a third of the way to the payout level. But it’s something to look into a side project rather than a main source of income. Do it for the love, rather than the money.

Thanks For Reading!

If you’ve enjoyed this article, great! I hope I answered questions. My inbox is open for any further questions. If you are on Twitch, please follow me on Twitch. Also YouTube, Twitter & Discord for my other services. If you have Amazon Prime and haven’t used your Twitch Prime Subscription, please consider using it with me – you get a cool emote that you can use on Twitch & Discord (thanks to ArdonPixels for the design). You can do so from my Twitch Profile by clicking on the “Subscribe” button at the top. If nothing else, thanks for reading and please share.