2024 September Retrospective

September was a truly indie game release month in my book. Isn’t every month of the year like that? Probably, but these days I am only interested in a relatively tiny selection of games, and most of them do fall into the indie game bucket; which is not too shocking or surprising, I guess.

Frostpunk 2

Let’s start with the behemoth in the room, which I am sure you guessed by now that it’s none other than the latest installment of the Frostpunk franchise, drum-rolls, please, Frostpunk 2.

While the city-building-survival-game genre isn’t exactly my cup of tea, I’ve been following the game pretty closely due to the simple fact that the first installment, can be pretty much considered nothing short of a bona fide cult classic.

It shouldn’t be shocking that it had a very successful launch and sold over 350k units during the opening weekend alone. I am always thankful when studios release any sort of numbers post-launch, because it allows me to double check the estimates provided by tools like Gamalytic.

When I looked at frostpunk2.com, I immediately noticed the video being used as a background, and thought that it would make a great wallpaper, then proceed straight to using the following series of incantations in order to extract and resize a suitable frame:

$ ffmpeg -i Frostpunk_2_Hammer_Trailer_Endslate_LOOP.mp4 \
	-ss 00:00:04 \
	-frames:v 1 \
	wallpaper_4k.png
$ convert wallpaper_4k.png -resize 1024 wallpaper_1080p.png

You can graciously witness the results of my great labor below.

It’s quite surreal seeing a 4K video being used as a mere background. If you’d tell me in the 90s that this was going to be the case, I would have laughed you out of the room, and asked you to kindly remind me when was the last time you awed a gander at D:\funstuff\videos\goodtime.avi.

Tiny Glade

Yet another banger this month was the quite whimsically chill diorama builder, called Tiny Glade.

One of the reasons why I thought of mentioning is because it’s being powered by some rather unorthodox and deliriously hipster tech stack under the hood.

A healthy mix of Rust, and Bevy, infused with copious amounts of procedural generation, go figure! Please tell me that it’s not the most surprising and amazing thing you’ve read or heard all week.

Come on now, tell the truth and shame the devil!

UFO 50

UFO 50 has been baking in the oven for an awfully long time, and it’s the brain-child of none other than Derek Yu of Spelunky fame.

People have been complaining about the fact that the included games are too hard and so forth, which is understandable; that was the whole point in fact, but perhaps it might have not come across clearly enough.

Teleport yourself into a bygone age filled with nostalgia and old-school tunes. It’s also worth pointing out the perhaps much lesser known fact that it’s a GameMaker game. That was quite a mouthful, wasn’t it?

But, then again, what else do you expect from a true to the heart Mossmouth production? Right on the money!

Kingdom Rush Vengeance: Pirate Kings Campaign DLC

I am not even going to bother saying anything about this one. One can never have enough of good old fashioned tower defense in their lives.

I must confess that I haven’t gotten the chance to play trough the entire campaign just yet.

By the way, another DLC should be dropping sometime in October, but for latest installment of the series released just a few months ago, called Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance. Just in time for the incoming onset of spooky season.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

Last, but not least, Nintendo dropped the latest entry in the legend of Zelda franchise, which seems to be using the same engine as The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening that came out a few years back.

Marmota

In other non-indie-game-related news, the curiosity got the better of me and wanted to see how Marmota fairs on Ubuntu. Now, I knew that it would compile and run because the only real dependencies it has are gtk and libvte, but I was still reasonably curious and intrigued.

Well, it works just fine and plays relatively nicely with Gnome 3, even in border-less full-screen mode, which is precisely what I was primarily interested in finding out more about.

However, in good old year of the Linux desktop fashion, there’s always a BIG BUT in the house. In order for the window’s icon to show up in the sidebar (launcher), it’s not enough to just specify the name of said icon via gtk_window_set_icon_name; in fact this pretty much is ignored and results in an unsurprising no-op.

gtk_window_set_icon_name(GTK_WINDOW(ctx->win), ctx->icon_name);

That would have been way too easy, right? One needs to create an actual .desktop entry file, which is just as convoluted to put together as it always was 20+ years ago.

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Marmota
Exec=marmota
Icon=terminal
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Utility;Application;

Eh, a small price to pay, right? Not really, but here we are!

Yet another reason why (just in case, there weren’t enough already), I do not use or fancy any of the so called well established, and traditional desktop environments.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, it looks like Ubuntu is no longer offering any official boot-table mini-netinstall type ISO images; which in turn makes it a pain in the butt to install, because one has to unnecessarily download an already largely out of date totally unnecessary pile of digital bits.

In 2024, having a net installer should be mandatory, and most definitely not some optional nice to have kind of a thing; well hidden away, just in case people find out and complain, and boy oh boy, complain they did.