TPWitchcraft

For around a half year, I try to locate games that don’t fit within the “market” and - if I find them to be good - review them on my Blog.

I came to believe that there are many interesting works that struggle from a lack of attention. It is my believe that it would be worth to attempt to unite the different non commercial gaming communities and the various “lone wolfs” into a (at least loosely) connected, defined scene to allow mutual feedback, help, and allow us to detect each other among the zero-effort-projects and commercial players.

My idea is to establish the term Underground Game for such non-commercial games; the corresponding scene should be close to the free software/open source movement, and - so my idea - be open towards leftist politics but shut out right wing bigots for various reasons.

Here you’ll find a manifesto I created, if you want to dive in further (no ads, no tracking, no placed content - the blog is strictly uncommercial, so i hope this is okay - putting the whole wall of text here wouldn’t be practical): https://thunderperfectwitchcraft.org/arcane_cache/2023/06/08/underground-games/

Right now, I’m druming in various smaller game dev communities and on mastodon. Would you have interest in partaking in such a community? What would be the right medium for a common channel in your opinion?

A identical topic was created for /gaming/. A few extra words here: Linux Gaming was changed a lot by Valves involvement. Many seem to be positive about this. But you should consider that a certain dependence comes with Valves heavy activity in the Linux Gaming-Landscape - this could backfire one day.

For around a half year, I try to locate games that don't fit within the "market" and - if I find them to be good - review them on my Blog.

I came to believe that there are many interesting works that struggle from a lack of attention. It is my believe that it would be worth to attempt to unite the different non commercial gaming communities and the various "lone wolfs" into a (at least loosely) connected, defined scene to allow mutual feedback, help, and allow us to detect each other among the zero-effort-projects and commercial players.

My idea is to establish the term Underground Game for such non-commercial games; the corresponding scene should be close to the free software/open source movement, and - so my idea - be open towards leftist politics but shut out right wing bigots for various reasons.

Here you'll find a manifesto I created, if you want to dive in further (no ads, no tracking, no placed content - the blog is strictly uncommercial, so i hope this is okay - putting the whole wall of text here wouldn't be practical): https://thunderperfectwitchcraft.org/arcane_cache/2023/06/08/underground-games/

Right now, I'm druming in various smaller game dev communities and on mastodon. Would you have interest in partaking in such a community? What would be the right medium for a common channel in your opinion?

Greetings Valentin

Today we put our first game, "Meditation 5" under a GPL. With this, all our games are "liberated"; the source codes are all available and put under GPL3; for "Acid Flight" and "Meditation 5" this also goes for the assets except of the fonts (that we don't own).

Our games: The Vaults of Minos is a roguelite precision platformer with very fluid controls and an refined level generation. Assets are non-free, but you might download the demo and place the binary you can build from the source there; the resulting game will have all features available.

http://thunderperfectwitchcraft.org/VaultsOfMinos/index.html

Acid Flight is a version of "Icy Towers" put on steroids. You might experience a texture glitch when starting it, in this case just restart the game (might require a few attempts).

http://thunderperfectwitchcraft.org/AcidFlight/

Meditation 5 is an minimal, abstract light gun game designed around taoist philosophy that should be played with a controller.

http://thunderperfectwitchcraft.org/Med5/index.html

Check them out!

The Arcane Cache reviews games that fly beyond the radar of the big gaming sites and blogs. I focus on amateur games and niche productions.

Since I play exclusive with Linux, all games I review run native or with wine.