Alien Science Post-mortem

Adventure Jam 2020 You can find the details here. And my entry Alien Science here. Initial idea The initial idea I had was this: You live alone in a little cave high up a cliff, in a very… Read More

Hints for Snowspirit

For Adventure Jam 2018, I created Snowspirit. If you need a bit of help getting through it, here are a few hints. Highlight/select each bullet point to get ever more “spoilery” hints about a problem. Hints   What… Read More

Overlapping path finding regions

I found myself wanting to have stairs and walkways that appear on top of other walkable areas. I had avoided this up to this point because of issues with pathfinding. While the A* algorithm I use for the… Read More

Dealing with a limited palette

The color palette I’ve chosen for Cascade Quest consists of the combinations of the sixteen EGA colors (to simulate the palette used by those old games, which often dithered two colors together). Since color A combined with B… Read More

Talk Sweetly To Printer

Cascade Quest was shown to the public for the second time at Seattle Indies Expo (a PAX West side convention) on September 3rd.   The booth Lots of space at SIX this year – they moved it to… Read More

Hints for Void Quest

A number of people are stuck on my Adventure Jam 2017 entry, Void Quest. The puzzles are pretty hard, especially if you haven’t played these kinds of games before. I tried to signpost the puzzles well, but I… Read More

Fast palette lookups

Cascade Quest uses a fixed palette that is based of the 16 default EGA colors. The 16-color Sierra games used dithering to give the appearance of more than 16 colors. Given the relatively blurry monitors and TVs of the day, this… Read More

Void Quest post-mortem

  Over the two weeks from May 5 to May 19, I worked on an entry for Adventure Jam 2017. Leary of taking two weeks off from working on Cascade Quest, I decided I could use the time to:… Read More

An Overview of Save Games

In the old days, Sierra was brutal when it came to save games. Death was around every corner, and it was up to the player to remember to manually save progress. Although Cascade Quest still has a good amount… Read More