Welcome to the Pixelmusement website!
Home of the obscure and barely known game designer: Kris Asick

News for July 5th, 2024:

I know it took a long time to get to this point, but I never stopped doing gamedev work while making Ancient DOS Games and my other video series, thus I am pleased to finally announce my next major "game" project...

"Project AB"

Click on any of the screenshots above to enlarge them!

Up to this point in time I had been talking on various socials about a different game idea I was working on, "Project LJ", and had even posted a couple exclusive things related to it to Patreon. However, earlier this year I was getting prepared to begin practical development on it, having completed its nearly thousand pages of story dialogue, only to realize the battle engine I had planned this entire time was actually... not fun to play. :|

Suffice to say, I still want to make Project LJ as it has a story with a central theme of "healing" that I really want to share with the world, but it's gonna have to wait until I can come up with better mechanics for battles. Since then though I have been going over other project ideas and gave this particular one another shot, having had issues with developing it to any great extent in the past. After some planning I tried throwing together some tests to ensure everything I would need the game to do was doable in the Godot Engine, and sure enough, virtually everything WAS possible, and the few things which weren't are things which are already addressed and being added to the next version update of the Godot Engine!

So, I decided I am pushing forward with "Project AB"! Again, just like with Project LJ, the name has the primary initials of the actual name in it as I already know what the "game" is going to be called when it's done... and I keep saying "game" in quotes because while it does have gameplay elements for sure, it's technically NOT a game in the traditional sense. Similar to how Maxis would call programs like Sim City "software toys", that's kinda what I'm going to be ending up with is more of a "software toy" than a game, with an emphasis on building your own worlds either to relax and recuperate in, or to vent out frustrations and engage in pure catharsis!

That said, I know the screenshots so far don't look like much, but they represent fully functional first-person movement physics along with the ability to select parts of the world, known as "set pieces" and move, rotate, and scale them however you see fit, through that same first-person interface! It kind of felt like reinventing the wheel making this all work, but it was necessary as this program is ultimately going to have VR support, meaning EVERYTHING has to function properly without a mouse cursor on a screen. Furthermore, to aid in user feedback and to keep things aligned well, set pieces are locked to a grid but the frame which shows up around what you're editing is NOT locked to the grid, thus providing much stronger feedback in terms of what the user is trying to do versus what's actually being altered.

Getting this one aspect of the program working lays a foundation for a LOT of the things which are to follow, as it won't just be simple cubes the player can adjust, as there will be stairs, ladders, ramps, and many more elements which tie in with the central theme of the program. In fact, my Patreon supporters at or above the $4 tier have been given an exclusive video of the world editing features in action!

...so what IS the central theme of this program you may ask? Sorry, that's still VERY MUCH a secret! I will say though I have told my closest friends what I am planning and ALL of them are excited for this project, which I feel is a very good sign!

News for April 25th, 2022:

So... I went and made another MegaZeux game... :O

Yep! For the sake of Ancient DOS Games Mod 10, I went ahead and spent a month making an ENTIRE game in MegaZeux! Due to time constraints and not wanting to make a video which is 10% interesting code and 90% boring stuff, the video itself is a less a documentary of the process and more an overview of how the game works, showcasing just how simple it is to break beyond the normal restrictions MegaZeux seems to have, all done with the really old v2.51 DOS release of the software!

The game itself can be downloaded from the MegaZeux Games section of my website, though you will also need a copy of MegaZeux to play it, which can be sourced from the ongoing MegaZeux community at the DigitalMZX website, keeping in mind I only tested the game as far as 2.51 is concerned so with any luck it works properly in modern Windows versions of MegaZeux too!

ADG Lazer Warz centres around a post-robot-apocalypse where small patches of Humans have been living off the land for decades, having been driven out of their cities by the bots. One resistance movement has created a quartet of experimental coloured lazers, each tuned to the four colourations seen in the bots and sets one of their best fighters out to an old city to test their effectiveness and try to wrest at least some amount of control from the bots in the process!

The game mechanics are centred around player-fired lazers, as the player never fires a standard bullet at any point in time anywhere in the game, but more specifically, you have four different colours of lazers you can swap between as if you match the appropriate lazer to the appropriate colour of robot, you deal quadruple damage!

There are 15 levels in total and my own runs put the typical playtime at between 3 and 4 hours if you know what you're doing, all culminating in an intense final boss fight!

News for August 2nd, 2021:

Got some big news today worthy of a main-page update to the site: Both Super Minesweeper and PixelShips Retro are now FREEWARE! :D

So this has actually been a long time coming, seeing as both games were originally developed in the mid 2000s primarily with Windows 98 as the target hardware, despite XP already being a thing and Vista being right around the corner. As such, they cann be a bit tricky to get working on modern hardware and sometimes will just randomly decide to not work even though they normally work fine, not to mention the whole 256-colour thing is poorly supported at best nowadays. :P

However, my original plan was to wait to do this release until I had another more modern game ready to sell so that there would always be something for sale on the site, but the company that's been handling payment processing and serial key registration since 2005 sent me a message about a month ago basically saying that they will no longer be maintaining relations with anyone selling less than $6,000 a year through their system... They basically became indie-hostile in one fell swoop. :(

Because of the age of the games, because of how tricky they can be to get working, and because of the serial key system embedded in both games being a hinderance to trying to release them elsewhere for sale, I decided "screw it" and spent some time hacking out the serial key systems and adding a few other updates to make them a bit easier to get working right, such as command line arguments for setting alternate colour depths and tweaking how much CPU time the games demand. Ironically, my solution to the serial numbers to ensure no consequences with the protections in place to detect hacking was to just have it manually apply a fixed registraton code any time the check for one comes back invalid or missing! :P

So! If you've never played either game before, or enjoyed the shareware versions moderately but not enough to feel they were worth spending money on... or just never got around to getting them, now's your chance! Or, for those of you who did purchase these games in the past, the new versions may be easier to get working due to the added command line options and while you can TECHNICALLY install them overtop of the existing games without issue, it's better to uninstall the existing versions first just so that both don't show up at the same time if/when you go to uninstall later. Unless you're on Windows 98/ME this should not affect saved games, high scores, or anything like that! :B

As for what's next, I've got a few ideas. I'm versed enough now with the Godot Engine to use it, but have found its 3D capabilities to have too many performance hiccups so will likely use it strictly for 2D ideas. Beyond that, I'm leaning to use the Unreal Engine as I have a couple VR ideas I want to tackle, which yes, will support non-VR play as well if I do pursue them!