Remember seeing The Shivah in an article about Manifesto Games and thinking how cool it was that an indie was making a point and click!

Whenever I do a stealth kill in a game I pretend I’m doing an E3 presentation and say stuff like “We’re giving players the choice to approach combat in a variety of ways”

If you would like to cover Amberspire at launch, now is the time to get in touch with us: contact@bithellgames.com

"HDR" seems to mean 19 different things and 18 of those things are "everything is grey now - good luck turning THAT off"

Omg ogg theora

1. A rough line sketch from the very early days of Amberspire, giving an idea of composition with a large gas giant in the back and buildings in front. 2. The finished cinematic concept art, following a similar composition with the gas giant in the background and the city in the foreground.

Remember to appreciate your local game concept artists, folks 🫶

Top: A dev sketch for Amberspire that was given to our concept artist, Simon
Bottom: What Simon gave us in return 🌇

This art is particularly fab and was really helpful to me when I was working on the soundtrack

In 2009 I had to have loads of weird sales calls from the people who owned Bink Video because of this problem and that is not a fate I would wish on anyone despite the 90's nostalgia of it all - someone with an immense brain should handle this and make it available for a Reasonable Price (TM)

Triple-L

You should do this for Reasons Which Will Soon Become Apparent

MMO98 - Official Release Date Trailer YouTube video by GameTrailers

Let's all cheer ourselves up with some cool-looking game trailers!

First up is MM098, a simulator in which you make and run MMOs in 1998 with an old-school Windows interface. What a brilliant/ bonkers idea, I love that people are making unusual games like this!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Xxo...

100% of Blender tips are like "press ALT + home + x" and they all fail 100% of the time

Critical analysis is where I say the state pension is either exploitative or acquisitive depending on how I feel about old people this afternoon

Saw people complaining about the state pension rise and I thought it was because of how small it is but no apparently it's because the bad old people have all the money or something - very impressive how we've managed to fuse vanilla British callousness with some bastardised historical materialism

I first learned of the existence of Zendaya via Zendaya is Meechee and thus she remains forever Meechee in my understanding

I would like to do a bit where you receive a letter from me in about 3 weeks that says "Yeah seems like a good idea" but I'm not going to

Oh boy

He just went through the red light, almost as if he had made no truce with the furies

Extremely happy with this as a post which garnered zero responses - I will now bring it up constantly at every opportunity

I am generally a fan of "do the thing and also simultaneously take care of players" when it comes to design or aesthetics. I know that not everyone shares that position...and I think that's good - indie games has to be a space for divergent design philosophies and approaches.

I was very keen to stress that I'm *not* saying "wow it's sooo terrible that indies are co-opting and manipulating the dynamics of gambling for their own objectives" and I feel like that's been reflected well in how I was quoted - always takes trust to do that and I appreciate Francisco's effort.

I enjoyed talking to Francisco for this and I'm grateful there's writers creating space to talk about these topics in a depolarised, non-antagonistic way. Sometimes it's good to just say "this appears to be a thing that is happening" without immediately stamping an ethical designation onto it.

A screenshot of our upcoming city-building game Amberspire (without UI), showing a growing settlement with a large Starport at the centre.

A screenshot of our upcoming city-building game Amberspire, this time with UI. Five resource dice have been rolled and are currently being distributed into a number of buildings: the Cistern, Ruster, Habitat, Bazaar, and Landing Pad.

A screenshot of our upcoming city-building game Amberspire, with resource dice again being allotted different buildings. This time, a Lighthouse is in the process of being built.

A screenshot from our upcoming game Amberspire. One of the factions, Void Lineages, has arrived in the city. To the right is a portrait of one of their members. To the left, a description: "The city has drawn the attention of a new off-world faction... Void Lineages The Void Lineages are a rhizomatic family of pilots, traders, smugglers, and shipbuilders. A familial structure organized under hierarchs maintains strict controls over its members, but this structure is frequently threatened by desires within and forces external. Ultimately the lineages remain reactive to an ever-shifting political landscape. The Void Lineages favor increases the maximum dice pool limit to eight, and the penalty reduces it to four.

Amberspire is out May 6th!

🌇 Build a science-fantasy city atop an abandoned mausoleum
🎲 Roll dice to collect resources and keep your city running
🏠 Grow your population and influence
👥 Earn the favour of off-world factions
🌧️ Manage the unusual ecology

Wishlist on Steam!

No Truce With the Furies is a better name than Disco Elysium

disappointed to find out the lutenist in super mead boy was subsequently ejected from the convention for what he later described as "memeing just that little bit too hardcore"

just typo'd "super mead boy" and that is the most "fantasy / American faux-medieval themed game music cover band at PAX in 2012" type phrase possible

Wow incredible! Thanks to @groundshatter.bsky.social for letting me try something a bit different with the Knights soundtrack - very cool to be recognised like this

The team behind Amberspire have played a lot of city builders between us, and that research came in handy when developing our own.

See how it turned out when Amberspire releases on May 6th! Available to wishlist on Steam now 💫

Still love many things about the UK but the absolutely relentless hostility of all our systems towards small business isn't one of them

Hah extreme quiet contentment probably doesn't count! A good exception I think