Links

A music tool made by Bryan Braun where you can compose songs that can be played using DIY music boxes. If you are interested on the background of this website, click the very small, hard to see "About" and "Guides" page in the bottom left corner of the page!

A meme-y music maker (and I also don't get the reference with the name).

A simple timer, stopwatch, alarm clock and world time website

A big suite of en- and decryption tools for ciphers and other adjacent tools, data and info. Neat for times where secrets in games, ARGs or other things use ciphers and you don't want to learn all the 200 possible ways to encrypt a message, although I reckon that there probably is fun in trying to solve puzzles and activate your critical thinking.

Some sections that I would recommend:

• Text Analysis: I first found this website by encountering a cipher in the wild wild web and not knowing a lot of ciphers to decode it. I thought that someone might've made a tool which automatically tries to detect what cipher was used, and my first hit came with this tool. It might misfire, but it's better than nothing!
• Other: More or less tributes to / summeries/logs of mysterious real life cases where a lot of cryptography is involved or just general IT stuff. As of March 2023, it only contains Cicada 3011, the Zodiac ciphers and a short page on quantum computing.
• "Puzzle": A puzzle on the internet where you need to find codes through image, audio and whatever else files and enter them to proceed to the next page which presents more info to decode. I do not know if this puzzle is Boxen (read more about it in the "About" section of the site) or how long it is. You can access this puzzle from the "Puzzle" section in the header of the page (or just under Sitemap > Web Puzzles 1).

Lastly, I think this quote is good to keep in mind while using this website:

Although tools can be helpful, there's a saying: "A fool with a tool is still only a fool". Good quality code-breaking puzzles can't be solved simply by using tools. It's your wits and creativity that matter, and the tools are just there to help explore your ideas.

A simple and handy web-based tool to edit Terraria player files. It's really well featured and allows to tweak seemingly anything such as:

• Basic stats (health & mana, difficulty mode and permanent upgrades)
• Inventories (including stuff like piggy banks)
• Research progress for Journey Mode characters
• Spawn Points per world

A website that provides a user-created database of tailored graphics for games in your Steam library so that you can customize the appearence of them by, for example changing the big banner image that shows while having a game selected.

This is especially useful for games that you add via the "Add a Non-Steam Game" option as they by default have no styling and look ugly.

It also has functionality to get the default styling of any game, including the game's icon (a functionality I sometimes used for the Video Games of this page).

The software I use to listen to my local music library on my computer. Instead of using the full-blown GUI I have set it up to only really display what song is currently playing. I select the songs themselves by just opening the audio files from my file browser. Other neat things:

• It's able to play .spc files. This is a very specific feature I make use of because SMW Central has a big section full of great originals and covers in this formet.
• It has a pretty cool design that's compact and stylish and I just really like how it looks.
• It seems to be lightweight.

The app I use to listen to my local music library on my phone. It has all the features that I need, seems to be completely offline and seems to be lightweight and not really resource-intensive.

A Windows-only Music Library manager I briefly used while I still had Windows. It's very customisable (which to me is it's biggest plus) and includes several features like visualizers, add-ons, meta-data editors and more. Therefore, it's a bit buggy and probably a bit more resource-intensive compared to most other software.

A software I found in my quest of a thing that helps with keeping my thoughts sorted. Sometimes it felt like this software could truly help me with my many problems if I were to stick with it, so that in a year or so, I'd have a backlog of all my concrete thoughts and concepts and feelings and situations that serve as examples for those feelings and advice from others that I found useful that I can access and interlink with a single search in the search bar - even now while writing this, it just seems like an insanely powerful tool that I should definitely use!

An art program with which you can create pixel art.

Just as a side-note: If you don't want to pay for Aseprite, you can completely compile it for yourself from their GitHub. According to the FaQ on the official website, you can still use your own compiled version for personal and commercial uses - the only thing prohibited in the EULA is sharing compiled copies online. This basically means you can buy the software if you don't want to compile it yourself and/or want to support whoever the money goes to, else it's just more cost-efficient to compile it yourself.

There is also a project called "LibreSprite", a fork of the last Aseprite version that was published under the shareable license (General Public License v2), that is maintained and probably updated with new features (although I don't know for sure since I didn't test it) and available for free, although I am biased to just say that I would compile Aseprite myself at that point.

Formerly called diagrams.net, draw.io is a very competent tool for making diagrams. It's free, doesn't require any registration, is apparently good in terms of privacy and I use it from time to time to visually map out my thoughts regarding something if I have trouble thinking about it, essentially just using it as a program where you can place textboxes on an infinite canvas and connect them via arrows that can optionally be labeled.

A simple and easy-to-use autoclicker for Linux with a few customization options (toggle hotkey; interval between clicks; which mouse button to click).

• My go-to tool to download videos/audio from YouTube (like video game music compilations).
• Just hit up the github and search for the options and assemble the command line arguments of your dreams.
• I don't know if it works for other websites or is commandline- or linux- only.
• No more sketchy yt-2-mp3 websites!

A simple notebook I currently use to just briefly note down noteworthy things I did for today. It seems like it would be a nice since it gives each day a more memorable face and because I can then see what sort of things I did in phases where I in hindsight felt like "nothing happened" and "the weeks drifted by" and "I wasted my life". Here are some thing I write into it for more ideas:

• When I play a video game, I denote my progress (For example, in Rain World I got from region -> region -> region -> region with this slugcat). If something noteworthy happened like a really funny moment or an important story beat, I'll write it down as well since I'm more easily able to memorize those events and then connect them with a specific date with this entry
• Important thoughts I had that felt worth preserving and were present multiple times in my day.
• Things like that I cooked or showered. Since I don't do this regularely, it's more of an exception found noteworthy.
• Ideas for projects I got, progress I made on projects, updates to my music library...

A simple & free Markdown (Markdown files are basically text files with more semantics like headings, quotes, links etc.) editor similar to the standard Windows Notepad but with a bit more features. It's really quite natural and intuitive to use!

A simple application for Linux with which you can listen to a variety of ambience like rain, thunder, waves, campfire crackling, white noise, etc. It allows mixing these audio streams together by tweaking the volume of each one as well as importing your own audio files.

A really fun game in which you can destroy everything in a variety of maps. The gameplay consists of needing to collect objects and getting to an escape vehicle within 60 seconds, making you need to plan a route through the map with your destructive power. Other things:

• It's really fun to destroy stuff!
• The main campaign is kind of repetitive since it's mostly the same gameplay loop. The ability to skip levels if it feels too much like a drag (or just taking a bit of a longer break) might help with that.
• Features modding with which custom maps, useful tools and even new gamemodes have been made.

I was really surprised to find out this game runs on my PC. The best thing is that the Steam page specifically notes that "Intel Integrated Graphics Cards" are not supported, yet I exactly have one (Inter UHD 630 with Intel Core i5-10400 - it might also just mean that it's more likely to not work and not get supported in further updates, not just being a complete end-all be-all "This will not run if you have this").

A very hit or miss game in which you're a small slugcat and need to collect enough food to hibernate between phases of deadly rain while also avoiding predators! Other qualities:

• Punishing (needing to restart 5-10 minute long cycle upon death, which is easy to do. Dying also lowers a score you need to travel from region to region., which to me makes sense since you would need to master surviving in one region before moving on the next, pacing the gameplay).
• Driven by exploration and learning how the world works.
• Pretty and atmospheric world. I like the feeling I get while playing the game.
• Sometimes intense player-driven moments.
• It's fun slowly getting better at navigating (map knowledge, better movement) through the game in modes like the Arena or in subsequent playthroughs, especially with "The Hunter" difficulty.
• I like the community of it, specifically the mods created and the events hosted (Like the "Rain World Bingo Events" I recommend watching once you've played the game yourself because of spoilers).
• The devlog linked to at the bottom of the page is an interesting read!

A co-op game where one player has a bomb in front of them and another player has the manual that has instructions on how to defuse it. Both parties need to communicate to defuse it successfully.

I can imagine that it's pretty fun to play when both parties are new to the game and are learning a lot while playing. There are also some interesting videos on YouTube that show experienced players defusing bombs with like 100 modules over the course of more than an hour, although at that point it feels like it would take too much effort to practice for me.

Super Mario Bros. X was a Super Mario Bros fan-game which included a really nice default campaign (The Invasion 2 - basically a whole 2D mario game!) as well as tools to make your own campaigns (like fully-fledged Level- and World Editors). The game also featured and mixed the styles of SMB, SMB2, SMB3, SMW and a handful of things from a few other Nintendo games like Metroid of The Legend of Zelda (such as tilesets or even playable characters with custom mechanics!).

The original game (SMBX) got discontinued in 2011 and a few fan-made projects sprung off, with the one's I've heard of being Super Mario Bros. X2 and TheXTech. TheXTech is a faithful port of SMBX, keeping compatability with campaigns made for the original as well as bringing the game to other OS's (like macOS, Linux and even Android, which I find peculiar). SMBX2 tries to improve the original by adding slews of new features the original didn't have (although I didn't really play around with it and can't give more details on that).

I prefer TheXTech over SMBX2 since it's generally what I grew up with and because SMBX2 has a hint of unfinished- / unpolished-ness to me that I don't like (although I didn't play it extensively and only tested it on Linux via Wine).

In terms of making your own Mario Bros games, the game definitely allows for more creativity in both making world maps (Secret exits, more control over terrain) and levels than Super Mario Maker 2 and I think it's editors are quite-somewhat accessible for people not too much into technical stuff.

And also interestingly enough: With TheXTech, the World & Level Editor got a complete visual overhaul, being now built into the game executable instead of being an entirely seperate program (as was the case with the original SMBX)! I can't tell if this removed some of the possibilities the original editor had since I didn't use some stuff like events or layers (because I didn't understand them), but I generally like the visuals & layout of it.

Other neat memories I remember with SMBX are:

• Playing "The Invasion 2" with a friend back when I was like 10 or something (~2013?). I remember it being very fun!
• Watching a Let's Play of two german late-teens / early adults playing "The Invasion 2" together. I found it quite comedic, but can't find it anymore which I find sad :(. I think their channel name was "MC Fritte", but I'm not sure.

A small and simple game about being a cube rolling around obstacle courses, trying to get to the end while also optionally collecting collectibles that're scattered in every level. It's a lush and pleasant hazy memory by now (since it's been years since I last played it, back when the Wii U was still the newest console by Nintendo, so around 2013-2015), and has music that I like (especially one melody from the title screen music that starts 54s in is oddly memorable / reminiscent of something to me).

A fun series of puzzle games in which you have to exercise ghosts from 20 properties using spells. The speciality of this game is that you'll have floorplans for those 20 properties that you can print out and fold, cut, draw on and so on to solve the puzzles each property holds.

I really like this idea and was full with glee when I first looked at the floorplans - there's just something about the cryptic, puzzly visuals of them that makes me happy and excited! I even like it so much I wanted to make two projects in honor of it: "MadoCraft Real Estate" is a Minecraft adventure map with some mods in which I would build and design my own properties and floorplans (although that project is pretty unfinished) and one where I tried to turn my IRL apartment in which I live into such a puzzle that I would then show to my friends and would let them solve it (also pretty unfinished)!

I really recommend looking at the floorplans of the game to get a feel for them! They were a very convincing reason to me to buy both games.

A series of small horror games with a fun concept! You monitor a house using multiple cameras and over the course of the night, anomalies start to happen. These can range from furniture moving, paintings changing or the more extreme ones like intruders entering the home. Most of these anomalies are subtle, and your job is to spot them and file a report listing both the room the anomaly is occuring in and what type of anomaly it is to remove it. Once too many anomalies are active, you loose. You have to survive until 6AM.

It's a simple, but really fun idea that works well! Each game is a bit replayable since there are a lot of anomalies that could happen and (to me) it's effective at building up the tension since any time you switch the camera there's the possibility of something horrible waiting for you, either blatantly or subtly.

A small, simple puzzle game where you have a hexagonal grid of tiles and need to fill them in with the numbers 1, 2 or 3 while abiding limitations (this row of numbers must sum up to 5). It isn't too difficult, but still pleasing to solve every puzzle. Also has a free version online containing the first half of the game (45 levels).

A relaxing puzzle game about being a small line of light that needs to solve puzzles to move from screen to screen and collect collectables. The thing that make this game stand out to me is definitely the calming atmosphere created by the simple visuals and really nice music. Most puzzles aren't really too hard, but still require some concentration from you, making it a nice little journey.

A game where you work at a border checkpoint, checking if the documents of people are valid and either denying or allowing entry - all while facing moral choices, terrorist attacks and a good number of other interesting occurences to keep you on your toes.

I haven't played this game, but seen a few playthroughs of it from others and can say that I do adore the game. Every element (gameplay, visuals, story/writing, sound & music) comes together to create a really palpable atmosphere while also being interesting on their own. The gameplay consists of keeping up with overwhelming, constantly updating information on what person requires what documents and crosschecking everything to be correct. I don't really know why, but I really like the pixel art - it fits really well with all the documents.

A game about exploring a bunch of personal websites right as the "internet" was born and became accessible to the common folk. It captures a strong charm and mimics that in a pretty neat way. One thing that was particularly pleasant to me was revisiting every website every time you skip forward in time a little to see what has changed. It feels real because you get to see these characters and all of these subplots and details grow over time, making this world feel really fleshed out to me!

Story-wise you're working as a moderator, looking for websites that break rules of copyright, harassment etc. and reporting those when you get enough evidence. The story gets more interesting as you go on (and made me cry), but that's the basic premise. It's a story about the people you read about on their websites and what happens to them growing up. You form a deeper (one-sided, parasocial) bond with them as you are just an observer with limited power.

I remember playing this online as a flash game somewhere and liking it, and so it was only a matter of time before I purchased a paid game of the series. It's a fun and stressful arcade game where a line of colored balls slowly make their way across a path to a point. When they reach that point, it's game over. You play as a stationary frog shooting the same colorful balls, and if 3 or more balls of the same color are next to each other, they get destroyed. It's simple but still fun and to me quite challenging!

A (currently meaty demo of a) horror game about finding signal from space in a remote research lab, similar to Signal Simulator. The game emulates the style of the source engine and seems to have a general unique and interesting style through the things you can do, things that can happen and the things you can purchase.

I didn't really play it because a) I'm a massive wuss; b) I get stressed out by the management elements of the game (hunger & sleep, managing money, completing every task in a day, checking up on & fixing servers) and c) it doesn't run passably on my Linux machinery, especially in places like the base.

Do note that this is still a demo and the changes between versions can be partially significant, with whole gameplay mechanics being added or tweaked and the game thus probably being a bit unbalanced. I remember that I played through 3 different tutorial levels over the years when I tried to play this game simply because they were remade multiple times.

I'm constantly afraid playing this game, like literally any time I open a door or do literally anything significant I fear triggering a random event. I literally quit out of the tutorial (from v0.6.2aa) because there was a jumpscare that I screamed at and there is creepy random stuff happening (that all happened to me while I was in the first room for 10-15 minutes trying to get used to the controls), like doors opening on their own (I reloaded the Tutorial map when a door opened up behind me when it shouldn't) or hearing faint sounds that sound like another player/entity is somewhere on the map (Fucking Footsteps, water splashes, objects being moved and colliding with walls and shit) - like what is this shit and why is it in a fucking tutorial ! I was too afraid to open the door downstairs and when I opened it after 2 minutes and saw the three ominous water slides, I just quit out of fear, not even approaching them and seeing where they might've lead because something scary might've happened.

Other "fun" features & things I found while cowardly hiding in the help menu:

• The power can turn off and you have to go outside of your base to fix it
• There are zombie deer or something for some reason, and you need to eat them to kill them
• Pausing, Saving and Sleeping is disabled during some events (cruel)
• Some things are [REDACTED] in the help menu, which is cool since it's scary but also fuck the developer since it's scary.

A virtual, imaginary video game console with strict limitions. It provides tools to develop games for it as well as an online library called SPLORE with which you can explore, play and look at the source code of games published by other people. While I'm not really interested in making games with PICO-8 (at least right now), it's definitely fun to browse through all the games & stuff other people have created with these limitations - especially the Featured section is just stuffed with games and tech demos that have fun/interesting/unique gameplay and/or nice/spectacular visuals and/or audio and is thus just amazing to browse through!

A website with which one can play the original yume nikki as well as several fangames online in a web browser. Also has some neat features such as (optional) multiplayer with chat functionality and support for save games.

Yume Nikki is a unique type of game where it seems like you mostly just wander through big, surreal worlds with surreal imagery, audio and characters. I played it for a bit and it didn't really grab me, but it's neat to see that there's an easy way to play these games online and that it even has multiplayer!

I remember watching Markiplier play this horror game back in like 2013-2014, near the time it came out, and liking it. Now I remebered it and rewatched it in 2023, and still do. One of the things I like the most is the main protagonist and the character he has through the style of writing - how it sets up this way of thinking and describing things in a direct way that seem to make sense, but also feels off, similar to how the world he lives in and the headspace he has seem off.