By David Simmons — originally published in July 2026 — Issue #13
Petal Panic
A gardener who grows plants mid-jump to fight screen-filling bosses on a Commodore 64. Yes, really. It’s brilliant.
It comes from Piggy18, the team behind A Pig Quest. If you know, you know. If you don’t, the short version: it was one of those releases that reminded people exactly what the C64 is still capable of in the right hands. Petal Panic feels like the same team with the pressure off, and that’s meant as a genuine compliment.
The premise is daft in the best way. You play as Petal Pete, a gardener whose pest control strategy involves growing plants on the fly, leaping across platforms, and going toe-to-toe with bosses that fill the entire screen. It’s arcade platforming with an ecological conscience. The golden rule, as Antonio Savona puts it, is to plant fast and fight weird. Honestly, that’s enough.
The game made its first public appearance at X’2026, still one of the most important dates on the C64 calendar. A three-world playable preview was handed out free to attendees. The response was exactly what you’d hope for when something genuinely good turns up out of nowhere. Word got around fast, and when the itch.io release landed, things got interesting.
Thalamus Digital, of all people, appeared in the comments asking about a publishing deal. Take a moment with that. Yes, that Thalamus. The label whose cartridges and tapes sat on bedroom shelves across Britain in the late eighties. Dropping a comment on an itch.io page in 2026.
The game came out of a deadline rather than any grand plan. Antonio and his collaborator Hobbit (Alain Mauricet), who handles the artwork and game design, realised they’d both be attending X’2026 in person for the first time. They couldn’t show up empty-handed. A full game wasn’t going to happen in a month or two, so they aimed for something more focused. The plant mechanic, the ecological thread, the whole concept, those were Hobbit’s ideas. Antonio’s role, as he explains it, is to take the most promising pitches and build a proof of concept to see if they fly. They usually do.
Hobbit’s art is what most people notice first, and understandably so. But Antonio is quick to point out that the design thinking behind those ideas is just as impressive, even if it’s easier to overlook.
As for the screen-filling bosses, Antonio is fairly breezy about the technical side. He’d already solved the hardest problems building A Pig Quest, where he was pushing even larger bitmap objects around. By the time Petal Panic came along, he knew what to do. The full game is planned for eight worlds, though the pair have ideas for twice that. They’re keeping it sensible on purpose. As Antonio puts it, they don’t want Petal Panic to be one of those projects that takes forever, despite their ‘ready when it’s ready’ motto.
The Thalamus comment caught Antonio completely off guard. Petal Panic was conceived as a gift to the community, nothing more. The plan is still to release the finished game as a free download on itch.io. That said, he’s not ruling anything out. He’s worked with Protovision, RGCD, and Psytronik before, and speaks warmly about all three. Physical media, he says, represents the real spirit of the eighties. As a kid he dreamed of holding his own game in his hands. He’s done that. Whether it happens again is another question, not least because, as he freely admits, you certainly don’t do it for the money.
And A Pig Quest 2? Concepts were floating around on social media a while back, isometric levels among them. The honest answer is it’s on hold until the right idea comes along. A Pig Quest took nearly three years and a near-ridiculous amount of collective effort. Antonio still has no idea how they pulled off something so enormous. Going bigger for the sake of it would be the wrong move for a sequel. If it happens, it needs to be genuinely different.
In the meantime, Petal Pete needs your help with the aphids. Everything’s at piggy18.itch.io/petal-panic
Stormbeard
Captain Victor Stormbeard and the Undead Treasure sails onto the C64.
There’s a playable demo doing the rounds at the moment for a new Commodore 64 platformer, and it’s got a proper story behind it that goes well beyond code and pixels. The game is called Captain Victor Stormbeard and the Undead Treasure, and it’s the work of Polish developer Krzysztof Debczynski, working under the name KD Software. The demo dropped on itch.io in early June and already carries a perfect rating from players, but what’s really interesting is how the whole project came together.
Krzysztof picked the C64 not because it was the obvious choice, but because it was the machine of his childhood. He had one growing up, yet never had the faintest idea how the games on it were actually made. “Even though I had a Commodore 64 at home back then, I had no idea how games were actually made,” he told me. So, the ideas stayed where they’d always been, on paper, sketched out in a notebook and “played” with a pen or a finger across his desk mate’s exercise book at primary school. Programming came much later, at university, and the C64 itself didn’t re-enter his life until about two years ago, when he dug an old machine out (bought, fittingly, at an online auction) and decided that since he now works as a professional programmer, maybe it was finally time to make something real.
“My biggest motivation is the chance to create something I dreamed of making when I was a child,” he said. There’s also a more tangible goal sitting behind it. A lot of new C64 releases get physical boxed editions these days, and Krzysztof would love to see his own game sitting on a shelf one day, made with his own hands.
But the part of this story that stuck with me most is who’s actually playing the game as it’s built. Krzysztof isn’t doing this alone, not really. His eight-year-old son Wiktor has become, in his words, “a great play tester,” constantly feeding back ideas for enemies, maps and mechanics. His daughter gets involved too. And it’s gone further than just trying out builds on a real C64. The kids have started designing their own levels on sheets of A4 paper, then taping them together end to end to build one enormous map, exactly the way you’d lay out a real game world. Wiktor, in particular, is apparently always asking when the next part will be ready, which Krzysztof says keeps him motivated to draw new maps and push the project forward.
The game itself is shaping up to be an action platformer with some genuinely Souls-like DNA running through it, which is an unusual pairing for the C64 but works surprisingly well from what’s playable now. The demo gives you the full first level, 21 connected screens of fighting, exploring, and treasure hunting, and it leans on punishing but fair combat rather than reflex-only platforming. You can save mid-run by hitting P on the keyboard, which calls up a pause menu letting you save, load, or restart, handy given how easily this thing can kill you. There’s apparently a secret room hidden somewhere in the demo too, and Krzysztof has been needling players on itch.io to go find it and share a screenshot if they manage it.
When the full game arrives, it’ll be a decent-sized adventure for a C64 title. Four levels, each built from around 20 maps, adding up to roughly 80 rooms in total. Behind the scenes, every one of those maps starts life as a YAML text file describing how it connects to its neighbours and what populates it, which then gets converted into binary data the C64 loads and parses on the fly as you move between screens. Krzysztof admits this system has been one of the toughest parts of the whole build. “I’m constantly improving and optimizing this system to reduce memory usage,” he said, and for now there’s no graphical level editor at all. Every map is still typed out by hand in YAML. Given the C64’s notoriously tight memory and slow processor, that’s no small undertaking for a solo developer learning the platform as he goes.
He’s not entirely solo on the audio side, mind. Musician Richard Bayliss (The New Dimension) has come on board to compose music for the game’s title screen, which should be a nice bit of polish once it lands.
As for release, Krzysztof is aiming to have the full game out by the end of the year. It’ll go up digitally on itch.io, and there’s also a physical release planned in partnership with Komoda & Amiga Plus, covering both floppy disk and cartridge formats, so there’s a real shot at that shelf-sitting boxed copy he’s after.
If you want to try it yourself, the demo is free (name your own price) and available now at: https://kdebczynski.itch.io/captain-victor-stormbeard-and-the-undead-treasure-demo, and it’s worth a look if you’ve any soft spot for old-school platforming with a bit of bite to it..
Ramizes brings Tutankham’s spirit back to the Amiga
There’s a new maze game on the Amiga, and it’s already turning heads. Ramizes, developed by tukinem (Pawel Tukatsch), has just walked away with top honours at the ROMA.EXE 2026 game competition, and once you see it in motion, you’ll understand why.
If the name Tutankham means anything to you, you’re already halfway to understanding what Ramizes is about. Konami’s 1982 arcade classic was a maze shooter wrapped in Egyptian mystery, all narrow corridors and sudden danger, and Ramizes leans into that same feeling rather than trying to reinvent it. This is a tribute built with real affection for the source material, not a loose reference tossed in for marketing purposes.
Right now, you can only get your hands on a demo, and it’s a short one. Two levels, two difficulty settings, and that’s your lot for the moment. Honestly, it doesn’t take long to see both levels through, which is why I’ve only included a couple of screenshots from actual gameplay this time round. Tukinem mentioned there may be more shots to share down the line too, but the graphics are still being refined ahead of the full release, so for now the demo is the best window into what’s coming.
And there is more coming. Development picks back up after the summer break, with new levels planned alongside additional bonuses, a third difficulty tier, and what’s been described as plenty of add-ons still in the pipeline. So, this demo is very much a taste rather than the finished dish.
What’s struck me most is the team behind it. tukinem handles the coding and core design, but he’s brought in some proper talent to round things out. Marcin Bialobrzewski (Eightbm) is responsible for the menu audio and sound effects, while Bartlomiej Niedzwiecki (Bartesek) composed the in-game soundtrack. Visual assets and graphics come courtesy of Tomasz Mielnik, known to many in the scene as Carrion through his work with c64portal.pl (Robot Jet Action) and his demoscene contributions behind demo crews such as Censor, Bonzai, and Elysium on the C64). It’s the kind of cross-community collaboration that makes the Amiga and C64 scenes feel like one big extended family, even when the platforms themselves don’t always talk to each other.
If you fancy giving it a go yourself, the demo is live on tukinem’s itch.io page: https://tukinem.itch.io/ramizes-amiga
Worth a download just to see what an OCS Amiga can still do in 2026 when someone puts real care into it.