First order of business – Planitia made the front page of Retro Remakes. I was totally not expecting this; I mentioned the demo on the forums there in the hopes of getting more feedback and Oddbob posted about it. Thanks, Bob! Teehee, I’m so excited!

Plus, I’ve got several friends with projects that deserve mentioning.

First, Tom Mauer has a brief but fun demo of the game he’s working on, Warriors of the Shining Star. It’s an action-adventure game that controls in a Robotron-esque fashion. You’ll need to have XNA installed and an Xbox 360 wired controller to play it.

Second, Ryan Clark has just released a new milestone version of his CrazyBump utility. What does CrazyBump do? Why, it procedurally generates bumpmaps from artwork, of course! What that means I have no idea, but previous versions of the utility got lots of very positive feedback so if you work with mumpbaps you should probably give it a try.

Third, SteelGolem is starting to get some real progress showing on his action/RPG game, ActionRPG. No demo yet, but if you want to watch his progress you can do so here.

And finally, Sol buzzes me about once a week with some new project he’s done and every time I forget to post about it. He’s got videos posted of some of the stuff he did for the demoscene, crazy photoshop filters (including one that makes your pic look like it’s on a ZX Spectrum), a simple 3D engine with source, as well as his video capture API and his text mode rendering engine, etc, etc, etc. Just poke around, he’s got tons of great stuff.