No Time To Play @[email protected]

Hello, everyone! My #GameDev news for 25 November 2021 are here, with good business, bad business, interactive fiction and game design. Enjoy! https://notimetoplay.org/blog/gamedev-news-20211125.html

It's surprisingly easy to code a poor man's csh.

Came up with a simple regular expression to split a string into quoted arguments by shell-like rules:

/'[^']*'|"[^"]*"|`[^`]*`|\S+/g

Frankly, it all sounds an awful lot like Fallen London in some ways, and not just because they share an aesthetic. Unfortunately it's all the bad ways, including a lot of fever-dream fantasy that doesn't feel at all grounded, or relevant to anything that actually happens in the story.

The 50 Years of Text Games project is now at 2014, therefore 80 Days, the game that brought modern CYOA into the mainstream. A good write-up, but I remain unconvinced about the game and the tool it was made with. Pretty much everyone I talked to who played it remembers 80 Days as all style and no substance, and Ink was always inscrutably cryptic to me. https://if50.substack.com/p/2014-80-days

Microsoft gaming chief calls for industry-wide game preservation https://www.axios.com/microsoft-old-games-preserve-emulation-748793a7-f559-4933-babf-81f34adc7cf6.html -- good for them, but yeah: past a certain point, copyright becomes a bigger obstacle than any technical issues.

I tried to avoid the new Activision scandal, but this opinion piece from Game Developer Magazine is a good summary: The villainous absurdity of Bobby Kotick, game industry maverick https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/the-villainous-absurdity-of-bobby-kotick-game-industry-maverick

I just came up with the best metaphor to describe programming language safety: Having a safety on your gun is good. Having to solve a sliding puzzle every time you need to fire the gun makes it useless.

Hello, everyone! My #GameDev news for 15 November 2021 are here, with ugly things and useful things in the world of games. Enjoy! https://notimetoplay.org/blog/gamedev-news-20211115.html

There's a new book out there about Unix shells out there called Userland, and of course it starts by comparing them to a text adventure. For once, the original Adventure, as opposed to its more famous direct successor: https://p1k3.com/userland-book/

Via lemmy.ml, I learned there's a database of open source games and engines hosted on GitHub, with statistics and other information: https://trilarion.github.io/opensourcegames/index.html

Of interest to game developers: Review of Open Source Color Blindness Simulations https://daltonlens.org/opensource-cvd-simulation/

At least Doom was fun. Rude, noisy fun that could get problematic, but still. Crucially, you were supposed to shoot demons, not philosophize about them: a message as powerful as it's simple.

This Friday, the Digital Antiquarian writes about the time when a bunch of jackasses with no taste tried to sully the burgeoning field of videogames with disgusting filth they dared called "transgressive", and thankfully fell flat on their faces: https://www.filfre.net/2021/11/the-dark-eye/

Hello, everyone! My #GameDev news for 5 November 2021 are here, with tool updates and write-ups, procedural generation and game history. https://notimetoplay.org/blog/gamedev-news-20211105.html

But no, non-parser games didn't begin to dominate soon after that. Two years later in 2014 there was a huge controversy just because they were gaining a little prominence. It wasn't until 2016 and Detectiveland's resounding splash that the writing was on the wall.

The 50 Years of Text Games series has reached 2012, when Porpentine's Howling Dogs sparked a Twine-powered revolution. Wait, you mean there was snobbery in the parser game community? No kidding! I had only written about it (checks notes) two years prior, and people were all "nope, I don't see it; no problem here, move along". Okay then. https://if50.substack.com/p/2012-howling-dogs