No Time To Play

In game development, one of the most important learning experiences is releasing a complete, polished title, no matter how small and simple. You know what else is? Porting a game to a different platform.

Now, with most kinds of games, the challenge is adapting to the input and output capabilities of the new platform; the game logic, if well designed, can stay the same. But with a text adventure, it’s the other way around; gameplay remains essentially unchanged, but the internals can change considerably. That’s because an interactive fiction platform isn’t just a virtual machine, but also a world model, and the programming languages themselves, while of course equivalent, can have very different philosophies.

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It’s been almost a year since I last looked into IF authoring systems, and the market has shifted again. A Hugo title became the most talked about game in 2011 — one that features extensive multimedia and random combat to boot. Yay for Cryptozookeeper! There is also an ever-increasing number of (choice-based) Web games, outnumbering those written for my new favorite platform, TADS 3.

Speaking of that, soon after a new release of TADS came out with Web play support, thus bringing the old powerhouse in line with its main competitor, the news spread like fire that a new online service came out enabling people to author Inform 7 stories online. To top it all, mere days later the young Quest system announced official support for a similar feature!

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There’s been much talk lately about Unity 3D. A combination of rich toolset, portability, price and other factors conspire to make it increasingly popular. The recently released Indie Games Developer magazine opens with an article on it, and this sentence jumped at me:

In fact, [Unity] is so simple that it sometimes scares people off initially as they do not believe that something so easy to use can produce professional quality games and that there must be compromises to be made.

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So, earlier today Nightwrath shows me this video tutorial for Unity 3D (on YouTube). It’s not my thing at all, but I watch a little out of curiosity. Wait… this bloke sounds like a twelve-year-old. That picks my interest, and I click through to his profile, then his blog. Which is full of game and console reviews, and more video tutorials. To top it all, he makes music as well. And what do you know… he actually is twelve! How cool is that?

No, I won’t give you an “in the old days” speech. Things were different back then. But I’m thrilled to live in an age when so many people can make a contribution to the world’s culture, without having to ask anyone for permission. As Michael Masnick put it recently, We’re Living In the Most Creative Time In History, and that’s not a given. Be grateful for this freedom. Fight for it.

And don’t forget to check out Computoguy’s blog.

How cool is that?! by Felix Pleșoianu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.