No Time To Play
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Weekly Links #123

Hello, everyone. After a week lost to false starts and self-doubt, I'm ready to announce that my roguelike Tomb of the Snake will be getting a graphical port for Windows and Linux, more than a year after launch. The "graphical" part is central, because it will make the game appealing to more people, and also it will keep things fresh for me. Not that I'm looking forward to designing an inventory screen from scratch, but it beats being bored.

In other news, this week Shamus Young wrote about the mistakes Doom didn't make (that would be the new one, not the 1993 original), and the quest designers of Witcher 3 wrote about their approach. But more interesting to me is an article Nightwrath sent about a new trend in retro game aesthetics. Remember two years ago when a blogger was complaining about the supposed ugliness of early 3D games? Turns out, people actually like that look enough to revive it on a wide scale these days, introducing a whole new generation of gamers to the pleasures of using their imagination.

Once again, it turns out style matters. Do you have a favorite game aesthetic?