Oh, wow. The gaming world must have been really active this week, because I picked up a ton of links without even trying. Gonna keep commentary short, OK?
Let's start with a number of retrospectives: a brief one of Street Fighter II (the arcade version; to me it was always a Super Famicom title), a longer one of the recently rediscovered Habitat, the world's very first graphical MMO, that a team is now trying to revive; and an interview with John Romero about a long-lived tile map editor.
Still on the topic of tools (it's a recurring theme this week), Emily Short posts some general advice on making your own, which applies to a lot more than interactive fiction. Especially relevant considering the vast number of tools these days made for easy, visual creation of HTML5 games. Fans of retrogaming might be more interested in how to set up Arcade Game Designer on the ZX Spectrum, while for RPG developers there's Uncharted Atlas, an unusually realistic generator of fantasy maps.
In more general game design news, we have an article about blending procedural generation with handcrafted content, and another about basing a game in real-world history. And for an announcement I can't possibly pass on, Seltani is now on itch.io.
I'll end with a bit of a rant. My friend and regular reader fluffy has returned to game development after a long absence, with a jam entry called Colorful Critter. And unfortunately I was completely unable to play the game on Linux. See, fluffy went with Love2D for this project, which is a very tempting choice (I considered it). Trouble is, Love2D games are nowhere near as portable and easy to distribute as its creators would have you believe. Let's take it step by step:
- Most Linux distributions carry an ancient version if at all.
- Official binaries are only available for Ubuntu.
- The Windows build doesn't work under Wine.
- Building from source is way too much trouble just to play a few games.
It should be noted that most of these issues are due to the use of SDL2, a notoriously finicky library with multiple components and dependencies that make it hard to build and ship with a game, an issue made worse by its creators' insistence that people stick with dynamic linking. (Pro tip: no programmer is going to pluck a DLL straight out of another app and use it as such; they'll look for the official website.) And yet it's somehow become a de facto standard for 2D and even 3D game development. Go figure.
But I'm already way over my quota for the week. See you next time.