Weekly Links #169

Hello, everyone. Despite everything, this week also came with plenty of interesting events in gaming. So many in fact that I had to trim multiple links, and it's still a lot. Shall we?

Let's start with an interview with the director of Wolfenstein 3D, occasioned by the game's 25th anniversary. And there's a ton of good advice in there, some of which I follow (embrace limitations, and don't burn out), some I unfortunately fail at (use the best tools available, and if there aren't any, make your own). And still on the topic of classic games, we have the first article in a series about the history of Sierra, which in turn quotes from a recent interview with two of Sierra's creators — both valuable bits of history.

Now for something completely different. Over at PC Gamer, there's an article about the portrayal of mimics in videogames (the D&D monster). I had high hopes for the article, too, because one of my favorite webcomics, Rusty and Co., features a mimic turned adventurer — and a talkative, witty one at that. But there was no mention of it. There was, however, a mention of Luggage from Discworld... but not a single word about Luggage's origins as a character in a novel written to parody fantasy cliches.

Dear people in gaming, do you ever read anything outside of reviews and strategy guides?

In the way of game design, Jason Dyer illustrates the biggest problem with random number generation, while the creator of Cogmind writes about clever uses of RNG seeds. And you know, I considered doing just that, but in my one game that could have used the trick, Spectral Dungeons, generating each level is so slow it would be especially annoying to do it all over every time. I am, however, careful to use a separate RNG for world generation versus enemy behavior when at all possible.

Also on the Grid Sage Games blog there was a discussion of various versioning schemes, which are as thorny as they are arbitrary, as we know from Windows, the Linux kernel, or the race between Firefox and Chrome. My advice? Don't fuss too much over it unless you develop software according to a strict plan; just pick a scheme, and use release code names to make things more clear.

To end with a couple of items from the world of interactive fiction, Emily Short writes about the place of parser-based games in 2017, while over on the intfiction.org forum there's a discussion about compass-based navigation, with some surprising conclusions.

I should probably write a come-back with my own extensive thoughts on mapping and virtual places, but for now this newsletter is way over quota, so see you!