Weekly Links #176

Hello, everyone, and welcome to a rather disjoint newsletter. No sooner does a game jam end, that another comes along. The traditional Open Game Art game jam has moved to itch.io, and is set to begin in less than a week. Also on itch.io you can now find Jonathan Cauldwell's Arcade Game Designer, a popular tool in the retrogaming community, whose members keep pushing the limits of 8-bit machines. And while we're partying like it's 1987, here's the story of Minitel, France's original take on a public computer network.

Moving on, fans of interactive fiction might want to know that the XYZZY Awards are open for voting, while people who design adventure games (but not only) would do well to read about the urbanism of Thimbleweed Park. In more technical news, someone apparently made it possible to run Pygame games in the browser (via the Lemmasoft forums). I haven't tried it, but the article also documents a game developer's journey, so it's worth a read for that alone.

Last but not least, it's good to hear that Machinarium is getting a remaster. Which is awesome, because I bought this excellent adventure game years ago but could never run it on any of my boxes. Ironically, I should have better chances with a game built on DirectX than the original Flash format.

Which of course says a lot about the sorry state of multiplatform graphics APIs in 2017. Oh well, see you next week.