No Time To Play
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Weekly Links #199

Hello, everyone. I'm afraid we're having a short newsletter again. In my defense, it was due to working on stuff. For one thing, I wrote 600 words about the gameplay of Electric Rogue (and added a couple more maps in the mean time). Work is now moving on to the polishing stage, and that feels good indeed.

In other news, this week Vintage is the New Old alerts us of an interview with the creator of Pong, and while it's somewhat disappointing (not a pretty story at all), he makes some very good points. Note his remark on the death of innovation for instance, or the one about getting out of one's comfort zone.

That said: dear Arcade Attack, you do realize games were already a big thing before Atari launched Pong, right? Maybe not quite in the public eye, but yes, we'd have ended up with a videogame industry anyway. Please tone down the sensationalism. It's bad enough in the mainstream media.

Last but not least, let's visit the game design aisle. Via the Lexaloffle forums we learn of a Pico-8 developer's exploration of breadth versus depth in games. I wrote about the subject myself years ago, in the context of verbs — how many different things you can do in a game versus what each action can achieve. This article goes much deeper (har har), discussing trading card games then size and complexity budgets before moving on to case studies. Overall, a good read and of just the right length.

And with that, enjoy the start of December. See you!