Turns out, the No Time To Play website was in a worse state than it seemed. Hours after posting the previous newsletter, a random referral made me realize the newsletter archive was full of dead links that still pointed at the old location of various articles. So I spent half a day fixing that. And then it dawned on me just how many projects were hosted elsewhere than on the main website where they belonged. First, three tools:
Then a game, Escape From Cnossus HD, that was in the same situation. And two more that did have homepages on the site, but were sending people elsewhere to download:
Now you can get them right here. On top of that, I also made a small change to the stylesheet. The game section looks much better this way, and is easier to organize.
Don't worry, that won't delay new games for long. Got one in pre-production in fact. Older games, too, are very likely to get a brush-up at the very least.
In the way of news, this week we have an interview with Tarn Adams about Dwarf Fortress, a trio of links without comment, and the now-usual appeal for help.
On Monday, Gamasutra publishes an interview with Tarn Adams about Dwarf Fortress. Too much good stuff in it to discuss here, so I'll just quote from the introduction:
One of the best uses of a high-powered processor out there for entertainment purposes has long been Dwarf Fortress, the game that makes an entire world out of ASCII characters, and will happily consume a gigabyte of your RAM and a good chunk of your processor cycles to bring it to life.
But unlike some other games, DF feels like it needs everything it requires. Its exhaustive calculations create an entire world, with buildings, towns, merchants, rivers, volcanoes, monsters and, of course, dwarves. If a single person created all these things it’d be an amazing achievement; Dwarf Fortress is a program that creates all those things on its own.
Remember when that was supposed to be the future of all games? All the CPU power we have today, put to good use? What did we get instead? More polygons! And rare exceptions like this one game only make it more obvious how much we're missing on.
Last but not least, we have a trio of links to present without comment:
Hope you find them worth your time!
Before concluding, let me remind you that keeping this website up costs money, that right now I'm paying out of pocket, on top of medical expenses, and never mind worries about next winter; at least that's still half a year away. So if you find my scribbles at all useful, please consider sending a tip, or else buying a book.
Thank you very much, and enjoy the Sunday. See you next time.