Weekly Links #324

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Hello, everyone! This week's big story is the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. Started early last weekend, it ended up carrying over 1600 games from over 1300 creators, and as of this writing it has made a staggering 6 million dollars! It's so big, Itch.io buckled under the load; our dev team was hard at work for days just to ensure people could browse the games and claim those they wanted. Pretty much everyone online sat up and paid attention. I like to think at least some of the other similar efforts launched since then were inspired by it.

All the money goes to a couple of legal defense funds for Black Lives Matter protesters in the United States.

In other news, I spent almost half the week writing an article about data-driven game engines. Yes, it uses text adventures as an example (again), but Twine and Unity work on similar principles: both pair a visual editor with a runtime -- the engine proper -- that turns the output from the editor into a playable game, and bundles them together for distribution. Many others work in the same way. And I've seen too many people confused about which is which and how it all fits together.

Otherwise most of my time went into some web design research that won't become relevant for this site until next year or more. So rather than talking about it, I'll let you enjoy this week's news with no commentary.

Have a great Sunday, and see you next time.


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Tags: community, interactive fiction, retrogaming