No Time To Play

This announcement is one week late (pesky real life…) but just after I published my port of Starborn — and Nitku graciously promoted it — a new user of Ramus surfaced and promptly did some very nice things with it.

Meet Conrad Cook. Not only he posted a minimal, “starter” Ramus document, a useful thing I failed to do myself, but followed up immediately with an original work called Unicorn Story. Which I am now hosting on the Ramus website at his request. Thank you, Conrad.

I also took the opportunity to flesh out the aforementioned website a little more, including an answer to the frequently asked question about (not using) jQuery. Hope this helps.

No, don’t get too excited. This is something I did myself, and it’s not even an original work but a port of Juhana Leinonen‘s Starborn. I meant to do it when the game first came out, but there was too much going on behind the scenes, or so it seemed from looking at the source code, and I hesitated. In the mean time, Nitku ported it to Undum himself, thus proving that in a keyword-based game a few boolean flags may well be able to replace a full-blown world model. So I took a closer look, and it turned out that more than half of the original Inform 7 code was dedicated to disabling the parser, implementing keywords as a game concept and other such changes.

On the Ramus side, development turned out to be very easy indeed. The only real problem is that I keep typing href instead of rel — understandable after over a decade of Web development. It may be worth implementing URL autodetection, like in HTML TADS, but my laziness is stronger than the annoyance factor.

Anyway, you can download the game here. Enjoy!

It’s been almost a year since I last looked into IF authoring systems, and the market has shifted again. A Hugo title became the most talked about game in 2011 — one that features extensive multimedia and random combat to boot. Yay for Cryptozookeeper! There is also an ever-increasing number of (choice-based) Web games, outnumbering those written for my new favorite platform, TADS 3.

Speaking of that, soon after a new release of TADS came out with Web play support, thus bringing the old powerhouse in line with its main competitor, the news spread like fire that a new online service came out enabling people to author Inform 7 stories online. To top it all, mere days later the young Quest system announced official support for a similar feature!

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As promised last time, I got around to setting up a new website for Ramus. Right now, it contains the exact same information as the original web page, except this time it has room to grow. And because it’s a wiki, you can suggest additions directly inline! See you there, and thanks.

Remember Ramus? I can’t blame you if you don’t — the last update was half a year ago. But recently, a new user (hi, John!) pointed out some missing stuff in Ramus, such as an example of how to link to multiple fragments at once, or include a fragment inside another. (The latter doesn’t work, by the way. See the F.A.Q.)

I also want to write some documentation, including a getting started guide, but that will require setting up a proper website for Ramus first, instead of a simple homepage. I’ll get around to it, just not right away. Thanks for your patience.

So, the project that has kept me busy as of late has ended, poorly (making current again something I wrote over a year ago). But all my recent reading triggered something in me, and instead of going back to coding games, I started writing fiction again for the first time in years. And this time, it seems I’m onto something.

As an amusing coincidence, the issue of storytelling in games has recently resurfaced. You may have noticed Kelketek’s earlier post, but the Rampant Coyote also chimed in, even twice, not to mention this post on how improvisational theater can inform game stories. And it just happens that storytelling is the one other skill (beyond coding and art) I need in order to make serious games.

But first to get something done.

Two gaming publications have just announced that they’re closing down. That in itself is no big deal, except perhaps for the timing. What is interesting is the different ways it was handled.

On the one hand we have the GamePro magazine issuing a press release a mere week in advance (which promptly drew the ire of Internet archivist Jason Scott). On the other hand, we have GameSetWatch explaining their reasons in a very personal manner, and explicitly promising to keep the website online.
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Work has ramped up as of late, preventing me from working on my projects much. On the plus side, I’m in a mood to write code again, though not on my existing games. But mostly, I’ve been thinking about art.

Among other things, I joined OpenGameArt and contributed some art I had laying around. For all that people make fun of programmer graphics, one of my submissions was actually appreciated. Having been made with a clear purpose in mind must have something to do with that.

I’ve also made another raytraced scene, and thinking of more. One of these days, maybe I’ll have enough of them to inspire an adventure game.

But first, to get my work/life balance back into shape. See you around.

Software developers are willing to put up with a lot for the chance to earn a little money. (Hello, Web agencies!) This is most visible in the iPhone market, which has two very onerous barriers to entry:

1. you have to own a Mac and
2. you must pay a $99 developer fee just to test your own apps on the device you bought honestly.

Despite these obstacles, the official Apple app store has enjoyed a veritable gold rush (which, like in history, has benefitted few people, often not those who took risks and toiled). This may have something to do with the fact that many developers already own a Mac, and you can at least develop your app without asking for permission.

This is not a given, however.

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This is undoubtedly no big deal for most game developers, but all my games have been mute so far. Not by choice, either. I know people who are equally good programmers, artists and musicians, but that’s hard. Those of us who are more specialized have few real options:
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