Much of the old blog's contents consists of timeless articles, that are now scattered throughout the various thematic sections; however, some blog posts were highly time-dependent, and were preserved as such. A separate page for posts made from 2011 to 2015 was considered, and rejected: old posts belong with the new. Mind the five-year gap.
2023-12-24 Updates
As of this writing, I've been posting game development news with (more or less) regularity for ten years. It's time to rest.
I'm tired. Some of the stuff I do still draws a little attention, like the new link directory. Headlines, not so much. And most of what's in the news these days sounds terrible. Even when it comes to game development. No need to amplify the bad stuff even more.
The site, of course, remains in place, and I intend to keep working on it. Not sure what to add, exactly. Suggestions are welcome. Been trying to study my analytics and figure out what people like, but it doesn't help much, so please talk to me.
Until then, this wiki definitely needs love, mainly in the form of wiki-like content, as opposed to archived blog posts.
Speaking of which, you can find older newsletters in the blog archive, and the oldest (from before the big change) in the site archive. Hope this helps.
2023-11-24 Assorted
This time it's been more than a month since the last link roundup. Should have posted this three days ago, but in my defense I was busy writing fiction instead.
To begin with, lately I've noticed multiple headlines about game history and preservation; a story that never ends:
In other news, we have some game design advice for indie game developers: I played over 100 visual novels in one month and here’s my advice to devs. It's not clickbait! And in the way of marketing, I'm told about Gaming Content Creators Now Making Independent Websites, which is excellent news (there was another one, but I lost the link).
Last but not least, something big that doesn't interest me, but matters for many other people: Opera Software announces a fair pricing scheme for GameMaker. To say the tides are turning is an understatement. Good on them, and see you in December.
2023-09-21 Assorted
I was going to wait until the end of the month, but a lot of things happened.
To begin with, a couple of interactive fiction write-ups were published right at the end of August, both from The Rosebush, a relatively new publication:
My beef with both is, after so many years game developers and critics alike remain afraid that audiences won't suspend disbelief or accept genre conventions. Today more than ever, in fact. Hence an obsession with mimesis, but also a fear of user interfaces.
At least that's more fun to think about that the latest drama, wherein yet another major game company decided to kill the golden goose and piss off the people who make their business work. PC Gamer explains Why every game developer is mad right now, and for a more personal account see Unity’s Trap.
Luckily it turns out you can go From Unity to Godot in a Weekend (pro tip: before you pull a stunt like this, make sure your captive audience really is). And there are many more alternatives to try out there. See:
and many others. Last but not least, Fiction-interactive.fr asks (in French): "Everything is political", even interactive fiction?. To which all I can answer is, name two memorable Infocom games. Trinity and A Mind Forever Voyaging, perhaps?
See you next time.
2023-08-28 Updates
It hasn't been two weeks since the last post here, but it's been a long time since the last update, and it's a good idea to have one of those now and then.
To get the bad news out of the way: a few days ago, while I was trying to reblog something on Tumblr, the No Time To Play sideblog vanished before my eyes. Nothing of value was lost, except for memories, but it's still a shocking reminder of how corporations will fuck you over at the drop of a hat, without explanation. No, I didn't contact support. Doubt it will help. I can keep posting right here where things stay put because I pay for it out of pocket.
(Reminder to pretty please support No Time To Play if you're reading this.)
On the plus side, as announced in the site-wide newsfeed, I finally got around to making a page about the QBJS compiler, for once not a one-off review but an ongoing collection of notes and samples. Got more of them elsewhere, but this is made by a fellow creator from itch.io, and I have high hopes for its future.
Last but not least, I finally got around to making a home page for the text-based version of Glittering Light, that also hosts the native port I wrote about in 2020 then set aside. Another thing I want to change.
Meanwhile, you can still find me on Mastodon, where if something happens there will be advance warning and a chance to move.
2023-08-15
This link roundup is both early and late. July was a busy month in the world of videogames, so by the start of August there were enough headlines. It just slipped my mind somehow. But it's all for the better, as you'll see at the end.
- To begin with: Enter the Matrix: exploring a unique tie-in game at 20; in their own words: "Twenty years ago, Enter the Matrix attempted to revolutionise the relationship between movies and their tie-in games. The developer’s only enemy was technology…" Fascinating story.
- Still in the way of game history, The Digital Antiquarian tells us about Going Rogue; the origins of the seminal genre. Worth reading even for people in the know.
- Also in the same department, we learn from Aaron A. Reed about The rise and fall of type-in text games, another old experiment that didn't pan out.
On a related note: New study reveals most classic video games are completely unavailable; "87% Missing" is a phrase that should worry everyone. But now let's turn back to the present:
You can't automate personal experience, and something like My Gamestory will always bring back my own happy memories. Until next time, try not to forget.
2023-07-02 Assorted
Even with six weeks passing between entries, it still feels like I don't have enough links for the journal, yet every time they turn out to be enough.
To begin with, back in May someone was telling us About the Time I wrote an Inform 7 Game. And still in the way of interactive fiction, NME informs us that Emily Short deserves her flowers. She certainly does! In their own words, "We pull focus on the ‘Fallen London’ narrative legend’s storied career and her new game ‘Mask Of The Rose’". And to go from interactive fiction to artificial intelligence, fittingly enough, Mike Cook warns that Automation Isn't Coming To Save Us (Time). To cap with something more positive, June ended for me with A Chronology of First CD-ROM Games. Good stuff!
This would make a pretty short update, but as promised, this time I have some highlights. For one thing, Fairy Tale, an idle game with a story as beautiful as it's simple. (Beware that it starts as you open the page, and there's no pause function.) The link is courtesy of Aywren, a fellow RPG and small web enthusiast. Last but not least, I'd like you to meet Renkon, a blogger and zinester from Japan with a knack for amplifying the voices of small creators.
That's it for today. Enjoy the summer, and see you!
2023-05-21 Assorted
Back again. Little of interest happened in April, but May picked up again, so it's time for another link roundup.
After this little warm-up, we have a couple of headlines occasioned by the release of a much-awaited game:
Last but not least, two chunks of videogame history:
All in all that makes for quite a few of them. Until next time, enjoy!
2023-03-09
Whew. Back. After skipping last month entirely, I thought this new journal ended for good. But stuff happens, and I'm still here. You're not rid of me yet.
To open with the oldest headlines:
Then some things I did:
There was more, but instead let's move to March and some food for thought:
The latter in particular talks about small, cozy virtual worlds like we've had since 1980, when they were text-based. When it can be about hanging out, having fun, and most of all being kind. So that strikes a chord. Cheers.
2023-01-25 Programming
So, what is it with programmers relying on shared libraries for the longest time, despite notorious problems? Modern languages created this century all use static linking by default, and people love them for it, because software distribution is a (largely unsolved) problem.
Don't get me wrong, shared libraries have their place, for things like:
- plugins and foreign function interfaces;
- basic operating system services like user interfaces (think curses).
(By the way: a standard user interface package is the #1 requested feature in any programming language that doesn't have one. Developers, get a clue already.)
But otherwise? Fixing a bug in many apps at once doesn't happen. What happens instead is DLL hell. Memory savings? Arguably, though it doesn't seem to help in most operating systems, and then you have Electron-based apps. Reusing libraries? People almost always do that by linking against them, and for that you need the development version anyway.
Magical solutions make you lose sight of desired outcomes. Watch out.
2023-01-14 Assorted
Hey, everyone. It's a new year, and I'm back after all. Amazing what difference one friend can make. Not much more happened in late December, apart from a nice write-up about the (now completed) DOS Game Jam. Other links went directly to various parts of the main website, because reasons; I should get better at pointing them out, but it's kinda hard with a large set of static pages.
Then came January, when yet another corporation has been trying to kill its golden goose. Because why should we have nice things in late-stage capitalism?
You've guessed it, this is about the D&D licensing debacle. A story in links:
Followed by two announcements in quick succession:
At which point I grew tired and stopped tracking the headlines. Look: this has long ceased being about money. Corporations by now have more money than they'd ever know what to do with. This has been all about control for decades now.
Let's get that into our heads already, for our own sake and the world's.
2022-12-14 Assorted
Hey, folks. The year's last link roundup is late today, not that anyone is going to notice. It's also thin on the ground, so let me stuff it with a few extra links. For one thing, I have a fan! And a friend recommended a (new to me) tutorial for isometric tile art. In other news, we have:
Last but not least, Nathalie Lawhead is busy again writing about The open-source no-code world of GDevelop. As she adds, "if you miss browser Flash games, this is keeping that dream alive!" I don't have the patience for these huge, complex tools with endless interactive tutorials anymore, but it's amazing that they exist. It's not easy, enabling everyone to make games.
That said: my last... many link roundups have gone completely unnoticed everywhere I posted about them, so there might not be another one come 2023. The site, of course, remain up and I'll keep thinking of ways to improve it. If anyone is out there at all, thanks for reading, and happy holidays, whatever you celebrate in December. Be well.
2022-11-14 Assorted
The weather just turned towards early winter, and news are still slow, but there's enough for a monthly link roundup. In mid-October, as the Wall Street Journal revealed, Company Documents Show Meta’s Flagship Metaverse Falling Short. Then there are two write-ups about freeing games from racism and colonialism:
Still on the subject of attitudes towards games, we get a plea to Stop Remaking Good Games And Start Remaking Games That Could Have Been Good. As the tagline says: "It doesn't make sense to remake games that are already classics when there are so many games with potential that deserve a second chance." And last but not least, Nathalie Lawhead takes advantage of the newest feature in itch.io to write about Video game blogging at the end of the world (and recommend some games while at it).
Which is good, but also all I have for November. See you towards Christmas.
2022-10-14 Assorted
It's been a slow news autumn, and that suits me just fine.
Let me start with a headline left over from last month: a roundup (in French) about new interactive fiction authoring tools. And while we're looking backwards, another from three years ago of The Best Command-Line-Only Video Games. There's even one I didn't know about!
Coming back to the present, there's a good opinion piece about Doom & Game Preservation. I wrote about this issue before, or rather about portability, and came to the opposite conclusion. Still a good counterpoint. Some notes over on Tumblr.
Last but not least, a delightful write-up titled How I play D&D with my kids, which as usual is always worth a read for people making computer games. And still in the tabletop department, someone put together a site to track Physical Game Jams on itch.io, which strikes me as a worthwhile endeavor.
But this is it for now. See you next month or so.
2022-09-07 Assorted
Hey, folks. Turns out I just barely missed a link for posting last month's roundup too early:
No comment. Let's look instead at more positive news from the rest of August:
Last but not least, September opens with Défis fantastiques : 40 ans d’aventures dont vous êtes le héros: a French language story about the Fighting Fantasy series of gamebooks, which as it turns out still gets reprints, and spiritual successors. So enjoy, and see you in October.
2022-08-28 Updates
It's been a while since the last update, and fans probably want to know what's happening around here. There are three big items this month:
- started work on a web port of Tipsy Turtle, and promptly set it aside, but will pick it up again before too long, promise!
- resumed getting rid of tags, and moved more articles to the main site — a slow process, but it's getting there;
- last but not least, added some more old links to the archive section.
Otherwise it's still relatively slow because summer, but at this pace there's probably going to be a link roundup on time mid-September, so see you then!
2022-08-07 Assorted
Link roundups are funny. With vacation season still in full beat, activity picked up again. No theme this time, just a few links from July:
And a couple more from August:
No comments either way. Next one... probably in September.
2022-07-22 Programming
If you happen to be in the market for a version control system, may I recommend Fossil?
Why Fossil: imagine having your own little GitHub running locally, out of a 7-megabyte executable, with no other files to worry about. Well, except for the repos, and each repo is also a single file starting from 220KB. You get all the usual goodies, including forums and chat if you share with other people. But even while working alone, bug tracking and a project wiki can help. Besides, the browser interface is so convenient when it comes to seeing changes from version to version and such.
Why not Git: everyone uses Git today. That's just wrong. Git is made for projects with millions of lines of code and thousands of contributors. You know, like the Linux kernel. Is your project even remotely comparable? Besides, Git is infamously arcane and unforgiving. It can and will delete all your work if you make a tiny mistake. Pro tip: people make mistakes. It's how we can learn and adapt. Any design that ignores this simple fact of life is fundamentally broken.
Fossil has its quirks too. Think twice before doing a commit, because you can't back out of it. (You can, however, yeet it to a hidden branch named "bloopers" or some such.) And binary files are managed separately, outside of the regular revision workflow. On the plus side, it has niceties like tracking all your (local) repos, changing tags after the fact or showing you a heat map of recent changes to a file. Once you get its philosophy, that will open new doors.
You can work without a safety net (I did, for years). You can use Bazaar, another fine VCS. Fossil is different. And a change is welcome these days.
(18 months later) Having used Fossil very little since writing the above, it forced me to think about the downsides as well:
- You can't simply take an existing project directory and put it in source control: got to create the repo, open it into an empty folder, then copy your files into it and add them; in other words, Fossil always assumes you're starting from scratch.
- Having to keep track of separate repository files is a hassle, even with assistance.
- It should be possible to undo one's mistakes, not sweep them under the rug.
On top of that, since almost everyone uses Git nowadays, all other version control systems must be able to talk to it. Fossil can... if you have Git installed, and it's huge. Your mileage may vary.
2022-07-14 Assorted
It's peak vacation season in the northern hemisphere. The world of games slowed down after last time, but picked up again in time for another monthly roundup.
To begin with: belatedly (but this is big enough), David Ahl places all his classic computing publications into the Public Domain. Also in the way of game history:
Yep, it turns out there are tabletop RPGs literally as old as Frankenstein.
That's damn cool! Now for the complete opposite, some tales from the crypt... o:
Funny how anything related to crypto seems to involve art theft. See you next time.
2022-07-09 Programming
You know that XKCD strip that pits programmers against bridge builders and aviation engineers?
Do you know why the latter two categories can be reasonably confident in the relative safety of what they make?
Because they're highly trained people who follow procedures, don't skimp on safety features, and when disaster strikes? They learn their lesson!
We programmers keep backups, do some testing... and that's pretty much it. We hate redundancy, fallbacks or procedures. Heck, we hate learning our craft. Then we have the guts to act surprised when the houses of cards we build fall over and suddenly nothing works because we were unprepared again. Just like the previous nine times.
Pro tip: never eliminate cash, analog radio or manual overrides.
2022-06-29
How did I not know about this?! Turns out there's a CSS pseudo-class called :target, that always matches at most one element: whatever document fragment is currently pointed at in the URL. Which means you can have links pointing at parts of the page <a href="#there">like so</a>, and only have the element with id="there" be visible, while all its siblings are not, with only a two-line stylesheet:
main article { Display: none; }
main article:target { Display: block; }What can you do with it? Why, stateless CYOA, of course! In other words, Ramus lite. Which is exactly what I'm calling it for now.
Stay tuned for details; meanwhile, many thanks to Snail Legs for enlightening me.
2022-06-14
You'd think people would be on vacation by now, but if anything activity is picking up again.
To get an ugly story out of the way: “Abusing you was by the book” (documenting two years of abuse from Game Journalism, after sharing my #metoo… the whole painful story all in one place). Just in case anyone thought that stuff was over by now. It's never over.
But there's also game design, a couple of things this time even:
And in the way of assorted news:
Which made me go on for way too long again, so enjoy, and see you in July!
2022-05-21 Updates
Took long enough, but it feels like the great wiki cleanup is finally getting somewhere. The full effects should be seen in another couple of months; for now, the wiki site finally got its mission statement, a must-have if it's going to function as a wiki, as opposed to a glorified dumping ground. Current plans include:
- continue migrating old articles to the main website;
- phase out the underused and broken tag system;
- profit!
Speaking of which, this is a good opportunity to thank a couple of recent donors, whose generosity ensures the domain and hosting for this site are covered come June. With any luck, No Time To Play will be around for a while yet. Join the joyride!
2022-05-21 Assorted
It's spring! Three weeks into May to be exact, and there's been a lull in game-related news, so might as well.
For one thing: NFT Market Collapses Just As Square Enix Sells Tomb Raider To Bet Big On Blockchain (followed by GameStop a few days later). No comment.
In better news, we have a couple of game design pieces: Designing the City of Glass and The AI of DOOM (1993). Good article, I just have a nit to pick: what the game does is really scripting, just in a hidden way. This is why you want to do it on purpose instead of improvising.
Anyway, we can also learn a lot from history, so let's move on to Playing It The European Way – A Discussion On The European Gaming Market In The 80s, and also Business Wargames: Early Complex Text Games, a surprise bonus from the 50 Years of Text Games project, as the book is taking shape.
Last but not least, last month's momentous release of Inform 7 as open source also got some French language coverage. Enjoy, and see you next month!
2022-04-30 Assorted
Another month, another link roundup. And what a month. For one, the end of April brings up the news of the season, or possibly the year, in game development.
No comment, really. In other news, we have a couple of game-adjacent write-ups:
Yep, that's Nathalie Lawhead. In simpler news:
Before I finish, let me go back for a moment with a couple of RPG news:
But this got scary long already, even without commentary, so until next month!
2022-03-30 Assorted
It's the end of the month, and I'm so distracted. There wasn't a theme in March, either, and links came haphazardly, but I can still do this. In reverse order:
Moving into the first half of the month, there are some personal news:
- My new article on scripting was translated to Russian! Site appears to be some sort of forum or collective blog; looks legit and safe enough either way.
- On the same note, I wrote about what we lose with progress (graphics are almost a theme this month).
And near the start, on an adjacent topic:
Whoops, this got long. Cheers, and see you around Easter.
2022-02-25 Assorted
Hello, everyone! My intention was to wait for the end of the month to post another link roundup, but weekend is coming and chances are small that many more headlines will gather until Monday. So let's see how things went in the world of games during February. Without comment:
But also:
And then:
Last but not least, some actual game design talk; CityCraft: ten tips for building better game cities. See you!
2022-01-28 Assorted
It's been a month since the No Time To Play newsletter was discontinued, but the site goes on, and the world of games isn't standing still either. For the past ten days, there's been a whole bunch of headlines that don't fit in other sections, but they're worth sharing anyway. Without any comment:
Not bad, given the circumstances. See you around.
2021-12-10 Programming
This post expands on a recent conversation from Discord.
As of 2021, I'm the proud owner of a 2008-vintage Dell Optiplex 780 with a Core 2 Quad CPU. People go "tsk tsk, poor you" when I tell them, but my previous machine must have been even older, probably from around 2005 or so.
On that older machine, I made a voxel renderer that ran in real time in software. In Python. It was kinda slow at 25 FPS, so I also ported it to Lua. That version ran at 40 FPS on the same hardware, or 60% faster.
On my new PC, the Python version runs at the framerate cap of 60 FPS without maxing out the CPU. I have no idea how fast it is.
That's the exact same code. Never touched it again since the first release. And it was naive code in the first place, because that's how I roll. No fancy tricks. The simplest thing that can possibly work.
Then again, my old computer could emulate the Super FX chip in software. In a web browser.
Do you realize how inefficient an app must be to slow down a configuration from at most five years ago? While doing much less? And using the GPU as well?
There's simply no excuse for bloat. None whatsoever.
2021-08-18 Programming and community
Over on Mastodon, a friend essentially asks why someone would use GitHub when they make software to self-host. I gave a short answer there already, but let me make it very clear: GitHub's real value isn't as a software forge.
- You don't need GitHub to make software.
- You don't need GitHub to publish software.
- You don't need GitHub to collaborate on software.
People go to GitHub to make themselves known. It's the Facebook of software development. That's it. Everything else can be done better elsewhere, but people don't bother because what's the point if no-one hears about it?
And just like with FB, we need to figure out some sort of alternative already. But it's not going to happen any time soon, because just like with FB, nerds are focusing on the technical solutions. Self-hosting! Federation! Go! Rust!
Fossil has been around for literally decades at this point. It powers a lot of websites. I run across it in the wild all the time. And nobody's heard of it.
What we need is communities of practice with shared values. Apps are easy.
2020-10-07 If programmers built bridges
If programmers built bridges, each bridge would last for only a year and a half before having to be torn down and replaced. After repeated protests, they’d finally come up with an “extended support” bridge that lasted for all of five years. The catch? It would be designed for the traffic from ten years ago, making it obsolete from opening day. Yet somehow it would still require maintenance every three or six months, so only half the traffic lanes would be open at any one time, making the bridge unusable in turn for cyclists, then buses, then trucks… breaking something else every time a problem is fixed.
When asked why things have to be that way, the builders would say that if they took the time to anticipate future needs and build something to last for five decades instead, a competitor would just erect their own bridge a hundred meters away and everyone would be using the shinier alternative.
Because, isn’t it, essential infrastructure is built for profit and/or bragging rights, as opposed to everyone’s benefit. Ah, modern technology.
2020-09-15 Procedural is simple
Years ago, I wrote a couple of games using the curses library bindings for Python. Later, I used that knowledge to write a quick start guide that’s still one of the most popular across my sites.
More recently, being between projects and not in the mood for much else, I finally got around to learning how it’s done in C. Turns out, it’s a lot simpler than in Python for the ABCs, and comparable at worst for advanced uses.
How come? In their drive to make everything fancy and by-the-book, Python programmers forgot that the typical curses program isn’t exactly a clone of the Turbo Pascal IDE. More like a glorified menu that the user can pick from by pressing a number key. It could be done in shell script, really, with the tput utility, and in fact it often is.
That’s the problem with object-oriented programming, you see. Practicality also means being able to tell when using an industrial power drill is overkill, and you’re better off drilling holes with an ice pick.
2015-08-11 No Time To Play is five
It says much about my state of mind this year that on the blog's fifth anniversary I waited until evening to write a few lines. Two years ago I complained that things seemed to be on the downswing. Turns out, they can always get worse. For a while after that post, I didn't work on games at all. Then I started coming back in a way, slowly and half-heartedly. Guess it showed, because basically no-one noticed my games from the past few months. More recently, finances and ISP outages alike threatened the blog itself, to the point that I decided to write a book and start a Tumblr (now gone) so No Time To Play can at least survive in other forms should the worst come to pass. Sadly nobody noticed those either...
The upswing from all this? Unlike a couple of months ago, I want the blog to survive. Five years is a lot of time, and good things have accumulated here. Moreover, I do see a future for videogames now, though it's far from the glorious VR-fest everyone else seems to dream of. If things seem slow for the moment, it's because these days I'm working on a different kind of game, that only involves computers tangentially. But I'll come back eventually. I always do.
What matters is that you, my readers, are still here when that happens, or else there's no point to me plodding along. So, happy reading.
2012-12-03 Random awesomeness
Just a couple of things I’ve run across today. First, via IndieGames and True PC Gaming, a little Star Wars-themed roguelike written in HTML5 that’s exquisitely tactical. You play (of course) a Force user, which gives you a variety of cool powers to combine smartly — and you will have to play smart. Caution actually helps, and luck can be in your favor for a change. The game is complete as it stands, but of narrow scope, and I hope to see more of it at some point. Bonus points for the tutorial and nice UI.
Second, the always enthusiastic Sophie Houlden humorously turns an old question on its head by asking, Can Art Be Games? And she’s damn good at highlighting the absurdity of this fake dilemma. We’ve touched on it ourselves, so I’ll say no more.
All this almost makes me wish to start making games again…