Weekly Links #88
Having been offline for the weekend due to yet another outage (so much
for Talk Like a Pirate Day), I find myself late and with insufficient
links to make a newsletter. Perhaps I could mention the latest toy
I've been working on — RPN-40, a programmable calculator trying
to stay simple and fun. Or perhaps Hardcore Gaming 101's retrospective
of C.P.U. Bach, which may seem off-topic. But think about it:
in 1994, computers were already able to compose music. 21 years down
the road, they are even able to design videogames. How can
we harness that ability?
And speaking of that, via Michael Cook I learned of this
blog post about procedurally generating cities. Having
done just that (in a simplistic way) for RogueBot, I can certainly
appreciate the work described.
Last but not least: Rock, Paper, Shotgun -- which has been leaning
noticeably towards my range of interests as of late -- has an article
about designing magic into fantasy worlds. Which of course
applies to all media, not just games; the article doesn't talk at all
about implementation issues. Tip: you basically need a scripting
engine to have magic in your game. The simplest implementations I've
seen resemble the example in my article about code versus data.
But the narrative angle matters just as much, if not more.
And that's pretty much all I have for today. See you next time.