Weekly Links #99

I'm almost done with the newsletters for the year, but things are somehow just heating up. Let's start with a couple of highly unusual games: Chris Meadows noticed this guy who made an XCOM game in Excel -- an impressive effort by any standard. And from the recent additions feed at itch.io, here's a murder mystery game in the form of a PC virtual machine (you need VirtualBox to run it). Hardly unprecedented in the analog world, but still a challenge to common notions of what can be a videogame. And while we're talking unusual games, take a look at this article about Soviet arcades. Which was news for me as well -- in Romania we had imported second-hand machines instead, making for quite a different landscape.

In actual game development news, Jay Barnson makes an interesting point: not only computer hardware has plateaued, we couldn't make good use of more computing power in games even if we had it: the law of diminishing returns is even more unforgiving than Moore's Law. Maybe this time people are ready to listen.

Last but not least, a couple of game design articles. Via @gnomeslair, the easiest game design exercise is a brief foray into the simplest type of board game there is. Having beta-tested just such a game (to say nothing of the many I played as a kid), I can attest it's not as straightforward as it seems. And Shamus Young continues presenting his work in progress with a discussion of how to teach the game to your players. It just happens that the issue of too many enemy types and no single path through the game is familiar to me from roguelikes. And the solution is... not keeping every new enemy type until the end. You introduce them, let them become the main enemy for a few areas (levels or whatever), then you phase them out. And if the players encounter bits of your game in the "wrong" order, big deal, they'll see at most a handful of different enemy types at once, a few of which will be familiar from before. Not enough to be overwhelmed.

Roguelikes achieve that by having templates of theme and difficulty for each level — a good idea even if you're designing your entire map by hand. Divide et impera? Call it what you want. And have fun until next week.