Weekly Links #101

Happy New Year, everybody! The week after Christmas wasn't very active, for obvious reasons, but things did happen. First among them is that I've been working on a new game! Deep Down in Darkness was supposed to become a first-person dungeon crawler, not unlike classics in the vein of Dungeon Master, except with eight directions instead of the usual four -- as suggested in this old article.

Turns out, it's not working out the way I want it, for various reasons I'll outline in a full article soon. What I learned from the attempt is invaluable however, and the new style of mobile-friendly UI you see in the screenshots works like a charm. So it's a win anyway.

In other game development news, a friend of mine who develops in PuzzleScript used it to make a match-3 game -- a genre I like, and a relatively unusual use for the platform. (Though not as much as a run-and-gun game.) And just because it's so quiet these days, maybe it's worth mentioning that next week Sophie Houlden will be running a Myst Jam — something I'd love to enter if puzzles were in any way my thing. Wonder if there will be any entries based in Seltani.net?

Last but not least, on the last day of 2015 we got retrospectives of the year in interactive fiction are related topics: one from Emily Short, the other from Juhana Leinonen.

But that's enough for now; the year is just starting. Have fun, and see you next week.