Weekly Links #121

Why does it always have to be a feast-or-famine sort of thing? After a year of working on anything but games, now I'm announcing two releases on the same week. First, my text adventure City of Dead Leaves, that I started last year, abandoned, then decided to finish anyway. It's hardly epic — a slightly surreal mood piece with a bit of romance After The End — but I hope you'll like it. Taught me a thing or two as well; stay tuned for a postmortem soon, if everything goes well.

Anyway, while the beta-testing process was taking place, I took the opportunity to bring one of my older games back to life. First released a year and a half ago for the first Procedural Generation Jam, RogueBot essentially lay forgotten while I dealt with various other projects. But many people don't like playing games in the browser, and performance can be much better on the desktop as well. Besides, I'd been meaning to learn FreeBasic for a while now, and needed a reason. So in a ten-day coding marathon the original tech demo got a new life. See the official announcement on itch.io, and if you like the game please consider buying it.

Last but not least, this week Sam Kabo Ashwell posted an article about narrow parsers, that connects surprisingly well with my recent write-up on verb-oriented game design. Which, considering the long list of examples he gives, is an idea that has troubled many developers along the years.

And on that note, I bid you a good week. Cheers!