Weekly Links #126

Hello, everyone. Hard to believe it's been only one week since I started work on a desktop port of Glittering Light, because it already looks like this:

Mind you, it's not even an alpha right now, and there are compatibility issues that may yet kill the project; but even if it does, I'll still recommend sdlBasic as a nice little tool for rapid prototyping and such — it's a surprisingly well-designed dialect and implementation, with a tiny but friendly community.

In the mean time, the Bring Out Your Dead game jam, after closing yesterday, reopened again for a few more hours. (If you're reading this on Sunday, you might still catch it!) My list of favorites however remains unchanged: Total Oblivion, an experimental tabletop RPG with an intriguing subject matter that's quite relevant these days; Kulhwch, a text-based room escape game made in Twine (and in verse, no less), which proves -- in the small -- that you don't need hunt-the-pixel puzzles for the genre to work; and an interactive comic prototype by a veteran of the interactive fiction community. Other entries are worth a look as well; if you drop by, leave the authors a comment, because socialization has been scarce during this jam as well.

On to more conventional news. While my neighbor from the south Konstantinos Dimopoulos writes about implying size and complexity in game cities (goes for any kind of virtual environment, really), one of Defender's creators talks about the bright future of arcade games. Last but not least, in Le Monde of all places there's an interview about what made Super Mario 64 so special. It's all in French, but the short version is, that was the first console game to feature a vast, wide open 3D world with sandbox gameplay — something we nowadays take for granted on all platforms.

So, games to play, lessons to learn and a new toy to play with. It's been a pretty good week after all. Have fun, and see you next time.