Weekly Links #184

You'd think vacation season is on the way out in the northern hemisphere, but my newsfeeds are still suffering from a dearth of interesting gamedev news. Admittedly there have been at least a couple of major conventions recently, including the WorldCon; this could be a factor.

To start with interactive fiction, you can still vote in the Introcomp 2017, and the Elm Narrative Engine has a new version out, that promises to bring rule-based storytelling to a whole variety of game genres, if those beautiful demos are anything to go by. In related news, here's an article about Alexis Kennedy's life and inspirations.

Next we have an article about the most historical games on PC, and another on what fantasy can learn from history. (It's telling how both of them praise Crusader Kings 2.) What can I say? It would be easy to blame the theme park "Middle Ages" so common in fantasy fiction on the Americanization of world culture, but remember Tolkien's utopian, impossibly idealized Shire. This is nothing new. And The Witcher, for all it's solidly rooted in a specific legendary -- that of Medieval Poland -- has been roundly criticized for indulging in many of the same cliches as more generic fantasy.

Me, I'd settle for more fantasy stories acknowledging the fact that a sword was goddamn expensive, hence a medieval fighter was a lot more likely to use an axe, or even just a club. The former not only uses much less metal, but can also double as a versatile tool (if suitably designed). And most fighters back then were in fact peasants 80% of the time if not more.

But this could be a much longer discussion. I'll end with an intriguing find: a game programming tutorial that teaches how to implement a Tetris clone in Lua and ncurses in the form of a literate source code file. Well done!