Weekly Links #185

Hello, everyone, and welcome to a belated newsletter. In my defense, I've been unwell for the past few days. On the plus side, I actually completed my game port! Expect a release announcement next week.

Let's start with a couple of retrospectives, one of Starwing (yes, the European edition), and one of Tekumel, a lesser know but highly detailed fantasy setting for roleplaying games.

In actual news, we learn that D&D will have more queer content, and while normally I'd be skeptical of such an initiative, the powers that be at WotC actually got it right, by hiring queer people to tell their own stories. This might just work out, if they manage to refrain from executive meddling, so stay tuned.

Moving on to actual game development, we have someone sharing their first experiences with Twine, and it's incredibly cute how they insist that Twine allows one to make games without any programming, only to go ahead and give examples of... wait for it... code! Admittedly Sugarcube markup, not JS, but an if-else clause is an if-else clause. Are people so afraid of the idea of programming that they're lying to themselves to such a degree? Grace Hopper's early research into human-friendly languages seems to suggest so, and Inform 7 takes that conclusion to its logical extreme, with results that speak for themselves. An idea for future design work... to mirror the past.

Last but not least, via the Dragonfly BSD Digest, we have a sizable and well-curated list of OpenBSD gaming resources. Surprisingly, it's about much more than emulators. Good to know!

And with that, I'll leave you to enjoy what's left of this Sunday. Cheers!