Weekly Links #186

Hello, everyone. I have so many links this time, commentary will have to be pared down. Clearly, September is here.

For starters, here's a long-form article about designing videogame cities, a highly recommended read. My own process is a lot less formal, but much of the advice still applies. And while my own urban environments for games so far have been tiny (if made to suggest a much bigger world beyond), my fiction has been another story entirely.

In other game design news, we have some musings about story mode in games, and observations about the effects of limited parsers (on interactive fiction). More technical are two write-ups about level compression in NES games and porting a game to DOS, respectively.

Speaking of specific games, we have a retrospective of Populous, and the story of how fantasy gamebooks conquered Britain. Moving into actuality, here's a Syrian refugee's saga made into a game, and an interview with Kenney Vleugels about his efforts to support indie game developers with asset libraries. Having used one of his sound packs in Square Shooter, I appreciate.

To end with a rant, it seems VR has failed to catch on. Again. And aside from the requisite I told you so, look how people are blaming the technology for "not being there yet". Notice what's wrong with this picture? A year or two ago when the craze started, everyone insisted that "this time it absolutely has to catch on becase the technology is finally here".

So which is it, boys? You can't have it both ways. Either the tech is ready this time, or it's not.

Better yet, you might want to admit that VR keeps failing because it's still pointless. If people had found any use for it, they'd have pounced on the medium long ago. You know, the way they did with 8-bit home computers.

But as always, remembering history remains a problem for human beings. Cheers.