Hello, everyone. Some weeks I get so caught up in a project or other that it leaves me little attention to spare for gaming news worth commenting on. This time it was the interpreter architecture mentioned last week. Figured I'd give it a good workout, you see, and work out it did, a lot better than expected. As of this writing I'm on the way to releasing a real-world, if not very useful, version. People are already interested in the online preview, so my hopes are high for once. And damn if it doesn't feel good to have a scripting language that can be ported to a new platform literally in hours, even as it's grown enough to not really be a toy anymore.
In the way of news, I hear the big publishers are all complaining about a terrible 2018, financially speaking. By which they mean profits are a few percent below their unreasonable expectations, so they're firing hundreds of people to keep the obscene bonuses of CEOs intact. Cue a "meanwhile, in Japan" moment: it was just last month, if memory serves, that Nintendo management cut their own wages in half so they'd have enough to keep paying their employees. Again.
That's why they continue to be so successful, folks: for all their sins, Nintendo is a humane business, and it shows in everything they do. Including games.
One other topic this week: at the very last moment, fluffy alerts me of a new game development tool called Môsi. It's inspired by Bitsy, except with a lot more features and designed for making games on a smartphone.
Or so it's supposed to; on mobile Chrome all I got was a blank screen. On desktop I can play the example, and browse through the various editor tabs, though actually editing sprites and rooms doesn't work in either Opera or Firefox. Oh well, Môsi is in early development. And there's quite a bit to look at: you can choose the size of your game world, that of a screen, a sprite, and even how many colors your game will have. Sprites can have multiple animation frames, and rich interactions are possible, including branching and looping. In other words... programming (cue finger wiggling), though it's all visual.
Not much more to say about it at this point, but this right here is a thing to watch closely. Could easily take off in a big way. And did I mention it's open source?
Thanks for reading, and enjoy the Sunday!