Games, engines and tools

Games

Many articles on this wiki were inspired or directly prompted by our games. This place is an attempt to collect and organize them.

While ultimately a design failure, Lost in the Jungle was documented in the article titled Encounter-based game design, which after successive refinements led to...

Keep of the Mad Wizard, a single-player text-based RPG of the dungeon crawl variety, with randomized elements; it yielded a trio of games design articles in the spring of 2019:

• Gamebooks and grammars (27 March 2019)
• Dungeon crawls and simple pleasures (03 April 2019)
• Musings on combat in videogames (15 April 2019)

Other games got their own pages here while the wiki was still taking shape:

• Buzz Grid: another canvas game that received a few ports, not all of them released; the faulty design made it unsuccessful, but it still makes for a good case study.

Shooters

• Square Shooter: a game developed before No Time To Play even existed, and the HTML5 canvas was still exotic, Square Shooter went through several incarnations over time, and people still seek it out. This is its story.
• Laser Sky: a shoot'em up that was never completed but yielded a nice development log and was followed by two more games.
• Attack Vector: a rail shooter with novel visuals that also spawned two more games, and some nice commentary on graphics programming.

Roguelikes

• Dungeon Romp: an unfinished HTML5 roguelike that served as the design basis for Spectral Dungeons, and most importantly yielded a series of game design articles.

Two recent articles (both from 2020) were inspired not by a specific roguelike, but years of experience making them:

• Digging digital dungeons: Simple roguelike levels via BSP trees.
• Roguelike coding advice

Tools and engines

• Ramus: a CYOA game engine self-contained in a single web page.
• EightWay, a pseudo-3D sprite-scaling engine, also yielded a couple of major articles.

More pages were moved to the main website in the mean time.