101–110 of 114 posts
This is probably a good place to mention a cool book, "50 Years of Text Games", at https://if50.textories.com/ . Based on a blog series as I recall, but essentially takes a game from each year or so, to look at in detail for what was interesting at that time.
Also The Digital Antiquarian series by Jimmy Maher; an ongoing blog that gets periodically collected into ebooks: https://www.filfre.net/the-digital-antiquarian-e-book-librar...
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Going by the sample rooms above, (27, 21, 24, 28, 27) words multiplied by 4000 rooms divided by 350–450 words per page yields 200–300 pages indeed. But if it's mainly exposition and not interactable I can see how it would become dull reading quickly.
It is boring, there’s minimal interactivity. Quite a long way from the better text adventures out there.
(This led me down a rabbit hole trying to find a source for that quote. It seems to be mostly, and falsely, attributed to Stalin.)
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When I was in Jr. High, we had an Atari 400. Mostly I used it to play Missile Command and Star Raiders, but it also came with a BASIC cartridge. In the back of the manual were four BASIC programs. The first three were very simple, stuff like a loop that prints your name 10 times and then exits. The last program balanced your checkbook. It was 4 pages long. I laboriously typed it in, hunt-and-peck style, which took ho…
In my experience, a core skill of programmers is that they are people who are able to deal with setbacks and frustration in a good way. Those come with the territory. I've always wondered if there is a correlation between developers and people that can enjoy tough but fair games like Super Meat Boy because of this.
I agree that resilience is important, but in my experience it emerges from a complex mix of temperament, environment, structural advantages, and mentoring, rather than being intrinsic to the individual. For illustration: I’ve trained a bunch of people from nothing on software and I always prioritized helping them find a project they cared about, because that motivation was what would power the through the inevitable frustrations.
Maybe if the Atari manual had taught me how to write a branching adventure game rather than a checkbook-balancing program, I would have stuck with programming back then. But I’m not dissatisfied with the path my life took.
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The thing that is giving the right juice is that they can hold up meritocracy and victory of ideas under fair competition in response to identity politics. If we just framed things in terms of fighting poverty and systemic bias instead of reparations they wouldn't have a leg to stand on. We're giving them the ammunition they're blowing holes in us with. Human vs AI is the same debate. No matter how good AI is, nothin…
> The thing that is giving the right juice is that they can hold up meritocracy and victory of ideas under fair competition in response to identity politics. They can hold the MYTHS of meritocracy and victory of ideas under fair competition, because that's what they are. They are popularly held and by a majority of the country I fear, but myths they remain. You walk around the board room of any major company in the c…
If you want to call out the fact that I'm published I can go scan my contract with US Games Systems, just say the word buddy.
If you ever come back to this message, I made this just with some art I've been working on over the last few days: https://imgur.com/a/Jw1Twbs Hit me back with your artistic output over the last 3 days kthxbai
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> The thing that is giving the right juice is that they can hold up meritocracy and victory of ideas under fair competition in response to identity politics. They can hold the MYTHS of meritocracy and victory of ideas under fair competition, because that's what they are. They are popularly held and by a majority of the country I fear, but myths they remain. You walk around the board room of any major company in the c…
You spent all those words just to come back to the original point: you are prejudiced against the source of the things you consume. If you want to call out the fact that I'm published I can go scan my contract with US Games Systems, just say the word buddy. If you ever come back to this message, I made this just with some art I've been working on over the last few days: https://imgur.com/a/Jw1Twbs Hit me back with yo…
And I’ve got to say, an artist signaling legitimacy by offering to scan a contract instead of sharing the art, paired with a broken link as your mic-drop moment? That’s a chef’s kiss I couldn’t script if I tried, even with AI.
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And, of course, it will be inferior to what the machines make. Just like machine created cutlery is essentially perfect, but human smithed cutlery will have lots of small imperfections.
In what way do those imperfections make something like cutlery inferior?
I’m surprised to see a QBasic game with 1GHz CPU and 512MB RAM required! Is that because the game needs it, or because that’s what it takes to even run a modern OS with dosbox or something?
It's because it's not written in QBasic. It's written in a variant of QBasic called QB64 [1] - a spiritual successor to Microsoft's QBasic intended to run on modern 64-bit machines. I went over the BAS source the last time this was posted a few weeks back and it has a lot of keywords that are specific to QB64 so unfortunately you can't run this on a true DOS machine (or DosBox). [1] https://qb64.com
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You spent all those words just to come back to the original point: you are prejudiced against the source of the things you consume. If you want to call out the fact that I'm published I can go scan my contract with US Games Systems, just say the word buddy. If you ever come back to this message, I made this just with some art I've been working on over the last few days: https://imgur.com/a/Jw1Twbs Hit me back with yo…
No kidding. I would daresay most people are. It's kinda the core issue in things like fair trade coffee, being upset about fast fashion, organic foods... hell I think you'd be hard pressed to find any kind of widespread consumer movement that doesn't involve that. Discernment is not discrimination and no amount of whining is going to change that. And I’ve got to say, an artist signaling legitimacy by offering to scan…
Turns out Imgur has content filters that are beyond stupid, male partial nudity with man boobs and Trump & Hitler doing a drag duet is too art for virgin internet eyes.
Also, stop talking shit and show me your recent art output.
I downloaded the rooms.txt file and the word "handcrafted" is doing some heavy lifting. It's like one sentence per room. Did I miss something? I don't want to play the game (I hate text adventures), but I want an idea of how much effort went into this. Example: --ROOM 22 START-- Village of Oathmoor 23,0,0,21 You find yourself in a narrow, dimly lit alley. An ELDERLY WOMAN sits perched on a broken stool, her piercing…
Presumably it's similar to Soda Drinker Pro, which is 102 rooms, each with terrible MS paint drawings, in which you drink a soda and walk around for a minute or two. https://youtu.be/C40kq29Emn0
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I think you're saying what the average person is thinking but is worried about being impolite. You are of course correct: it is the kind of fact about a game that non-gamers might still mistake for quality or depth. The horseshoe theory of ai generation tells us that handcrafting and content generation extremism end up very close to each other: https://emshort.blog/2016/09/21/bowls-of-oatmeal-and-text-ge... The fact…
That Emily Short blog post is a good read, but I didn't find that it helped me learn what is "the horseshoe theory of AI generation" nor in what sense handcrafting should end up close to procgen or anything else. Can you elaborate and/or point to something that does?
Online, almost nobody is actually going to crack open the interactions.txt file. Instead, the conversation is about the idea of it being interesting or of any special qualities, when it isn't. The thing itself is just a prop for the conversation, and you can see where anyone actually talking about the thing itself is on the margins.
When this is for a free text adventure game, it's harmless fun to hype it. But the other prong is AAA hype and AI hype, which seems like the opposite but is actually the same thing.
2) right horseshoe prong ("infinitely generated quantity is quality"): "100,000,000,000 unique planets made by one generative codebase" was the premise of Endless Space and it had a very rocky launch that took years of bespoke human work and decisions to improve the quality. Because when you're deadset on quantity being your primary quality, you also don't have time for intractable complexity or true differentiation.
And you can see the consequences play out in an adventure game like Starfield where they included infinite random planet generation, except the interactions and space of player decisions remain the exact same, so it's more like an infinite screensaver than gameplay.
On both ends, the media and discussion is aggressively channeled away from the thing itself and towards the narrative of it being something compelling and noteworthy by virtue of how it was created.
The "robot barista" at the SF airport "making" you an espresso by having a servo arm insert a kurig cup and charging you 5 bucks is extremely similar to someone charging you 50 bucks at a craft fair for a "handmade" set of earrings that look suspiciously like someone just wrapped some copper wiring they bought online around a semi-precious stone they bought online.
In one case you are "participating in a spectacle of the future" and living in an aesthetically futuristic moment while paying 500% markup to drink a shitty instant espresso, and in the other you are "participating in a spectacle of the past" and harkening back to the aesthetic of a time where we all came together as a close-knit community at our town market to support our village crafters and artists while... also paying a 500% markup for goods where real or perceptible increase in quality/value-add is often marginal.
The goods which are remarkable speak for themselves, the rest is marketing.