I’ve been looking at the stats for the IndieGameDev blog (a Tucows blog for
independent game developers) and I’ve noticed that the
article Writing
Interactive Fiction (a.k.a. “Text Adventure Games”) with the Inform
Programming Language
has consistently been the most-read one ever since it was published.
Would you like more articles on Interactive Fiction
development?
Finding gane development information and articles has always been a
tricky thing, but after having done some legwork, I’m pretty sure I can
feed Tucows’ IndieGameDev blog more regularly. There are already two entries for this week…
Yesterday’s entry covers Transcend,
a 2D shoot-em-up with abstract visual,
musical and gameplay elements for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. You can
either just play it or you can check out the source code (it’s licensed
under the GPL). Here’s a
screen shot of the first level:
Today’s entry covers Neverball,
a “tilt the landscape to guide the marble to the goal before the clock
runs out” type of game. It’s available for Windows, Mac OS X and a
handful of Unixen. As with Transcend, it’s licensed under the GPL —
you can either just play it, or you can also see what’s “under the
hood”. Here ‘s a screen shot:
CIRA, the Canadian Interney Registration Authority, is, as their “about” page says:
…a not for profit Canadian corporation that is responsible
for operating the dot-ca Internet country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD)
as a key public resource for all Canadians in an innovative, open, and efficient manner.
CIRA may carry out other Internet related registration activities for the Canadian community in a similar manner.
was running for position on CIRA’s board of directors and thought he
had enough nominations, which isn’t surprising considering his many
contributions to the field of internet domains in both CIRA and ICANN.
The dude’s forgotten more about domains than I will ever learn.
One day last week, two-thirds of his nominations just disappeared. Ross’ suspicion:
…a
person or person controlling a large block of votes purposely inflated
the amount of support for my nomination – which gave me a false
indication of my status in the process – and then withdraw that false
support minutes before the nomination process.
I am inclined to agree.
Ross has the details on his blog and the EFF’s Wendy Seltzer has blogged her take on the situation.
On The Farm, the Tucows programming-in-general blog:
– a command-line app that you can call from shell scripts / other
command-line apps to display standard dialog boxes. Good for giving
your interactive command-line apps a Mac-like UI with very little work
on your part.
a book on writing Perl frameworks that generate functions. I point to
both the book’s site and an interview with the author of Higher-Order Perl, Mark Jason Dominus.
SELECT * FROM MySQL_Reference_Material WHERE usefulness = 100;!
— one’s a weblog with some awesome JavaScript/DHTML code; the other is
a useful library for JavaScript/DHTML apps. There’s also some mention
of Ruby on Rails.
On IndieGameDev, the blog for independent game developers:
comes a time in every 3D game where the user needs to click on
something in the scene. Maybe he needs to select a unit in an RTS, or
open a door in an RPG, or delete some geometry in a level editing tool.
This conceptually simple task is easy to screw up since there are so
many little steps that can go wrong.”
In the Blogware blog:
A well known J-school’s magazine (produced by graduating journalism
students) takes a look at the intersection of blogging and journalism.
Yeah, it’s all “Money for blogging and chicks for free” when you’re the Technical Community Development Coordinator.
But seriously, here are my most recent entries on the various Tucows blogs to which I contribute:
On The Farm:
On IndieGameDev:
On the Blogware blog: