Six UX lessons from game design:
- Story vs Narrative (Think in terms of story arcs)
- Games are fractal (Break up the journey from big to small to tiny)
- Learning loop (figure out your core mechanic)
- Affordances (Prompt for known loops)
- Hintiness (Move to new loops)
- Pacing (Be sure to start here)
Boolean logic manifested in a Turing-complete game
It’s all fun and games until you realise that everything in here was inspired by actual interfaces out there on the web.
This is a very cute offline page. Ali Spittel has written up how it was made too.
Look, it’s Friday—were you really going to get any work done today anyway?
Dave is liking the word “telepresence”:
On social media we broadcast our presence and thoughts over radio and wire and I likewise consume your projections as they echo back to me. We commune over TCP/IP.
Just wait until he discovers the related neologism coined by Ted Nelson.
I was just talking about how browser-based games are the perfect use-case for service workers. Andrzej Mazur breaks down how that would work:
This fun little film gives me all the feels for Battlezone …but then watching the excellent “making of” video really made me appreciate the love and attention to detail that went into this.
Robin Sloan smushes the video game Fortnite Battle Royale together with Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem trilogy and produces a perfect example of game theory, cooperation, and the prisoner’s dilemma.
Based on my experiments in the laboratory of Fortnite, I think Liu Cixin is wrong. Or at least, he’s not entirely right. Fortnite is more Dark Forest theory than not, and maybe that’s true of the universe, too. But sometimes, we have a lever against the vise of game theory, and in this case, it is a single bit of communication. I mean “bit” in the programmer’s sense: a flag with a designated meaning. Nothing more. My heart emote didn’t make Fortnite cuddly and collaborative, but it did allow me to communicate: “Hold up. Let’s do this a different way.”
The latest explainer/game from Nicky Case is an absolutely brilliant interactive piece on small world networks.
Pong + Pacman + Space Invaders!
Graham is recreating the (beautiful and addictive) Geometry Wars in canvas.
Best played with a twin-stick controller (or WASD + Arrow keys as a fallback)
If you’re on Windows, XBONE or XB360 controllers are the easiest to use. On Mac, a PS4 Dualshock 4 or wired 360 controller (with a downloadable driver) works well.
A fun game with pins and string in canvas.
A deceptively simple but thoroughly addictive little in-browser puzzle game.
(It would be neat if this were turned into an offline-first progressive web app; it’s already keeping everything locally.)
Once I got the hang of this game, I found it incredibly addictive. I would describe it as mindless fun, but I think it’s more like mindful fun: it has the same zen contemplative peacefulness as Sudoku. I can certainly see how it makes for a good activity while listening to podcasts.
Note: click once for water; double-click for ships. And don’t blame me if you lose hours of time to this game.
An up-to-date list of Brighton design and dev meet-ups. There’s quite a few!
A thoroughly enjoyable adventure game in your browser. You are the AI of a colony starship. Humanity’s future is in your hands.
Plague; zombie; nuclear …Anna’s got them all covered in her roundup of apocalyptic literature and games.
The spirit of 5K.org lives on. View source: this JavaScript version of Tetris is less than 1K. Details on Github.
A collection of interactive lessons—games that teach—featuring the work of Bret Victor, Nicky Case, and more (the site is put together by Nicky Case).