Chronophoto - The Photographical History Game
This is a fun game—with the same kind of appeal as that Wiki History Game I linked to—where you have to locate photographs in time.
Link tags: game
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A post by Clearleft on LinkedIn
This is design engineering.
Life Universe
A fractal version of Conway’s Game Of Life: keep zooming out …forever!
as days pass by — Farmbound, or how I built an app in 2022
Stuart writes up the process up making a mobile game as a web app—not a native app. The Wordle effect reverberates.
It’s a web app. Works for everyone. And I thought it would be useful to explain why it is, why I think that’s the way to do things, and some of the interesting parts of building an app for everyone to play which is delivered over the web rather than via app stores and downloads.
Notes from a gopher:// site - daverupert.com
The result of adding more constraints means that the products have a broader appeal due to their simple interface. It reminds me of a Jeremy Keith talk I heard last month about programming languages like CSS which have a simple interface pattern:
selector { property: value }. Simple enough anyone can learn. But simple doesn’t mean it’s simplistic, which gives me a lot to think about.
Globle
Like Wordle, but for geography instead of words.
Every day, there is a new Mystery Country. Your goal is to guess the mystery country using the fewest number of guesses. Each incorrect guess will appear on the globe with a colour indicating how close it is to the Mystery Country.
Wiki History Game
This is fun (and addictive)! With every new entry pulled from Wikipedia, you’ve got to arrange it onto a timeline correctly.
Townscaper
Now you can play a demo of Townscaper right in your browser.
There goes your productivity.
Gaming the Iron Curtain
The ZX Spectrum in a time of revolution:
Gaming the Iron Curtain offers the first book-length social history of gaming and game design in 1980s Czechoslovakia, or anywhere in the Soviet bloc. It describes how Czechoslovak hobbyists imported their computers, built DIY peripherals, and discovered games as a medium, using them not only for entertainment but also as a means of self-expression.
The Lords of Midnight
I played a lot Lords of Midnight (and Doomdark’s Revenge) on my Amstrad 464 when I was a kid. Turns out there’s a dedicated labour of love to port the games to modern platforms. I just downloaded the OS X port, so there goes my weekend.
Cookie Consent Speed.Run
My current score is one minute and 18 seconds. Can you beat it?
In Praise of the Unambiguous Click Menu | CSS-Tricks
What’s important is that you test it with real users… and stop using hover menus.
Strong agree!
Same Energy Snap
Match up images that have been posted in pairs to Twitter with the caption “same energy”. This is more fun and addictive than it has any right to be.
Lateral Thinking With Withered Technology · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer
What web development can learn from the Nintendo Game and Watch.
The Web now consists of an ever-growing number of different frameworks, methodologies, screen sizes, devices, browsers, and connection speeds. “Lateral thinking with withered technology” – progressively enhanced – might actually be an ideal philosophy for building accessible, performant, resilient, and original experiences for a wide audience of users on the Web.
Making a ‘post-it game’ PWA with mobile accelerometer API’s | Trys Mudford
I made an offhand remark at the Clearleft Christmas party and Trys ran with it…
The Server Souvenir: Taking Home Remnants of Virtual Worlds | Platypus
When the game developer Blizzard Entertainment decommissioned some of their server blades to be auctioned off, they turned them into commemorative commodities, adding an etching onto the metal frame with the server’s name (e.g., “Proudmoore” or “Darkspear”), its dates of operation, and an inscription: “within the circuits and hard drive, a world of magic, adventure, and friendship thrived… this server was home to thousands of immersive experiences.” While stripped of their ability to store virtual memory or connect people to an online game world, these servers were valuable and meaningful as worlds and homes. They became repositories of social and spatial memory, souvenirs from WoW.
AI Weirdness • Play AI Dungeon 2. Become a dragon. Eat the moon.
After reading this account of a wonderfully surreal text adventure game, you’ll probably want to play AI Dungeon 2:
A PhD student named Nathan trained the neural net on classic dungeon crawling games, and playing it is strangely surreal, repetitive, and mesmerizing, like dreaming about playing one of the games it was trained on.
How Video Games Inspire Great UX – Scott Jenson
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)
Turing Tumble - Build Marble-Powered Computers
Boolean logic manifested in a Turing-complete game