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…
Link tags: game
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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
User Inyerface - A worst-practice UI experiment
It’s all fun and games until you realise that everything in here was inspired by actual interfaces out there on the web.
You are not connected to the Internet
This is a very cute offline page. Ali Spittel has written up how it was made too.
Post Haste
Look, it’s Friday—were you really going to get any work done today anyway?
Telepresence - daverupert.com
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.
Progressive Web Games – Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog
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:
- Add to Home screen
- Offline capabilities
- Progressive loading
TANK (short film by Stu Maschwitz) - YouTube
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.
I Played Fortnite and Figured Out the Universe - The Atlantic
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 Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds
The latest explainer/game from Nicky Case is an absolutely brilliant interactive piece on small world networks.
pacapong by kingPenguin
Pong + Pacman + Space Invaders!
Geometry Wars
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.
Constellations
A fun game with pins and string in canvas.
Cub n Pup - puzzle game demo
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.)
Battleship Solitaire: Mindless Podcast Companion
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.
List of Brighton & Hove Design, Development, and Various Other Tech / Nerdy Meetups
An up-to-date list of Brighton design and dev meet-ups. There’s quite a few!
Seedship
A thoroughly enjoyable adventure game in your browser. You are the AI of a colony starship. Humanity’s future is in your hands.