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.
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)
This broke my brain.
The challenge: in the fewest resources possible, render meaningful text.
- How small can a font really go?
- How many bytes of memory would you need (to store it and run it?)
- How much code would it take to express it?
Lets see just how far we can take this!
Ooh! A documentary on Claude Shannon—exciting!
I just finished reading A Mind At Play, the (very good) biography of Claude Shannon, so this film feels very timely.
Mixing contemporary interviews, archival film, animation and dialogue drawn from interviews conducted with Shannon himself, The Bit Player tells the story of an overlooked genius who revolutionized the world, but never lost his childlike curiosity.
Well, this is interesting. Panic, the little software company that could, are making a handheld gaming device. This is like the hardware equivalent of the indie web.
This seems to work quite nicely: convert your progressive web app into an APK file that you can then submit to the Google Play store (you’ll still have to go through all the hassle of submitting the app, but still).
I tested this with The Session and sure enough, it looks like it’s available to download from Google Play.
During the internet of 2006, consumer products let anyone edit CSS. It was a beautiful mess. As the internet grew up, consumer products stopped trusting their users, and the internet lost its soul.
The internet of 2019 is vital societal infrastructure. We depend on it to keep in touch with family, to pay for things, and so much more.
Just because it got serious doesn’t mean it can’t be fun and weird.
I love this use of e-ink to play a film at 24 frames per day instead of 24 frames per minute.
I love this example of paying it forward:
Some lovely little animation experiments from Cameron.
A fun way to play around with the options in variable fonts.
Marcin built this lovely little in-browser tool to demonstrate how segmented type displays work at different sizes.
The latest explainer/game from Nicky Case is an absolutely brilliant interactive piece on small world networks.
Pong + Pacman + Space Invaders!
A really deep dive into display: contents from Ire.
A fun game with pins and string in canvas.
Tal Leming’s thoroughly delightful (and obsessive) account of designing the 90 Minutes typeface for U.S. Soccer.
FIFA has strict regulations that govern the size and stroke weight of numbers and letters used on official match uniforms. This made me unbelievably paranoid. I had a nightmare that one of the national teams would be set for kickoff of an important match and the referee would suddenly blow the whistle and say, “Hey, hey, hey! The bottom stroke of that 2 is 1 mm too light. The United States must forfeit this match!”
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).
A nexus of hypermedia on all things Blade Runner, from links to Tumblr blogs to embedded screenplays, documentaries, and scanned images.