Getting burned out on playing Wordle? Want something that’s more about the letters individually? Want to play around with taxonomies of multicultural letterforms for the sake of science? (who wouldn’t??)
Glyph is a newly-launched game that will help researchers better understand how crowdsourced individuals around the word perceive the shapes, texture, and patterns of letters from 45 different written languages. The video below explains how it works:
Even when run through Google Translate, this in-depth article from Famitsu on the design of Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a clear and interesting dive into the meticulous design thinking that goes into Nintendo’s flagship games.
For me, the most interesting details are about how much they considered the need for abstraction to make the game successful — so much of the game is modeled on reality but very carefully distilled into primitive shapes and textures (despite the capabilities of newer hardware) for aesthetic purposes but also to help the player inject their own memories and feelings into the experience:
In this way, the degree of symbolization is selected according to the role in the game. However, reducing the amount of information by symbolization can be considered as discarding the amount of information. Regarding this, Mr. Takahashi said, “I think there are many artists who hesitate to reduce the amount of information in images on high-resolution screens. So why can we confidently throw away information?” I don’t think that the amount of information in the picture will decrease and the response will be lost, but I think that it creates an “imaginary gap”. ”
By having an imaginary gap, the user tries to fill the gap by recalling information from his or her memory. And by projecting one’s thoughts on it, it will lead to creating goals and motives for play.
The article also explores the ways that the game has very intentionally placed “play triggers” pretty much everywhere except for the sky (where you even have balloons to shoot down from time to time), as well as an emphasis on leading the player to desire communication while playing. There’s a lot going on below the surface of Animal Crossing!
PS: for the fans of the series, there are quite a few shots of development versions of the game — always interesting to see how the designs progressed from earlier prototypes.
I recently went on a dig through the Archive.org Atari 8-bit Manuals archive, clicked on a fairly random manual for a not-exactly-popular shoot-em-up (Burgers!), and was surprised to find that the game was written by Douglas Crockford, well-known JavaScript developer and creator of the JSON data format standard.
This also reminded me that I’d also seen his name on early Lucasfilm Game products — he was the one who had to bowdlerize the NES port of Maniac Mansion for the NES! Go read his Expurgation of Maniac Mansion post, it’s worth it if you’re a fan of that era of adventure game.
Anyhow, I kind of envy his career path.
If there is a pinball renaissance, as boosters like to claim, it seems to hover somehwere in the middle distance, unless you live in pinball-mad cities like Portland, Ore. In New York, fans still have to work at it, but the rewards are just as sweet. Like great poetry, pinball transports.
Nice writeup from the NYTimes on finding pinball in NYC. So glad that we have Pinballz here in Austin!
Bonus trivia from the article: did you know that pre-famous Tina Fey did the “damsel” voices for the 1997 Williams pinball table Medieval Madness?
Last week I discovered that the batteries in my late 90’s TI-85 had leaked and corroded, and cleaning it up and turning it on first the time in years I lamented the awesome lost ZShell ASM games that I’d loaded the thing up with back in high school (that was one of the best versions of Tetris ever, right?).
And now, news that Portal has an awesome-looking unofficial TI graphing calculator port. I hope somewhere this is bringing some pleasure and enjoyment to some poor kid sitting in a boring class or study hall.
(Via Ars Technica)
Hey, that’s not a very nice thing to call game developers! Oh, you mean literal slime molds…
British computer scientists are taking inspiration from slime to help them find ways to calculate the shape of a polygon linking points on a surface. Such calculations are fundamental to creating realistic computer graphics for gaming and animated movies. The quicker the calculations can be done, the smoother and more realistic the graphics. …
Adamatzky explains that the slime mould Physarum polycephalum has a complicated lifecycle with fruit bodies, spores, and single-cell amoebae, but in its vegetative, plasmodium, stage it is essentially a single cell containing many cell nuclei. The plasmodium can forage for nutrients and extends tube-like appendages to explore its surroundings and absorb food. As is often the case in natural systems, the network of tubes has evolved to be able to quickly and efficiently absorb nutrients while at the same time using minimal resources to do so.
The Internet will some day be a series of (feeding) tubes?
Game designer Brian Moriarty delivered quite a talk at the 1997 Game Developers Conference, touching on everything from interaction design, emergent play, community-created art, creativity, self expression, and even an unexpected but interesting tangent about 101 Dalmatians. In hindsight, many of subjects he talks about would become evident over the next decade, from the Sims to Etsy to Minecraft to social networking. From Listen! The Potential of Shared Hallucinations:
Before we can learn, before we can grow, we have to be prepared to listen.
What does it mean, to listen?
The word is commonly understood to mean “attentive hearing.”
It has its etymological origin in the archaic verb, list.
“List!” they used to say. “Ssh! List! The wild boar is outside!”
But the verb “list” also means to tilt something to one side.
When a sea vessel leans to starboard or port, it is said to be listing.
So how did the word “list” turn into the verb “listen?”
Because when we try to hear something, we sometimes cock our heads in the direction of the sound.
So to listen means more than to hear attentively.
The word also implies a change of inclination.
A new slant.
To listen is to put ourselves into a receptive attitude.
A position to be re-aligned.
Also worth reading (the talk is also available for watching as a video in the GDC Vault) if you fondly remember the days of Hypercard, MUDs, and when text adventures reigned supreme on AOL, or if you like crazy 1990s Photoshop anaglyphs…
A fan-made port of the pixel font built into the adventure game classics The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. As a bonus, a separate version is available that is properly kerned and hinted. (double bonus: opening the .ttf file in Font Book reveals that the demonstration string for the font reads “You fight like a dairy farmer!”)
A post combining Lucasfilm Games and typography? Immediate reblog!
Steve Kordek, the guy who revolutionized the world of pinball by introducing a machine with the now-familiar electromechanical flippers at the bottom of the playfield (imagine: a player can somewhat control the game!), passed away this week at the age of 100. His 6-decade career started off with remarkable serendipity. From the NY Times obit:
On a visit to his hometown in 1937, he was walking down a street without an umbrella when a torrential rain forced him to step into the lobby of a building he was passing. It was the Genco company. A receptionist asked if he was looking for a job.
“I had never seen a pin game before in my life,” Mr. Kordek told The Chicago Tribune in 2009. For 45 cents an hour, he was soon doing soldering on the company’s production line. …
Mr. Kordek never got tired of the clang, clack and buzz of pinball. “I had more fun in this business than anyone could believe,” he told The Tribune.
Nice write-up by Ars Technica on the ScummVM project’s history and developers. Hard to believe it’s been around for over 10 years already! (also, I hadn’t heard that they had a brief-lived controversial build that supported Eric Chahi’s Another World, one of the best games of all time…)