Andrew Plotkin @zarfeblong@mastodon.gamedev.place

Let me tell you the good word about Cragne Manor: http://blog.zarfhome.com/2018/12/cragne-manor-is-available-to-play.html

Yeah, I had to write a quick blog post about this one: _System Syzygy_ by mdsteele. http://blog.zarfhome.com/2018/11/system-syzygy.html

IFComp results! https://ifcomp.org/comp/2018

Musings on what kind of game _Extrasolar_ was. (Still is, but it's shutting down at the end of the month.) http://blog.zarfhome.com/2018/11/four-years-ago-in-planetary-exploration.html

SFWA has announced a new Game Writing category for the Nebula Awards. http://blog.zarfhome.com/2018/11/a-nebula-award-category-for-game-writing.html

Just to have the words out there (US politics): http://blog.zarfhome.com/2018/11/vote-usa-2018-edition.html

Restless released in EctoComp: http://blog.zarfhome.com/2018/11/restless-released-in-ectocomp.html -- an Emily Short game built on SpiritAI's Character Engine. I built a bunch of the underlying engine logic for this style of menu-based game.

Inventing a new IF engine, like one does.

Folk music recommendation: Cindy Kallet.

Recommendations? Basically I am a junkie for Carbon Based Lifeforms. Is that cool or does it make me a massive poser? I grew up on folk music, I have no idea.

There, I bought some stuff on bandcamp to support their "voting is important actually" fundraiser.

Assorted news bits around the 25th anniversary of Myst: http://blog.zarfhome.com/2018/09/myst-25-years-old.html

I have crossed the Rubinomicon and started replacing my script's instances of "###boss" and "###client" with actual names that I just made up.

Best wishes to everybody now plummeting out of Telltale. And man... it's too soon to be sunny-side about this... but I hope this results in a dozen Oxenfrees and Firewatches sprouting over the next couple of years.

Sux about Telltale Games. I did not get into their new-model Walking Dead genre games (Sam&Max forever!) But they never wavered from their commitment to big narrative-centered games, and I appreciated that the industry had that.

How the heck am I supposed to remember that Subsurface Circular and Subserial Network aren't the same game

Still not writing an IF parser engine.

I am not in fact writing a new text parser engine in Python. It's just the easiest way to test what I'm writing is command-line input.

This is just the dev game engine, of course. It'll eventually export Python objects into either ObjC, JS, or C# source code, depending on how I feel a year from now.

Gah, the activation energy of going from "one hacky Python script in your working directory" to "gotta build a game engine in Python, how will I lay out the submodules"