Andrew Plotkin @zarfeblong@mastodon.gamedev.place

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"

I will be hanging around DifferentGames at WPI. I have a (small) bit in the (diverse, amazing) MemoryBlocks anthology. https://2018.differentgames.org/arcade/

Me: I never want to write a domain-specific language again. I'll just use Python.
Five minutes later: Can I add switch statements to Python? Can I put decorators on if statements? I bet I can make it happen.

Ima start writing some code this month, I promise, but I have to have at least a rough outline of the puzzle structure first.

Anybody else do the thing of starting a git repo and then just editing the notes file for a month, so the log looks like 75 commits of "Notes." "More notes." "Puzzle notes."

But I am not at this point concerned with exactly how to separate people from their money - up-front, micro, subscription, whatever. My question is how do we rebuild a marketplace where games have medium-sized satisfied audiences at all. We currently seem to be aggregating towards many cult favorites (three devoted players each) and Fortnite (all the rest of the money).

Moodboarding "tron window ui" is a terrible cliche, but I can't stop. Orange and cyan are my spirit waveguides.

Thus the discussion turns to publishers and their fan bases, and other communities of curation. This is an indirect answer to the comments I saw on (e.g.) the "Post-apocalypse" article, saying (e.g.) "stupid devs are marketing only via twitter and the indie festival circuit". I think this is not unreasonable! And I don't just say that because I'm planning to do it myself!