A screenshot of a white-on-black terminal depicting a 19x19 go board in ascii graphics, with empty grid intersections as periods, and black and white as Os and #s

It’s absolutely incredible that one of the largest Japanese-run Go servers, which has been running since 1992, is still accessed entirely via Telnet. And while most players use GUI clients that use Telnet under the hood, you can still connect manually and get ASCII graphics streamed to you

"Stop running time" is easy to understand: stop ticking game play and keep ticking rendering. But it gets real exciting when you realize you need to tick some gameplay systems, like those needed to run the UI for pause. At some point you need layers of selective subsystem ticking.

This is one of the systems you have to design for early or suffer during late stage polish. It's up there with supporting Undo with early engine design decisions that you will regret later.

Not only does the sound system need to pause all playing effects on game pause, it needs to pick them back up when you unpause, and of course the pause UI also needs sounds and the goddamn unpause sound has to start while the game is paused and then get mixed into the game sounds as pause ends,

You stopped pumping time to the particle system because particles should stop animating when the game is paused, but now in late stage UI polish you've decided to put particle bursts on your buttons and now you need only some particles to pause,

Like you gotta keep ticking input so the player can interact with the pause UI, but you don't want to input from the game to bleed into pause or vice versa, so maybe you need an additional layers of abstraction that track contextual input state.

"Stop running time" is easy to understand: stop ticking game play and keep ticking rendering. But it gets real exciting when you realize you need to tick some gameplay systems, like those needed to run the UI for pause. At some point you need layers of selective subsystem ticking.

I propose we call this the Eno Effect.

It's Mother's face. What Lies Beneath did a pretty nice homage to this transition in its last scene. The whole sequence with the psychiatrist explaining Norman Bates' psychosis was a forced addition to the script, but Hitchcock made it cool anyway.

I suspect that the specific blend of interests that produced this image are perhaps more widely held than you might think.

I am a big fan of Nanashi No Geemu because it's a horror game about a game developer building a (cursed) horror game. It's cursed because crunch led the lead dev to go insane and murder his family.

happy 17776 day everyone

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CURE

Yeah! World Builder is not HyperCard but it's pretty awesome. Check out the manual: www.mocagh.org/miscgame/wor...

hey @jjsignal.bsky.social this is for you

Transfer Point is a modern adventure game made with 40-year-old software Something old, something new.

wrote about a game that's somehow old and new at the same time www.theverge.com/entertainmen...

They wheeled the TV cart into my 10th grade lit class and fiddled with it until the broadcast came in. There were screams and tears.

SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA! are you: a horror game lover? a giant nerd with disposable income who wants tattoos and to support a gay lil artist? a lover of tattoos that'll make your friends go "what the hell is that?" comment or DM me to book one of THESE freaks!

I feel like this is just Sturgeon's Law again, but as the volume of content explodes I would like to propose that we are entering the era of Sturgeon's Power Law, in which each percentile below 90 is twice as crap as the one before it.

My favorite example of this was an old Mac shareware RPG called Mantra, which included a sign by some random road that said, "Wait here for the king." There was no king, there was no code associated with the sign, it was just a sign. Players waited for hours.

Honestly 10% is probably conservative

If your environment is meant to be investigated, it's on you not to create accidental mystery with random background objects. A locked door must eventually have a key, pages missing from a diary must be found. 10% of your players will lose their minds if they think they've missed something.

Random game Saturday! It's Echo Night: Beyond, a masterclass horror walking simulator before we had the term "walking simulator." The best of the Echo Night series and one of the best horror games of the era, though fairly obscure. Badass intro movie is one of my favorites: youtu.be/R8QOIy1-Oe8?...

if u like Lake Mungo, you'll be into Corporeal, a horror game where u investigate a cursed 90s NZ family photo album

Seems unsurprising that the IP skews older, but I wonder if the entire JRPG format does as well. I bet Octopath Traveler and Triangle Strategy look similar despite the recency of their IP. Games for folks who first encountered this format on a SNES. I wonder how Clair Obscur fares.

I had feelings about this one. horror.dreamdawn.com?p=14800395

Hey, Mom!

woah video so epic