"The two points I want to focus on here are about Ricky’s initial attitude about this warehouse idea and about the fact that he made this prototype ‘to surprise me’

Earlier I said that Ricky and Nate were sick of hearing about this idea. That was an understatement. In reality they openly mocked it. They had a running joke that I should call it ‘Clown Warehouse’ and make all the things in it clown paraphernalia. I wasn’t particularly hurt by this. It was good banter. It’s kind of how we talk about game ideas a lot of the time. 

But then Ricky made a prototype to surprise me. (Not to mention spending months taking it from a prototype to a finished game.) And my point is that this is how friendships work. These expressions of good natured antagonism and affection, Winding someone up one day and giving them a nice surprise another, are the hallmarks of real friendship.

If you make games and your game development process isn’t like this you are doing it wrong. In my opinion."

This whole article from Dick Hogg, on making Wilmot's Warehouse, is a delight. On making parts and working out what a game is later; on friendship; on playtesting; on games with endings. Just great.

I always have time for people writing about ZZT. (Anna Anthropy's book on it is cracking). I have fond memories, both of Sweeney's own 'worlds' as well as the awful things I made.

"Here is, instead, the first reading that occurred to me, looking at these reimagined vistas set among the tall columns of RIBA headquarters: the idea that videogame architecture is essentially a folly, something that takes the form of a building that has a physical function, but which cannot meaningfully fulfil that function and which instead uses its simulated practicality to fulfil, say, an emotional or aesthetic or wayfinding purpose. I read Playing the Picturesque as suggesting that we might use the existing centuries of design and discussion around follies, and the long related history of arguments about the “picturesque”, to usefully inform the ways that we look at videogame architecture."

Lovely writing – dense, detailed, and shrewd – from Holly about a show I must go and check out.

Nice interview and profile; when I read it, I remembered how much I enjoyed _Grafts_.

Some properly gnarly games maths, laid out. I understood some of it? But always nice to see what goes into things, even when you don't enjoy them, especially at that technical-art conjunction.

Oskar Stålberg illustrates some of his work on Bad North. I love illustrations of software development through animation – captures the change-over-time aspect of code work.

Great writeup of the V&A games show from Robert Yang, making me all the more excited to see it, and all the prouder of peers and friends.

Web-based port of Laurie Spiegel's _Music Mouse_. Instant composition; just wonderful to fiddle with. Suddenly thinking about interfaces for this.

Using a Raspberry Pi to emulate the memory of a NES cartridge and then outputting that data through the original NES. The making-of is good too.

Impressive, fun, immediate.

A good list of ways to protect any MCU circuit – not just an Arduino.

Good crunchy post on the design of the axe-recall feature in God Of War (2018); particularly interesting on how it evolved, how players perceived variance in its implementation, and the subtleties of its sound and rumble implementation. And yes, there's screenshake. It's one of the simpler functions to grok in the game, but one of its best mechanics, I think. Looking forward to more posts.

Beautiful. Poppy Ackroyd soundtrack, too.

Yeah, that. See also 'drawing is thinking' – drawing exposes the paragraphs I left out of paragraphs I wrote. I've been writing documentation recently and boy, that properly forces you to think about how to describe the thing you're doing.

Janelle Shane – with some effort – trains neural networks to make knitting patterns. Then knitters from Ravelry make them. I love this: weird AI being taken at face value by people for art's sake.

Quite like the look of Stimulus for really simple interactions without too much cruft.

Really rather impressive port of Prince of Persia to… the BBC Micro. From the original Apple II source code which is, of course, also a 6502 chip – although not quite the same. The palette may be rough and ready, but the sound and animation is spot on. I'd dread playing this with the original micro keyboard, though.

"You are a traffic engineer. Draw freeway interchanges. Optimize for efficency and avoid traffic jams." Lovely.

Useful, this stuff is not nearly as easy as it should be in ES.

Great interview with Meng Qi, with lots of lovely stuff on being both a musician and an instrument bulider. I need to return to this.

This feels… familiar. Two things resonated a lot, though: the description of Hymns Ancient and Modern as a tradition to come from, and especially the description of 'cramming for A-levels' – my version of that was a combination of Fopp and Parrot Records at university, and the local libraries' CD sections during my teenage years.

He's a better musician then me, though, clearly.

A good list of design notes from Raph and a few things to get around to playing.

"HTML goes in, games come out. HTMLE is a project template and a set of scripts that take care of a lot of the work involved in setting up these tools and simplifying everything." Might well be useful for things that aren't games, too…

"From 1950 to 1990, Tinsley had been the world champion of checkers whenever he wanted to be. He’d occasionally retire to work on mathematics or devote himself to religious study, but he’d eventually return, beat everyone and become champion again. In that 40-year span, he lost five total games and never once dropped a match." Brilliant article from Alexis Madrigal on the race to solve draughts/checkers, one man and his computer, and another man and his faith.