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I'm shifting my bloggery to blog.zarfhome.com

Nine years ago I made my blogging debut with a post titled Games that don't exist. I'd been on the web since 1993 (really!) but 2008 was my first venture into blogging -- which I guess I'd define as a...

Posted by Andrew Plotkin on May 27, 2017 2:13 PM

Hadean Lands release 2.1.0

I have updated the Mac/Win/Linux version of Hadean Lands on Steam. These are small UI changes, mostly inherited from the past year's worth of Lectrote updates. The gameplay has not changed, and save files will continue to work undisturbed. The...

Posted by Andrew Plotkin on May 22, 2017 4:41 PM

The history of Glk!

Last weekend I gave a short talk at BangBangCon, a small New York conference dedicated to "the joy of computing". I talked about the development of Glk -- from its Z-machine origins to modern web-based interpreters. It's a ten-minute talk...

Posted by Andrew Plotkin on May 15, 2017 2:02 PM

Making navigation work

I've been playing a bunch of mobile games this spring (for no reason except that I played a lot of PC games over the winter) and I keep thinking about navigation. Here's a navigation scheme which is common in casual...

Posted by Andrew Plotkin on May 9, 2017 10:32 AM

IFTF's Adoptable Technology Archive

An announcement went up last week on the IFTF blog. You may already have seen it, but it's important and I want to talk about it some more. [...] While we wish we could take over and maintain software projects,...

Posted by Andrew Plotkin on February 25, 2017 9:33 PM

Text in spaaaace: FTL, Out There, Voyageur

Bruno Dias's space-text-RPG Voyageur was released this week. I spent a bunch of time playing it, which reminded me that I'd just spent a bunch of time playing Out There, and a bunch more time last month playing FTL. Three...

Posted by Andrew Plotkin on February 12, 2017 2:51 PM

My Secret Hideout: now available on Itch.IO

A very long time ago (as times go), back in 2011, I released an iOS app titled My Secret Hideout. It was... ...a wacky, creative thing set in a treehouse. It’s not like any app you’ve seen before. Buy it!...

Posted by Andrew Plotkin on February 6, 2017 1:16 AM

More 2017 IGF nominees

More assorted comments on games! Some of these were honorable mentions for the Narrative award; some were listed in other categories; some were games that just struck me as particularly nifty in some way. (See Monday's post for the six...

Posted by Andrew Plotkin on January 11, 2017 11:39 PM

2017 IGF nominees: my comments

The Indie Games Festival nominees are now posted. The IGF is a showcase of indie games which exists as part of GDC (early March, San Francisco, expensive). I was again invited to be on the jury for Excellence in Narrative....

Posted by Andrew Plotkin on January 9, 2017 2:29 PM

Quern: Undying Thoughts: design ruminations

When the Obduction kickstarter fired up in 2013, it seemed like a good moment for adventure games in general. With Unity3D well-established and the Unreal 4 engine coming up, small teams were in a good position to produce really stellar...

Posted by Andrew Plotkin on December 7, 2016 2:35 PM

Hadean Lands on sale this week!

You may have noted that Steam has launched its Thanksgiving sale. It's not Black Friday yet; I dunno, maybe it's Purple Wednesday. They don't tell me these things. Anyhow, Hadean Lands is part of this sale. My first Steam sale!...

Posted by Andrew Plotkin on November 23, 2016 1:35 PM

Even more very quick takes on recent games

I finished up all the games I bought from Steam's summer sale, so I bought a bunch more in Steam's Halloween sale. Nice how that works out, right? Note: I am involved in IGF judging again this year. However, I...

Posted by Andrew Plotkin on November 6, 2016 12:28 AM

Alchemy game notes, circa 2003

Here's a bit of a thing. I happened to look at my "game design" folder, which is of course full of random snippets of text dating back years. The oldest file is from 2003: alchemy-game Research: enter a book "room",...

Posted by Andrew Plotkin on October 16, 2016 2:47 PM

More very quick takes on recent games

It's IFComp time! And I haven't played any of the 58 IFComp games! But I have been playing down my backlog of random Steam walking-simulator-and-other-exploration games. So here are some more notes. Metrico+: Stylish little platformer which attempts to substitute...

Posted by Andrew Plotkin on October 3, 2016 1:39 PM

My Obduction nonreview

Obduction is a really good adventure game. You should play it. I finished the game a week ago and I've had a heck of a time thinking of anything to say. To be sure, my Myst review was written in...

Posted by Andrew Plotkin on September 8, 2016 3:42 PM

Dropbox dropping support for playable HTML

(This has been widely noted, but I wanted to summarize what's known.) At the beginning of September, some Dropbox users got email: We’re writing to let you know that we’ll be discontinuing the ability to render HTML content in-browser via...

Posted by Andrew Plotkin on September 7, 2016 5:11 PM

Very quick takes on recent games

Recently played games, that is. I bought many of these during the July Steam sale... by browsing the "Walking Simulator" tag and grabbing anything that looked interesting. (Like many of my friends, I missed the brief period when "walking simulator"...

Posted by Andrew Plotkin on August 13, 2016 2:33 PM

Very quick takes on recent games

Recently played games, that is. I bought many of these during the July Steam sale... by browsing the "Walking Simulator" tag and grabbing anything that looked interesting. (Like many of my friends, I missed the brief period when "walking simulator"...

Posted by Andrew Plotkin on August 13, 2016 2:33 PM

Point-of-view in The Witness: design ruminations

I played The Witness to an ending, and then I went back and played until I had finished it to my satisfaction. (504 +82. I looked at just two hints, and no thanks, I am not going to beat the...

Posted by Andrew Plotkin on July 27, 2016 1:42 PM

SFWA eligibility for game writers

SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, has announced that game writers will soon be eligible to join. (The rule change goes into effect on August 1.) This applies to writers who work on videogames, RPGs, and tabletop...

Posted by Andrew Plotkin on July 21, 2016 9:31 PM