I read this great book of essays recently. Successful games designers of all stripes writing about the games closest to their hearts. It’s a fun read, though some of the essays struggle a bit in evoking the appeal of games you’ve never seen before. Especially since the book contains no illustrations.
Mark Pilgrim is focusing his laser-precise attentions on HTML 5 so that we all might benefit from his understanding. Dive Into Python was a classic, and he’s always a pleasure to read. Nice use of fonts too.
The ruby programmer, artist, musician & surrealist _whytheluckystiff appears to have deleted his entire online presence. To play him out, here’s a beautiful song he wrote.
The Play-Generated Map and Document Archive. A museum style effort to archive hand-made role-playing game materials, in the belief that they’re a valuable type of folk art. The website is just a way to view the collection, the physical artifacts are also stored. (via MeFi)
A Cthulhoid text adventure set in Shakespearean London.
BoardGameGeek has re-branded, re-structured and re-launched with new support for role-playing games at Geekdo.com. The original DB was insanely well-populated, and it looks like the new RPG entries are already impressively complete.
Fun logic/programming based flash game. Direct your robot around a track with simple instructions, conditionals, loops & function calls. User contributed puzzles tend to be slightly too easy, but the execution is pretty nice.
Free downloadable PDFs of this book on the comingled histories of Lucasfilm, ILM & Pixar, and the stories of many computer graphics firsts.
Fun presentation on teaching kids to code, and working programming logic into a game design (via project.ioni.st)
To coincide with the announcements of both the new XBLA version of Monkey Island, and Telltale Games’ episodic Tales of Monkey Island, Ron Gilbert does a “behind the scenes” post covering some of the fun facts surrounding the creation of the original.