It’s crazy to me that the games in this collection are so good!

I rarely see people talking about Mini and Max. I think most people aren’t sticking with it very long. The game is much, much bigger than it looks. There is a ton of adventure to have there. There’s an old man in a pot to the west that is especially important to meet.

Absolutely agree with this. The product could have had fewer games and each game could have been much more shallow and it still would have been “good”. But there’s honestly a ton of bangers in this collection and the variety and creativity is astounding.

Mini and Max is so strangely awesome! It didn’t have to have nearly as much content as it does. It’s huge!

My understanding is that the steam version released with no ASCII tileset, but there is one now after an update. I bought the steam version but haven’t played it much at all, so I haven’t confirmed this myself.

The video above has the ASCII style graphics I was talking about. This video shows a dragon attack using a different tileset. (This video begins with some loud music).

https://youtu.be/9ejgsGgH__M?si=RFsdfaKLiCgjhr7p

You can see in this one how the flames billow and spread.

So you’ll have to imagine what the combination is like. You’re already in a headspace where your brain is filling in details not supplied by the ASCII and then the world just explode into flames.

These other tilesets have their advantages. But I’ll never give up the text-based rendering of the world - I’ve had too many great experiences to give that up.

So like, yes, I totally agree.

I want to take a second to tell a story though, about the graphics in this game. I hope to explain why this game actually has the best graphics ever.

Context for some folks: the game is entirely rendered using ASCII characters (for the purpose of this story. I know, I’m leaving out detail, it’s okay). So the goblins in Dwarf Fortress look roughly like this

g

A dog looks like this

d

And a dragon looks like this

D

Learning to play Dwarf Fortress can be tough at first because there’s a soup of letters and other typing characters on the screen and your brain needs to convert that into a scene that makes sense. But here’s the thing … eventually that’s exactly what your brain does! You stop seeing the semicolons and hyphens, the letters and the strange formatting characters like “╥”. You start to see rivers and grass, tiny people working hard, a bustling metropolis, an invading horde.

And the creator of this game hasn’t simply cut corners on making the game look good by using ASCII tilesets. The grass (made of commas or single quotes) sways in the breeze. Running water shimmers. Cherry trees gently rain cherry blossom petals during certain seasons. There’s actually a ton of little details there for your brain to pick up and immediately upscale into high def for you. It’s delightful. And sometimes terrifying.

Sometimes something new will happen. A creature you’ve never seen before will approach your little community. It will be represented by some letter and your brain will render that for you in the way it has been taught to do. Your eyes see a d and you see a dog. Your eyes see a D and you see a dragon. It’s bigger than a dog. Most things are, no big deal. But you’ve been deceived.

You watch as a band of dwarfs approach the dragon. The creature is quite still, right next to the round trunk of a tree that looks like this O. The brave warriors are still far from the creature. You’ve built whole dinning halls, with wooden chairs and stone mugs and carvings decorating the walls, that could fit within the space separating the warriors from the capital D dragon. One canny dwarf let’s loose an arrow at the beast. It zips through the air like this -

As it approaches the Dragon, which is surely just to Iike a dog but a bit larger and green right, time begins the slow. It ticks. And ticks. And hell is unleashed. Flames jet from the Dragon. Unending flames pouring like red ink in billows that quickly fill the vast space and enrobe the dwarven warriors in a superheated death that pushes in and flows past and even through the band until flickering flames fill virtually all space to one side of a capital D that you will never, ever, mistake the size of again.

My scalp tingled and it felt like my skull was over heating when my brain spontaneously supplied all the extra graphical details for that particular scene. I’ll never forget it.

I can’t tell if you’re trolling. But if you aren’t, here’s something cool you might enjoy.

If an object has two sides, you can colour each side a different colour. Think of a dinner plate. That has two sides and an edge that goes all the way around. You could use a marker to colour the front side red, stopping anywhere you hit an edge. Then you could use another marker to colour the back side blue, because the backside wouldn’t be coloured yet.

It sounds like I’m explaining this in a dumb, very obvious way. I am. Not because I think anyone reading this is dumb. But because the shape in the photo does something that is not obvious.

Look at the shape above and imagine it without all the keys sticking out. Imagine it is smooth enough to draw on with a marker. It’s pretty easy to see where any edges are. Imagine colouring one side of the shape red, avoiding where the edge is. If you keep colouring as much as you can, without crossing an edge, once you’re done you’ll find that there’s no place left to colour with the blue marker. You’ll have coloured the whole shape. It only has one side and that one side snakes and twists around to be its own backside as well.

If you’re looking to learn more, the shape is called a Möbius strip.

That’s a great point. I suppose one could tell how healthy the relationship is between developer and publisher by looking at how many dev companies on the roster have created a second great game. Of course, that’s tough even with a great publisher, so maybe that’s not realistic.

Wow. I’ve always trusted games published by Annapurna to be something exciting, new, and high quality. I’m devastated to hear that this publishing company is floundering.

I found a technique that worked well for me. I want to share with you and others, but I don’t want to come across as judging you in anyway. It’s hard to find great candidates of any sort. And I wouldn’t necessarily recommend my technique to every company, because it’s just not reasonable in all cases.

I’ve found that the best way to get a good mix of people hired onto the team is to do more than hope that it happens.

I had to get out to workshops, conferences, and meetups. Local universities had groups that I got in touch with. I had to make connections with the communities that I was looking to hire from. It was a lot of hard work.

But once you’ve developed those connections, candidates roll in with surprising regularity for a long time. After two years I had a team of 10 great devs with a 50/50 split between genders and a huge range of background and cultures. It was the most fun team to work with and we made awesome stuff.

I play a lot of board games. And I own a lot of board games. Not all of my games get played very much, so I like to track each play and over time see which games are forgotten gems or which games I’d be best to just trade away.

In the board game community, you might come across people talking about the “Friendless” metric of their collection. It’s a totally made up measurement, invented by a person with the user name Friendless. In that way, it’s like the Elo rating in chess and other games. I find it’s useful to know when I’m “done” with something that doesn’t really have an end, like playing board games. You can always play one more game.

Friendless hypothesized that if you play a game 10 times, you’ve gained 90% of its remaining utility. So after 10 plays, you consumed 90% of the game play that game provides. After another 10 plays, you’re at 99%. By the time you reach 30 plays, you’ve consumed 99.9% of the game.

You can do the same with games. Maybe the number of plays changes a bit. Maybe it’s not the number of plays, but the number of hours. I would say that games of Civ are like games of any other board game: 10 = 90% utility gained. Matches in COD, probably not the same.

I’ll totally agree that the author did not do a great job of stating their thesis plainly. However, I think that the article isn’t incoherent. The author is writing about why they are surprised and disappointed that France and the Olympics gave Tom Cruise a global spotlight. They claim he’s too much in bed with Scientology to make supporting him possible without supporting them. And they claim that France and french media should know better than to support Scientology.

I think it’s a reasonable objection and I’m glad someone is objecting. Although, again, I agree that the article could have benefited from having that thesis clearly written from the start.

Right?! So excited for season Two and so excited that we’ll get to see a proper (planned) ending to the series instead of a slow fading away before cancellation.

Damn. I had forgotten what actual journalism looks like. There was actual work done here to investigate and acquire facts. I’ve been reading “articles” that are just paraphrased PR statements for so long. This was a breath of fresh air.

Wandersong is a game about happiness that made me really happy while I was playing it. Not all the way through; there are parts that are sad too. But I’m thinking of replaying it because it made me feel really happy when I played it the first time.

I’ve been enjoying my Fairphone 4 a lot since getting it last year. This camera update really improved the experience of taking photos.

Yes! For most genres of games, I’ve noped out of some games but completed others. It wasn’t until you mentioned it that I realized I’ve never completed a Zachtronic game. I absolutely adore what Witness was doing, but I haven’t finished it. I should go back to it.

Gonna jump in to agree that Moon+ Reader seems to be the most commonly used. And for good reason: it’s very customizable and it does a great job presenting text in an easy to consume way.

OP, I’m sure you’ve already tried it, but consider giving it another go. You can make it do nearly all the things on your list.

I love seeing recommendations for Wandersong. It’s a completely different type of adventure game with a unique, and lovely, plot.

Thanks for sharing this interview and article. It was a really interesting read. I feel like I understand a lot more about how the game came to be now that I’ve read it