[Bloganuary] Playtime

This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:

Do you play in your daily life? What says “playtime” to you?

How do I play? Let me count the ways!

RPGs

I’m involved in no fewer than three different RPG campaigns (DMing the one for The Levellers) right now, plus periodic one-shots. I love a good roleplaying game, especially one that puts character-building and storytelling above rules-lawyering and munchkinery, specifically because that kind of collaborative, imaginative experience feels more like the kind of thing we call “play” when done it’s done by children!

Composite photo showing a young boy rolling a D20 onto a character sheet in front of a tabletop battlemap, and three monitors in a dark room showing a video chat between people and a digital gameboard.
Family D&D and Abnib D&D might have a distinctly different tone, but they’re still both playtime activities.

Videogames

I don’t feel like I get remotely as much videogaming time as I used to, and in theory I’ve become more-selective about exactly what I spend my time on1.

Dan with his thumbs-up in front of the high-score table (with the top-ranking spot about to be filled) of Wonder Boy, on a generic "80s Arcade Classics" arcade cabinet.
I managed to beat Wonder Boy last week, and it “only” took me three and a half decades!

Board Games

Similarly, I don’t feel like I get as much time to grind through my oversized board games collection as I used to2, but that’s improving as the kids get older and can be roped-into a wider diversity of games3.

A girl, sat in front of an Agricola farmyard board, holds up a "sheeple" (small wooden sheep game piece) for the camera.
Our youngest wakes early on weekend mornings and asks to kick off his day with board games. Our eldest, pictured, has grown to the point where she’s working her way through all of the animal-themed games at our local board games cafe.

Escape Rooms

I love a good escape room, and I can’t wait until the kids are old enough for (more of) them too so I’ve an excuse to do more of them. When we’re not playing conventional escape rooms, Ruth and I can sometimes be found playing board game-style boxed “kit” ones (which have very variable quality, in my experience) and we’ve recently tried a little Escape Academy.

Ruth and Dan hold up an Alice In Wonderland themed sign reading "it went like a dream" underneath the sign for escape room company Escape Hunt. Both are wearing silly hats, and Dan is also wearing white rabbit ears.
Ruth and I make a great duo when we remember to communicate early-and-often and to tag-team puzzles by swapping what we’re focussing on when we get stuck.

GNSS Activities

I’m sure everybody knows I do a modest amount of geocaching and geohashing.4

Dan, outdoors in a field on a grey day and with the wind whipping his hair across his face, wearing a high-vis jacket over a warm fleece, holds up a GPS receiver which shows he's zero metres from his destination.
I’m out standing in my field.

They’re not the only satnav-based activities I do at least partially “for fun” though! I contribute to OpenStreetMap, often through the “gamified” experience of the StreetComplete app, and I’m very slowly creeping up the leader board at OpenBenches. Are these “play”? Sure, maybe.

And all of the above is merely the structured kinds of play I engage in. Playing “let’s pretend”-style games with the kids (even when they make it really, really weird) adds a whole extra aspect. Also there’s the increasingly-rare murder mystery parties we sometimes hold: does that count as roleplaying, or some other kind of play?

Guests dressed as a chef, a priest, and a librarian sit around a dining table at a murder mystery party.
A chef, a priest, and a librarian walk into a party… stop me if you’ve heard this one.

Suffice to say, there’s plenty of play in my life, it’s quite varied and diverse, and there is, if anything, not enough of it!

Footnotes

1 I say that, and yet somehow Steam tells me that one of my most-played games this year was Starfield, which was… meh? Apparently compelling enough that I’ve “ascended” twice, but in hindsight I wish I hadn’t bothered.

2 Someday my group and I will finish Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 so we can get started on Season 0 which has sat unplayed on my shelves since I got it… oooh… two or three years ago‽

3 This Christmas, I got each of them their first “legacy” game: Zombie Kids for the younger one, My City for the elder. They both seem pretty good.

4 Geocaching is where you use military satellite networks to find lost tupperware. Geohashing uses the same technology but what you find is a whole lot of nothing. I don’t think I can explain why I find the latter more-compelling.

Composite photo showing a young boy rolling a D20 onto a character sheet in front of a tabletop battlemap, and three monitors in a dark room showing a video chat between people and a digital gameboard.× Dan with his thumbs-up in front of the high-score table (with the top-ranking spot about to be filled) of Wonder Boy, on a generic "80s Arcade Classics" arcade cabinet.× A girl, sat in front of an Agricola farmyard board, holds up a "sheeple" (small wooden sheep game piece) for the camera.× Ruth and Dan hold up an Alice In Wonderland themed sign reading "it went like a dream" underneath the sign for escape room company Escape Hunt. Both are wearing silly hats, and Dan is also wearing white rabbit ears.× Dan, outdoors in a field on a grey day and with the wind whipping his hair across his face, wearing a high-vis jacket over a warm fleece, holds up a GPS receiver which shows he's zero metres from his destination.× Guests dressed as a chef, a priest, and a librarian sit around a dining table at a murder mystery party.×

Wonder Boy

There are video games that I’ve spent many years playing (sometimes on-and-off) before finally beating them for the first time. I spent three years playing Dune II before I finally beat it as every house. It took twice that to reach the end of Ultima Underworld II. But today, I can add a new contender1 to that list.

Today, over thirty-five years after I first played it, I finally completed Wonder Boy.

Entryway to "West View Leisure Centre", decorated in a bright, abstract, 80s style.
I first played Wonder Boy in 1988 at West View Leisure Centre, pictured here mostly as-I-remember-it in a photo by Keith Wright (used under CC BY-SA 2.0 license).

My first experience of the game, in the 1980s, was on a coin-op machine where I’d discovered I could get away with trading the 20p piece I’d been given by my parents to use as a deposit on a locker that week for two games on the machine. I wasn’t very good at it, but something about the cutesy graphics and catchy chip-tune music grabbed my attention and it became my favourite arcade game.

Of all the video games about skateboarding cavemen I’ve ever played, it’s my favourite.

I played it once or twice more when I found it in arcades, as an older child. I played various console ports of it and found them disappointing. I tried it a couple of times in MAME. But I didn’t really put any effort into it until a hotel we stayed at during a family holiday to Paris in October had a bank of free-to-play arcade machines rigged with Pandora’s Box clones so they could be used to play a few thousand different arcade classics. Including Wonder Boy.

A young girl in a pink leopard-print top plays Wonder Boy on an arcade cabinet.
Our eldest was particularly taken with Wonder Boy, and by the time we set off for home at the end of our holiday she’d gotten further than I ever had at it (all without spending a single tenpence).

Off the back of all the fun the kids had, it’s perhaps no surprise that I arranged for a similar machine to be delivered to us as a gift “to the family”2 this Christmas.

A large, arcade-cabinet-shaped present, wrapped in black paper and a red ribbon, stands alongside a Christmas tree.
If you look carefully, you can work out which present it it, despite the wrapping.

And so my interest in the game was awakened and I threw easily a hundred pounds worth of free-play games of Wonder Boy3 over the last few days. Until…

…today, I finally defeated the seventh ogre4, saved the kingdom, etc. It was a hell of a battle. I can’t count how many times I pressed the “insert coin” button on that final section, how many little axes I’d throw into the beast’s head while dodging his fireballs, etc.

So yeah, that’s done, now. I guess I can get back to finishing Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap, the 2017 remake of a 1989 game I adored!5 It’s aged amazingly well!

Footnotes

1 This may be the final record for time spent playing a video game before beating it, unless someday I ever achieve a (non-cheating) NetHack ascension.

2 The kids have had plenty of enjoyment out of it so far, but their time on the machine is somewhat eclipsed by Owen playing Street Fighter II Turbo and Streets of Rage on it and, of course, by my rediscovered obsession with Wonder Boy.

3 The arcade cabinet still hasn’t quite paid for itself in tenpences-saved, despite my grinding of Wonder Boy. Yet.

4 I took to calling the end-of-world bosses “ogres” when my friends and I swapped tips for the game back in the late 80s, and I refuse to learn any different name for them.[footnote], saved Tina[footnote]Apparently the love interest has a name. Who knew?

5 I completed the original Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap on a Sega Master System borrowed from my friend Daniel back in around 1990, so it’s not a contender for the list either.

A young girl in a pink leopard-print top plays Wonder Boy on an arcade cabinet.× A large, arcade-cabinet-shaped present, wrapped in black paper and a red ribbon, stands alongside a Christmas tree.×

Woodward Draw

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Screenshot showing a completed game of Woodward Draw; the final word was "goat".

  • Explore the set of 4 letter words
  • Either change one letter of the previous word
  • Or rearrange all the letters of the previous word
  • Find all 105 picture words!

Daniel Linssen (via itch.io)

Woodward Draw by Daniel Linssen is the kind of game that my inner Scrabble player both loves and hates. I’ve been playing on and off for the last three days to complete it, and it’s been great. While not perfectly polished1 and with a few rough edges2, it’s still a great example of what one developer can do with a little time.

It deserves a hat tip of respect, but I hope you’ll give it more than that by going and playing it (it’s free, and you can play online or download a copy3). I should probably check out their other games!

Footnotes

1 At one point the background colour, in order to match a picture word, changed to almost the same colour as the text of the three words to find!

2 The tutorial-like beginning is a bit confusing until you realise that you have to play the turn you’re told to, to begin with, for example.

3 Downloadable version is Windows only.

Werewolves and Wanderer

This blog post is also available as a video. Would you prefer to watch/listen to me tell you about the video game that had the biggest impact on my life?

Of all of the videogames I’ve ever played, perhaps the one that’s had the biggest impact on my life1 was: Werewolves and (the) Wanderer.2

This simple text-based adventure was originally written by Tim Hartnell for use in his 1983 book Creating Adventure Games on your Computer. At the time, it was common for computing books and magazines to come with printed copies of program source code which you’d need to re-type on your own computer, printing being significantly many orders of magnitude cheaper than computer media.3

Front cover of The Amazing Amstrad Omnibus, by Martin Fairbanks, with its bright yellow text on a red background.
Werewolves and Wanderer was adapted for the Amstrad CPC4 by Martin Fairbanks and published in The Amazing Amstrad Omnibus (1985), which is where I first discovered it.
When I first came across the source code to Werewolves, I’d already begun my journey into computer programming. This started alongside my mother and later – when her quantity of free time was not able to keep up with my level of enthusiasm – by myself.

I’d been working my way through the operating manual for our microcomputer, trying to understand it all.5

Scan of a ring-bound page from a technical manual. The page describes the use of the "INPUT" command, saying "This command is used to let the computer know that it is expecting something to be typed in, for example, the answer to a question". The page goes on to provide a code example of a program which requests the user's age and then says "you look younger than [age] years old.", substituting in their age. The page then explains how it was the use of a variable that allowed this transaction to occur.
The ring-bound 445-page A4 doorstep of a book quickly became adorned with my pencilled-in notes, the way a microcomputer manual ought to be. It’s strange to recall that there was a time that beginner programmers still needed to be reminded to press [ENTER] at the end of each line.
And even though I’d typed-in dozens of programs before, both larger and smaller, it was Werewolves that finally helped so many key concepts “click” for me.

In particular, I found myself comparing Werewolves to my first attempt at a text-based adventure. Using what little I’d grokked of programming so far, I’d put together a series of passages (blocks of PRINT statements6) with choices (INPUT statements) that sent the player elsewhere in the story (using, of course, the long-considered-harmful GOTO statement), Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style.

Werewolves was… better.

Photograph of Dan in his mid-teens, with shoulder-length bleached-blonde hair and wearing a t-shirt with a picture of a snarling wolf, sits in front of a running PC (with its beige case open) on which an external modem is precariously balanced.
By the time I was the model of a teenage hacker, I’d been writing software for years. Most of it terrible.

Werewolves and Wanderer was my first lesson in how to structure a program.

Let’s take a look at a couple of segments of code that help illustrate what I mean (here’s the full code, if you’re interested):

10 REM WEREWOLVES AND WANDERER

20 GOSUB 2600:REM INTIALISE
30 GOSUB 160
40 IF RO<>11 THEN 30

50 PEN 1:SOUND 5,100:PRINT:PRINT "YOU'VE DONE IT!!!":GOSUB 3520:SOUND 5,80:PRINT "THAT WAS THE EXIT FROM THE CASTLE!":SOUND 5,200
60 GOSUB 3520
70 PRINT:PRINT "YOU HAVE SUCCEEDED, ";N$;"!":SOUND 5,100
80 PRINT:PRINT "YOU MANAGED TO GET OUT OF THE CASTLE"
90 GOSUB 3520
100 PRINT:PRINT "WELL DONE!"
110 GOSUB 3520:SOUND 5,80
120 PRINT:PRINT "YOUR SCORE IS";
130 PRINT 3*TALLY+5*STRENGTH+2*WEALTH+FOOD+30*MK:FOR J=1 TO 10:SOUND 5,RND*100+10:NEXT J
140 PRINT:PRINT:PRINT:END

...

2600 REM INTIALISE
2610 MODE 1:BORDER 1:INK 0,1:INK 1,24:INK 2,26:INK 3,18:PAPER 0:PEN 2 
2620 RANDOMIZE TIME
2630 WEALTH=75:FOOD=0
2640 STRENGTH=100
2650 TALLY=0
2660 MK=0:REM NO. OF MONSTERS KILLED

...

3510 REM DELAY LOOP
3520 FOR T=1 TO 900:NEXT T
3530 RETURN
Locomotive BASIC had mandatory line numbering. The spacing and gaps (...) have been added for readability/your convenience.

What’s interesting about the code above? Well…

  • The code for “what to do when you win the game” is very near the top. “Winning” is the default state. The rest of the adventure exists to obstruct that. In a language with enforced line numbering and no screen editor7, it makes sense to put fixed-length code at the top… saving space for the adventure to grow below.
  • Two subroutines are called (the GOSUB statements):
    • The first sets up the game state: initialising the screen (2610), the RNG (2620), and player characteristics (26302660). This also makes it easy to call it again (e.g. if the player is given the option to “start over”). This subroutine goes on to set up the adventure map (more on that later).
    • The second starts on line 160: this is the “main game” logic. After it runs, each time, line 40 checks IF RO<>11 THEN 30. This tests whether the player’s location (RO) is room 11: if so, they’ve exited the castle and won the adventure. Otherwise, flow returns to line 30 and the “main game” subroutine happens again. This broken-out loop improving the readability and maintainability of the code.8
  • A common subroutine is the “delay loop” (line 3520). It just counts to 900! On a known (slow) processor of fixed speed, this is a simpler way to put a delay in than relying on a real-time clock.

The game setup gets more interesting still when it comes to setting up the adventure map. Here’s how it looks:

2680 REM SET UP CASTLE
2690 DIM A(19,7):CHECKSUM=0
2700 FOR B=1 TO 19
2710   FOR C=1 TO 7
2720     READ A(B,C):CHECKSUM=CHECKSUM+A(B,C)
2730   NEXT C:NEXT B
2740 IF CHECKSUM<>355 THEN PRINT "ERROR IN ROOM DATA":END

...

2840 REM ALLOT TREASURE
2850 FOR J=1 TO 7
2860   M=INT(RND*19)+1
2870   IF M=6 OR M=11 OR A(M,7)<>0 THEN 2860
2880   A(M,7)=INT(RND*100)+100
2890 NEXT J

2910 REM ALLOT MONSTERS
2920 FOR J=1 TO 6
2930   M=INT(RND*18)+1
2940   IF M=6 OR M=11 OR A(M,7)<>0 THEN 2930
2950   A(M,7)=-J
2960 NEXT J
2970 A(4,7)=100+INT(RND*100)
2980 A(16,7)=100+INT(RND*100)

...

3310 DATA   0,  2,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0
3320 DATA   1,  3,  3,  0,  0,  0,  0
3330 DATA   2,  0,  5,  2,  0,  0,  0
3340 DATA   0,  5,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0
3350 DATA   4,  0,  0,  3, 15, 13,  0
3360 DATA   0,  0,  1,  0,  0,  0,  0
3370 DATA   0,  8,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0
3380 DATA   7, 10,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0
3390 DATA   0, 19,  0,  8,  0,  8,  0
3400 DATA   8,  0, 11,  0,  0,  0,  0
3410 DATA   0,  0, 10,  0,  0,  0,  0
3420 DATA   0,  0,  0, 13,  0,  0,  0
3430 DATA   0,  0, 12,  0,  5,  0,  0
3440 DATA   0, 15, 17,  0,  0,  0,  0
3450 DATA  14,  0,  0,  0,  0,  5,  0
3460 DATA  17,  0, 19,  0,  0,  0,  0
3470 DATA  18, 16,  0, 14,  0,  0,  0
3480 DATA   0, 17,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0
3490 DATA   9,  0, 16,  0,  0,  0,  0
Again, I’ve tweaked this code to improve readability, including adding indention on the loops, “modern-style”, and spacing to make the DATA statements form a “table”.

What’s this code doing?

  • Line 2690 defines an array (DIM) with two dimensions9 (19 by 7). This will store room data, an approach that allows code to be shared between all rooms: much cleaner than my first attempt at an adventure with each room having its own INPUT handler.
  • The two-level loop on lines 2700 through 2730 populates the room data from the DATA blocks. Nowadays you’d probably put that data in a separate file (probably JSON!). Each “row” represents a room, 1 to 19. Each “column” represents the room you end up at if you travel in a given direction: North, South, East, West, Up, or Down. The seventh column – always zero – represents whether a monster (negative number) or treasure (positive number) is found in that room. This column perhaps needn’t have been included: I imagine it’s a holdover from some previous version in which the locations of some or all of the treasures or monsters were hard-coded.
  • The loop beginning on line 2850 selects seven rooms and adds a random amount of treasure to each. The loop beginning on line 2920 places each of six monsters (numbered -1 through -6) in randomly-selected rooms. In both cases, the start and finish rooms, and any room with a treasure or monster, is ineligible. When my 8-year-old self finally deciphered what was going on I was awestruck at this simple approach to making the game dynamic.
  • Rooms 4 and 16 always receive treasure (lines 29702980), replacing any treasure or monster already there: the Private Meeting Room (always worth a diversion!) and the Treasury, respectively.
  • Curiously, room 9 (the lift) defines three exits, even though it’s impossible to take an action in this location: the player teleports to room 10 on arrival! Again, I assume this is vestigal code from an earlier implementation.
  • The “checksum” that’s tested on line 2740 is cute, and a younger me appreciated deciphering it. I’m not convinced it’s necessary (it sums all of the values in the DATA statements and expects 355 to limit tampering) though, or even useful: it certainly makes it harder to modify the rooms, which may undermine the code’s value as a teaching aid!
Map showing the layout of the castle in video game "Werewolves and the Wanderer". Entering from outside the castle, to the West, the player must progress through the ground floor, up the stairwell in the Inner Hallway, into the Lift, and then East to the exit, but there are several opportunities to diverge from this path and e.g. explore the dungeons or various dead ends on the ground or first floors.
By the time I was 10, I knew this map so well that I could draw it perfectly from memory. I almost managed the same today, aged 42. That memory’s buried deep!

Something you might notice is missing is the room descriptions. Arrays in this language are strictly typed: this array can only contain integers and not strings. But there are other reasons: line length limitations would have required trimming some of the longer descriptions. Also, many rooms have dynamic content, usually based on random numbers, which would be challenging to implement in this way.

As a child, I did once try to refactor the code so that an eighth column of data specified the line number to which control should pass to display the room description. That’s a bit of a no-no from a “mixing data and logic” perspective, but a cool example of metaprogramming before I even knew it! This didn’t work, though: it turns out you can’t pass a variable to a Locomotive BASIC GOTO or GOSUB. Boo!10

An experimental program being run that attempts to GOSUB a variable, failing with a syntax error on the relevant line.
In hindsight, I could have tested the functionality before I refactored with a very simple program, but I was only around 10 or 11 and still had lots to learn!

Werewolves and Wanderer has many faults11. But I’m clearly not the only developer whose early skills were honed and improved by this game, or who hold a special place in their heart for it. Just while writing this post, I discovered:

A decade or so later, I’d be taking my first steps as a professional software engineer. A couple more decades later, I’m still doing it.

And perhaps that adventure -the one that’s occupied my entire adult life – was facilitated by this text-based one from the 1980s.

Footnotes

1 The game that had the biggest impact on my life, it might surprise you to hear, is not among the “top ten videogames that stole my life” that I wrote about almost exactly 16 years ago nor the follow-up list I published in its incomplete form three years later. Turns out that time and impact are not interchangable. Who knew?

2 The game is variously known as Werewolves and Wanderer, Werewolves and Wanderers, or Werewolves and the Wanderer. Or, on any system I’ve been on, WERE.BAS, WEREWOLF.BAS, or WEREWOLV.BAS, thanks to the CPC’s eight-point-three filename limit.

3 Additionally, it was thought that having to undertake the (painstakingly tiresome) process of manually re-entering the source code for a program might help teach you a little about the code and how it worked, although this depended very much on how readable the code and its comments were. Tragically, the more comprehensible some code is, the more long-winded the re-entry process.

4 The CPC’s got a fascinating history in its own right, but you can read that any time.

5 One of my favourite features of home microcomputers was that seconds after you turned them on, you could start programming. Your prompt was an interface to a programming language. That magic had begun to fade by the time DOS came to dominate (sure, you can program using batch files, but they’re neither as elegant nor sophisticated as any BASIC dialect) and was completely lost by the era of booting directly into graphical operating systems. One of my favourite features about the Web is that it gives you some of that magic back again: thanks to the debugger in a modern browser, you can “tinker” with other people’s code once more, right from the same tool you load up every time. (Unfortunately, mobile devices – which have fast become the dominant way for people to use the Internet – have reversed this trend again. Try to View Source on your mobile – if you don’t already know how, it’s not an easy job!)

6 In particular, one frustration I remember from my first text-based adventure was that I’d been unable to work around Locomotive BASIC’s lack of string escape sequences – not that I yet knew what such a thing would be called – in order to put quote marks inside a quoted string!

7 “Screen editors” is what we initially called what you’d nowadays call a “text editor”: an application that lets you see a page of text at the same time, move your cursor about the place, and insert text wherever you feel like. It may also provide features like copy/paste and optional overtyping. Screen editors require more resources (and aren’t suitable for use on a teleprinter) compared to line editors, which preceeded them. Line editors only let you view and edit a single line at a time, which is how most of my first 6 years of programming was done.

8 In a modern programming language, you might use while true or similar for a main game loop, but this requires pushing the “outside” position to the stack… and early BASIC dialects often had strict (and small, by modern standards) limits on stack height that would have made this a risk compared to simply calling a subroutine from one line and then jumping back to that line on the next.

9 A neat feature of Locomotive BASIC over many contemporary and older BASIC dialects was its support for multidimensional arrays. A common feature in modern programming languages, this language feature used to be pretty rare, and programmers had to do bits of division and modulus arithmetic to work around the limitation… which, I can promise you, becomes painful the first time you have to deal with an array of three or more dimensions!

10 In reality, this was rather unnecessary, because the ON x GOSUB command can – and does, in this program – accept multiple jump points and selects the one referenced by the variable x.

11 Aside from those mentioned already, other clear faults include: impenetrable controls unless you’ve been given instuctions (although that was the way at the time); the shopkeeper will penalise you for trying to spend money you don’t have, except on food, presumably as a result of programmer laziness; you can lose your flaming torch, but you can’t buy spares in advance (you can pay for more, and you lose the money, but you don’t get a spare); some of the line spacing is sometimes a little wonky; combat’s a bit of a drag; lack of feedback to acknowledge the command you enterted and that it was successful; WHAT’S WITH ALL THE CAPITALS; some rooms don’t adequately describe their exits; the map is a bit linear; etc.

Front cover of The Amazing Amstrad Omnibus, by Martin Fairbanks, with its bright yellow text on a red background.× Scan of a ring-bound page from a technical manual. The page describes the use of the "INPUT" command, saying "This command is used to let the computer know that it is expecting something to be typed in, for example, the answer to a question". The page goes on to provide a code example of a program which requests the user's age and then says "you look younger than [age] years old.", substituting in their age. The page then explains how it was the use of a variable that allowed this transaction to occur.× Photograph of Dan in his mid-teens, with shoulder-length bleached-blonde hair and wearing a t-shirt with a picture of a snarling wolf, sits in front of a running PC (with its beige case open) on which an external modem is precariously balanced.× Map showing the layout of the castle in video game "Werewolves and the Wanderer". Entering from outside the castle, to the West, the player must progress through the ground floor, up the stairwell in the Inner Hallway, into the Lift, and then East to the exit, but there are several opportunities to diverge from this path and e.g. explore the dungeons or various dead ends on the ground or first floors.× An experimental program being run that attempts to GOSUB a variable, failing with a syntax error on the relevant line.×

Satoru Iwata’s first commercial game has a secret

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Codex (YouTube)

This was a delightful vlog. It really adds personality to what might otherwise have been a story only about technology and history.

I subscribed to Codex’s vlog like… four years ago? He went dark soon afterwards, but thanks to the magic of RSS, I got notified as soon as he came back from his hiatus.

Sisyphus: The Board Game (Digital Edition)

I’m off work sick today: it’s just a cold, but it’s had a damn good go at wrecking my lungs and I feel pretty lousy. You know how when you’ve got too much of a brain-fog to trust yourself with production systems but you still want to write code (or is that just me?), so this morning I threw together a really, really stupid project which you can play online here.

Screenshot showing Sisyphus carrying a rock up a long numbered gameboard; he's on square 993 out of 1000, but (according to the rules printed below the board) he needs to land on 1000 exactly and never roll a double-1 or else he returns to the start.
It’s a board game. Well, the digital edition of one. Also, it’s not very good.

It’s inspired by a toot by Mason”Tailsteak” Williams (whom I’ve mentioned before once or twice). At first I thought I’d try to calculate the odds of winning at his proposed game, or how many times one might expect to play before winning, but I haven’t the brainpower for that in my snot-addled brain. So instead I threw together a terrible, terrible digital implementation.

Go play it if, like me, you’ve got nothing smarter that your brain can be doing today.

All the game descriptions from the sale

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Video game poster for "It's Probably Fine", showing a woman driving with red and blue lights behind her.

You’ve got 37 unpaid parking tickets. You just got pulled over for speeding. In your defense, you were texting your sister about how drunk you are. Plus there’s all that blood on your windshield. Obviously you know it’s deer blood, but the police officers walking toward your vehicle don’t. Still, in the time it takes them to figure that out, maybe you’ll sober up. Or escape on foot! Either way, it’ll probably be fine.

User Tags: Poor Choices / Story Rich / Multiple Endings / Parkour

Video game poster for Dead Seagull Zoo Magnate, showing dead seagulls in a cartoony style.

Collect dead seagulls and build a zoo to house them all. Beautify the zoo with artistic flair and deodorizing sprays. Design creative group promotions to stir up interest! Is that a customer? You’d better hope it’s not the owner of the live seagull zoo down the street, because he’s probably got some questions.

User Tags: Hard Work / Supply / Demand / Diseases & Parasites

Claire Hummel produced fake video game art for the Steam Summer Sale, which was already excellent, but when @g-a-y-g-o-y-l-e reblogged, asking for more context, Claire delivered and then some. Every single one of these “game descriptions” is a special kind of comedy gold… and yet somehow believable from the store that sells us Dream Daddy, IKEA VR Pancake Kitchen, Organ Trail, Oh… Sir!! The Insult Simulator, and Goat Simulator (all of which I own copies of). Go read the full list.

Video game poster for "It's Probably Fine", showing a woman driving with red and blue lights behind her.× Video game poster for Dead Seagull Zoo Magnate, showing dead seagulls in a cartoony style.×

DNDle (Wordle, but with D&D monster stats)

Don’t have time to read? Just start playing:

Play DNDle

There’s a Wordle clone for everybody

Am I too late to get onto the “making Wordle clones” bandwagon? Probably; there are quite a few now, including:

Screenshot showing a WhatsApp conversation. Somebody shares a Wordle-like "solution" board but it's got six columns, not five. A second person comments "Hang on a minute... that's not Wordle!"
I’m sure that by now all your social feeds are full of people playing Wordle. But the cool nerds are playing something new…

Now, a Wordle clone for D&D players!

But you know what hasn’t been seen before today? A Wordle clone where you have to guess a creature from the Dungeons & Dragons (5e) Monster Manual by putting numeric values into a character sheet (STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS, CHA):

Screenshot of DNDle, showing two guesses made already.
Just because nobody’s asking for a game doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make it anyway.

What are you waiting for: go give DNDle a try (I pronounce it “dindle”, but you can pronounce it however you like). A new monster appears at 10:00 UTC each day.

And because it’s me, of course it’s open source and works offline.

The boring techy bit

  • Like Wordle, everything happens in your browser: this is a “backendless” web application.
  • I’ve used ReefJS for state management, because I wanted something I could throw together quickly but I didn’t want to drown myself (or my players) in a heavyweight monster library. If you’ve not used Reef before, you should give it a go: it’s basically like React but a tenth of the footprint.
  • A cache-first/background-updating service worker means that it can run completely offline: you can install it to your homescreen in the same way as Wordle, but once you’ve visited it once it can work indefinitely even if you never go online again.
  • I don’t like to use a buildchain that’s any more-complicated than is absolutely necessary, so the only development dependency is rollup. It resolves my import statements and bundles a single JS file for the browser.
Screenshot showing a WhatsApp conversation. Somebody shares a Wordle-like "solution" board but it's got six columns, not five. A second person comments "Hang on a minute... that's not Wordle!"×

Taking a Jackbox Zoom Party to the Next Level

A love a good Jackbox Game. There’s nothing quite like sitting around the living room playing Drawful, Champ’d Up, Job Job, Trivia Murder Party, or Patently Stupid. But nowadays getting together in the same place isn’t as easy as it used to be, and as often as not I find my Jackbox gaming with friends or coworkers takes place over Zoom, Around, Google Meet or Discord.

There’s lots of guides to doing this – even an official one! – but they all miss a few pro tips that I think can turn a good party into a great party. Get all of this set up before your guests are due to arrive to make yourself look like a super-prepared digital party master.

1. Use two computers!

Two laptops: one showing a full-screen Zoom chat with Dan and "Jackbox Games"; the second showing a windowed copy of Jackbox Party Pack 8.
You can use more than two, but two should be considered the minimum for the host.

Using one computer for your video call and a second one to host the game (in addition to the device you’re using to play the games, which could be your phone) is really helpful for several reasons:

  • You can keep your video chat full-screen without the game window getting in the way, letting you spend more time focussed on your friends.
  • Your view of the main screen can be through the same screen-share that everybody else sees, helping you diagnose problems. It also means you experience similar video lag to everybody else, keeping things fair!
  • You can shunt the second computer into a breakout room, giving your guests the freedom to hop in and out of a “social” space and a “gaming” space at will. (You can even set up further computers and have multiple different “game rooms” running at the same time!)

2. Check the volume

3.5mm adapter plugged into the headphone port on a laptop.
Plugging an adapter into the headphone port tricks the computer into thinking some headphones are plugged in without actually needing the headphones quietly buzzing away on your desk.

Connect some headphones to the computer that’s running the game (or set up a virtual audio output device if you’re feeling more technical). This means you can still have the game play sounds and transmit them over Zoom, but you’ll only hear the sounds that come through the screen share, not the sounds that come through the second computer too.

That’s helpful, because (a) it means you don’t get feedback or have to put up with an echo at your end, and (b) it means you’ll be hearing the game exactly the same as your guests hear it, allowing you to easily tweak the volume to a level that allows for conversation over it.

3. Optimise the game settings

Jackbox games were designed first and foremost for sofa gaming, and playing with friends over the Internet benefits from a couple of changes to the default settings.

Sometimes the settings can be found in the main menu of a party pack, and sometimes they’re buried in the game itself, so do your research and know your way around before your party starts.

Jackbox settings screen showing Master Volume at 20%, Music Volume at 50%, and Full-screen Mode disabled

Turn the volume down, especially the volume of the music, so you can have a conversation over the game. I’d also recommend disabling Full-screen Mode: this reduces the resolution of the game, meaning there’s less data for your video-conferencing software to stream, and makes it easier to set up screen sharing without switching back and forth between your applications (see below).

Jackbox accessibility settings: Subtitles, Motion Sensitivity, and Extended Timers are turned on.
Turning on the Motion Sensitivity or Reduce Background Animations option if your game has it means there’ll be less movement in the background of the game. This can really help with the video compression used in videoconferencing software, meaning players on lower-speed connections are less-likely to experience lag or “blockiness” in busy scenes.

It’s worth considering turning Subtitles on so that guests can work out what word they missed (which for the trivia games can be a big deal). Depending on your group, Extended Timers is worth considering too: the lag introduced by videoconferencing can frustrate players who submit answers at the last second only to discover that – after transmission delays – they missed the window! Extended Timers don’t solve that, but they do mean that such players are less-likely to end up waiting to the last second in the first place.

Jackbox game content settings; "Filter US-centric content" is switched on.
Finally: unless the vast majority or all of your guests are in the USA, you might like to flip the Filter US-Centric Content switch so that you don’t get a bunch of people scratching their heads over a cultural reference that they just don’t get.

By the way, you can use your cursor keys and enter to operate Jackbox games menus, which is usually easier than fiddling with a mouse.

4. Optimise Zoom’s settings

MacOS desktop showing a Jackbox game running and Zoom being configured to show a "portion of screen".
A few quick tweaks to your settings can make all the difference to how great the game looks.

Whatever videoconferencing platform you’re using, the settings for screen sharing are usually broadly similar. I suggest:

  • Make sure you’ve ticked “Share sound” or a similar setting that broadcasts the game’s audio: in some games, this is crucial; in others, it’s nice-to-have. Use your other computer to test how it sounds and tweak the volume accordingly.
  • Check “Optimize for video clip”; this hints to your videoconferencing software that all parts of the content could be moving at once so it can use the same kind of codec it would for sending video of your face. The alternative assumes that most of the screen will stay static (because it’s the desktop, the background of your slides, or whatever), which works better with a different kind of codec.
  • Use “Portion of Screen” sharing rather than selecting the application. This ensures that you can select just the parts of the application that have content in, and not “black bars”, window chrome and the like, which looks more-professional as well as sending less data over the connection.
  • If your platform allows it, consider making the mouse cursor invisible in the shared content: this means that you won’t end up with an annoying cursor sitting in the middle of the screen and getting in the way of text, and makes menu operation look slicker if you end up using the mouse instead of the keyboard for some reason.

Don’t forget to shut down any software that might “pop up” notifications: chat applications, your email client, etc.: the last thing you want is somebody to send you a naughty picture over WhatsApp and the desktop client to show it to everybody else in your party!

Two laptops: one showing a full-screen Zoom chat with Dan and "Jackbox Games"; the second showing a windowed copy of Jackbox Party Pack 8.× 3.5mm adapter plugged into the headphone port on a laptop.× MacOS desktop showing a Jackbox game running and Zoom being configured to show a "portion of screen".× Jackbox settings screen showing Master Volume at 20%, Music Volume at 50%, and Full-screen Mode disabled× Jackbox accessibility settings: Subtitles, Motion Sensitivity, and Extended Timers are turned on.× Jackbox game content settings; "Filter US-centric content" is switched on.×

Tick Tock

Looking for something with an “escape room” vibe for our date night this week, Ruth and I tried Tick Tock: A Tale for Two, a multiplayer simultaneous cooperative play game for two people, produced by Other Tales Interactive. It was amazing and I’d highly recommend it.

Tick Tock screenshot showing a mysterious machine with many buttons. The machine is switched on and the screen shows a wolf's head and the number "-2". The buttons show a bug, an hourglass, a snake, a wolf's head, a keyhole, a cog, a raven, a doll, and a section of railway track.
If you enjoyed the puzzles of Myst but you only want to spend about an hour, not the rest of your life, solving then, this might be the game for you.

The game’s available on a variety of platforms: Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, and Nintendo Switch. We opted for the Android version because, thanks to Google Play Family Library, this meant we only had to buy one copy  (you need it installed on both devices you’re playing it on, although both devices don’t have to be of the same type: you could use an iPhone and a Nintendo Switch for example).

Screenshot from Tick Tock: an old-fashioned wireless radio set produces a scramble of letters in the air.
I can’t read that text. But if I could, it still wouldn’t make much sense without my partner’s input.

The really clever bit from a technical perspective is that the two devices don’t communicate with one another. You could put your devices in flight mode and this game would still work just fine! Instead, the gameplay functions by, at any given time, giving you either (a) a puzzle for which the other person’s device will provide the solution, or (b) a puzzle that you both share, but for which each device only gives you half of the clues you need. By working as a team and communicating effectively (think Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes but without the time pressure), you and your partner will solve the puzzles and progress the plot.

(We’re purists for this kind of puzzle game so we didn’t look at one another’s screens, but I can see how it’d be tempting to “cheat” in this way, especially given that even the guys in the trailer do so!)

Nopepad showing handwritten notes including: "Ticket stub 00067", "Clock shop open 18th", and "Set clock 12".
You could probably play successfully without keeping notes, but we opted to grab a pad and pen at one point.

The puzzles start easy enough, to the extent that we were worried that the entire experience might not be challenging for us. But the second of the three acts proved us wrong and we had to step up our communication and coordination, and the final act had one puzzle that had us scratching our heads for some time! Quite an enjoyable difficulty curve, but still balanced to make sure that we got to a solution, together, in the end. That’s a hard thing to achieve in a game, and deserves praise.

Tick Tock screenshot: among other documents, we examine a schematic for the construction of a mechanical raven's wing.
The art style and user interface is simple and intuitive, leaving you to focus on the puzzles.

The plot is a little abstract at times and it’s hard to work out exactly what role we, the protagonists, play until right at the end. That’s a bit of a shame, but not in itself a reason to reject this wonderful gem of a game. We spent 72 minutes playing it, although that includes a break in the middle to eat a delivery curry.

If you’re looking for something a bit different for a quiet night in with somebody special, it’s well worth a look.

Tick Tock screenshot showing a mysterious machine with many buttons. The machine is switched on and the screen shows a wolf's head and the number "-2". The buttons show a bug, an hourglass, a snake, a wolf's head, a keyhole, a cog, a raven, a doll, and a section of railway track.× Screenshot from Tick Tock: an old-fashioned wireless radio set produces a scramble of letters in the air.× Nopepad showing handwritten notes including: "Ticket stub 00067", "Clock shop open 18th", and "Set clock 12".× Tick Tock screenshot: among other documents, we examine a schematic for the construction of a mechanical raven's wing.×

How to beat Skyrim without walking

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

I don’t normally watch videos of other people playing video games. I’m even less inclined to watch “walkthroughs”.

This, though, isn’t a walkthrough. It’s basically the opposite of a walkthrough: this is somebody (slowly, painstakingly) playing through Skyrim: Special Edition without using any of the movement controls (WASD/left stick) whatsoever. Wait, what? How is such a thing possible?

That’s what makes the video so compelling. The creator used so many bizarre quirks and exploits to even make this crazy stupid idea work at all. Like (among many, many more):

  • Dragging a bucket towards yourself to “push” yourself backwards (although not upstairs unless you do some very careful pushing “under” your feet).
  • Doing an unarmed heavy attack to “stumble” forward a little at a time, avoiding the stamina loss by eating vegetable soup or by cancelling the attack (e.g. by switching quickselected arrows), which apparently works better if you’re overencumbered.
  • Mid-stumble, consuming a reagent that paralyses yourself to glitch through thin doors. Exploit a bug in dropping gear for your companion near an area-change doorway to get all of the reagent you’ll ever need.
  • Rush-grinding your way to the Whirlwind Sprint shout and Vampire Lord “Bats” ability so you’ve got a way to move forward quickly, then pairing them with paralysis to catapult yourself across the map.
  • When things get desperate, exploiting the fact that you can glitch-teleport yourself places by commanding your companion to go somewhere, quicksaving before they get there, then quickloading to appear there yourself.

This video’s just beautiful: the cumulation of what must be hundreds or thousands of person-hours of probing the “edges” of Skyrim‘s engine to discover all of the potentially exploitable bugs that make it possible.

Banners Begone!

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

It’s a clicker quest of purging banners from your homepage!

Push through dozens of banners and upgrade various web-tools to grow your ad-blocking power.
Hone your clicking skills – matters are in your own fingers hands!

There’s no time for idling, show these ads their place!

I quite enjoyed this progressive game: it’s a little bit different than most, the theming is fun, it lends itself to multiple strategies, and it’s not geared towards making you wait for longer and longer intervals (as is common in this genre): there’s always something you can be doing to get closer to your goal.

You’ll need a mouse with left and right buttons.

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