Games

By Ryan, 7 October, 2023

I'm a lifelong video game enthusiast. My brother and I cut our teeth on Atari 2600, Commodore 64/128, and NES games, eventually learning to develop our own in BASIC, QBasic, C (long live MUDs!), and FreeBASIC (a modernized, open source QuickBASIC derivative).

For all that I enjoyed games, including many plays through Super Mario 3 or youth group battles in Starcraft and Descent, I never got too sucked into any one game. I own hundreds, but I've actually completed very few. (And despite playing dozens of roguelikes, Brogue is the only one I've beaten.) Instead, I always tended to prefer the experience of making them - learning to reproduce certain mechanics, trying new concepts, riffing on themes, and working within constraints. 

In short, the best "game" to me was the experience of making a game, and sharing my works in progress with friends was as fun to me as actually completing a game.

All that leads to the point of this post: I recently decided to learn how to make games in Roblox, the global gaming phenomenon that I've heard about over the years but somehow never even looked at until last week. A friend from the QB / FB forums had recently published one there and I wanted to check it out, and then of course, having experienced his, I then had to try my hand at making my own.

By Ryan, 13 July, 2023

Generally speaking, I prefer my children play the "real deal" when it comes to games like Minecraft. Cloning and remixing is fine as far as it goes, but most clones end up as cheap attempts to copy an original for free for the sake of generating ad revenue. The price of the game is lower than the price of the privacy you're forfeiting and the control you have over the experience for your kids.

Simply put: I don't want my children's free time monetized by these companies, nor do I want them exposed to the content of certain advertisements.

By Ryan, 12 September, 2008

I've always been a big fan of ASCII based games. If I sit down to toy with a project, more often than not I'm doing something ASCII. I was never a great artist, but I loved Roguelikes (ADOM being my favorite) and had a mind to write a multi-player Roguelike back in the day.