for thinking people
April 22, 2024
It’s been a while since I made a game. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, the previous effort was about a year ago, with The Clock Village. This time I thought to make something far simpler, so here’s Letteract, a card game with words. Like all my games and programs, it’s free and ad-free.
The setup and rules are very simple, as you will see. The program didn’t take more than two or three days to put together, and another few to polish some details.
April 24, 2023
The Clock Village, my latest programming project, is first and foremost an interactive fiction experience. Only nominally could one also call it a modern text adventure game, like my earlier Mansion Escape.
In other words, though in this process as a “player” you move around, engage in interactive dialogues, collect and use items, and try to increase the score that will let you get a “better” ending, I prefer to see The Clock Village as something more artistic.
Perhaps it’s a philosophical exploration of self. Or maybe a short interactive reflection of our innermost existential anxieties. Maybe, like true art, it simply is what its experiencer wants it to be
March 21, 2022
First of all, a necessary disclaimer: If you came here expecting to find a ready video game version of the popular board game, Forbidden Island, I’m afraid I’ll disappoint you. This post does show my efforts in creating a Forbidden Island JavaScript app, but I can’t share the program with you. I can’t even share the JavaScript code with you.
You see, the game is – obviously enough – copyrighted. It would be both illegal and unethical to the creator of the game, Matt Leacock, to offer anything I’ve made (even for free).
However, worry not. Not only will I describe my thought process behind turning Forbidden Island into a JavaScript/PHP app – which might help you code one yourself, if you so wish – but, more importantly, I’ll share with you a discovery I’ve made.
This discovery is useful to all of us, gamers or not, coders or not.
I discovered that the most genuine form of creation comes when not only do you have no expectations, but when you can’t even have any expectations. In other words, the most genuine way to create something artistic is a result of knowing it will only be made for the sake of making it.
