A web log
Like the Metaverse, Play-to-Earn ( P2E ) has mostly retreated from the headlines but I’m sure it is one of those zombie ideas that won’t stay dead for long. The core promise of P2E was that players could - through gameplay and engagement - earn actual real world cash. In broad sense, this isn’t exactly new: things like gold farming, account boosting, eSports tournaments, and user-generated content…
As multiplayer games grew in popularity, matchmaking - the backend machinery that decides who plays with whom - became far more noticeable. Back in the old days of lobbies, people more or less randomly piled together to play a game. However, people vary in skill and experience so wouldn’t it make sense to group people of equal skill to play together so that everyone can have a good time and not…
A long time ago I saw a presentation by Eric Seufert on Using (Free!) App Annie data to optimize your next game [1] . The idea was to do market research by taking the daily iOS Top Grossing chart positions of games and then do a linear regression of them and so filter down to games that have a positive coefficient over time. It’s really rough but does give some indication about games’ life cycles…
Fortunately, the Metaverse boom seems to have mostly blown over by now, entirely enclipsed by the AI one. However, in the last five years, metaverse seemed to ride the hype cycle with cryptocurrencies, VR , NFT s, and Fornite and Roblox . The latter were definitely the technology triggers for the hype, the building blocks for the promised evolution of virtual worlds. For a good look of the peak of…
Ten years ago, I wrote about The Million Ways to Markup Your Content , where I covered the then main ways (HTML5, Microdata, Microformats, OGP , JSON-LD ) to mark up one’s content for the semantic web , or more accurately for the search engines. When I last year moved my blog to Eleventy , I wrote my layouts from scratch and left most of the semantic markup to the floor for a couple of reasons.…
Vuonna 2011 tein yhdessä parin kaverin kanssa harrasteprojektina Verokuitti -palvelun, jossa käyttäjä kykeni tutkimaan valtion budjettia syöttämällä vuositulonsa ja sivu visualisoi valtion menojen osuuden tälle käyttäjälle kauppakuitin muodossa. Palvelu voitti 2011 Apps4Finland-gaalassa Helsingin Sanomien erikoispalkinnon vuoden parhaasta tietojournalismista. Seuraavana vuonna se oli ehdolla…
Welcome to the 5th edition of this web log! For the past decade or so, this website was built with Jekyll . However, in the past few years my hodge podge of an asset pipeline built on Gulp meant that publishing anything started to become very difficult. Today, this website is built using Eleventy [1] , switching Jekyll’s Ruby to more web native Javascript. The main user facing changes are sharper…
Last year I translated DURF , a rules-light dungeon-fantasy tabletop role-playing game to Finnish . This was made possible by the permissive Creative Commons license on the game. Now I found some time to translate the System Reference Document ( SRD ) of micro RPG sci-fi series 2400 as well. You can find the translation on Itch . Again, this was possible because the 24XX rules are available on a…
Atom feeds add one burden to the publisher, your entries require a lasting, well-formed unique identifier [1] , if you intend to follow the specification . Other formats do not add as strict rules, RSS and JSON Feed only require it to be unique, although JSON Feed relaxes it further to only be locally unique. Both usually advocate for the post’s URL (or permalink ), but this isn’t necessarily the…
Since 2020, I’ve been pretty good at completing around 30 books a year [1] . It’s time again for a short rundown of most of the books that I read this year. Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson This was my first read from Sanderson’s profilic body of work. I backed his Kickstarter, A Year of Sanderson , which promised four (already-written) novels throughout 2023. I managed to read two of…
In addition to translating DURF to Finnish , I found myself working on another RPG -related project. And again, it involved a lot of interesting side quests to get it done. Traveller is an older science-fiction role-playing game, the first edition was published in 1977. It’s been since revised in multiple different editions. A facsimile version of the 1981 edition of the first three books [1] are…
Last year, I ended up reading a bunch of RPG rulebooks . One of them was DURF , a rules-light dungeon-fantasy RPG in the vein of games like Knave , Troika! and Into the Odd . And like many indie RPGs , it’s available with a permissive license to build upon or transform, in this case with a Creative Commons license [1] . I’m not exactly sure what drove me to translate this exact RPG [2] , but it’s…
This year, I ended up reading a bunch of role-playing books. To date, I haven’t really ever played a tabletop roleplaying game [1] . They never really were a thing in my circles when I was growing up as far as I was aware and I wasn’t really ever interested in swords and sorcery that much. Anyway, I wasn’t totally new to them. Like many others, I had been listening to an actual play podcast, in my…
I have participated in Goodreads’ Reading Challenge since 2011 and last year failed to read my usual annual goal, 10 books. This year I hit a new record of reading 30 books [1] . This achivement can be attributed at least indirectly to the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, because through lockdowns I learnt about my local libary’s ebook services . It is funny how much more motivation having 14 day…
Recently, Microsoft has released more information about their upcoming games and plans for the next generation. The overarching strategy of Microsoft seems to be to make Xbox a service and having Xbox not just anywhere, but everywhere. Examples of this strategy are Halo Infinite , the return of Microsoft Flight Simulator and challenges in bringing xCloud to Apple’s devices. During Xbox Games…