Playing at making games since 2010. Because development IS the best game.
Hey, everyone. Sorry for the dearth of recent updates. Readers who come to No Time To Play for the links might be happy to hear there's now a dedicated page in the Adventure & RPG section. It even has a couple of links added this spring! Also, several older links now have dates and were placed in chronological order. Thanks, and enjoy.
Here comes my first big update for 2022: a new article in my popular series about scripting languages. Thank you very much to all my readers for sticking around. I plan to try and keep this site going. Meanwhile, enjoy!
Oops, this feed badly needs an update. Maybe I'll find more energy for it now that the blog is ended (click through for details). To answer a question many people have asked after the final post: I intend to keep the site up, and continue to update it, for as long as I can. Unfortunately, that's not worth much lately, but here's to hoping. Happy New Year in 2022!
Oh, whoops! Forgot to tell you the last time, so now it has to be two-in-one: I finally added the long-missing strategy and arcade subsections to the game page. They're kind of thin right now: turns out I wrote surprisingly little about either subject over time. Oh well, it will be easier to fill in pages that exist than to start from scratch. I'll consider it an incentive. Stick around!
As part of the ongoing efforts to improve the website, I finally started adding syntax highlighting, via the popular highlight.js; for now it's only on the BSP howto linked from this item, but it's looking good and more pages will get the same treatment soon. Enjoy!
In the way of (belated) spring cleaning, the link section is now running new software; content was filtered and reorganized to take advantage of it. And yes, I even found a dead one. More details tomorrow, in this week's newsletter.
After adding a dedicated page on the site for the most well-represented game genre in my portfolio, it was time for the second most numerous. So as of this week there's also one for shmups, that also promptly adopted some of the content that used to sit in other corners. More tricky was figuring out where to place the banner, but I found it a good place. Take a look!
Well, that was a big oops. Did you know many of the links in the archive section were broken? They were still pointing out at the old locations of various articles, possibly because the wiki was still in flux when I migrated the newsletters. Only noticed thanks to a random referral, and spend yesterday afternoon fixing things. Better late than never! And yes, there's still a few broken links…
This has been on our homepage for a while, but just in case you're sticking to RSS: for bureaucratic reasons, all books sold under the No Time To Play name are now on Gumroad. That's less than ideal (the price can't vary for instance), but it does mean you can continue supporting us while actually getting something in return. Hopefully better solutions will (re)emerge.
After a big exhausting project, I figured it was time to unwind a little. So this time it's not one big game, but instead a whole album of little games. All whimsical and unpolished, of course, but still plenty fun. And it's not even done yet. Just done enough to show off. So enjoy, and stay tuned!
I've been silent after Christmas, mainly because of the two months spent working on a new game. Then after releasing it on itch.io I kind of forgot to also make a page for it here. Another week later, this omission is corrected. Thank you for being with me still.
Enjoy the holidays, and keep in mind that beginning after New Year the weekly newsletter will first be posted to the new blog, and only archived to the main website next December. I have a surprise addition to the formula, too. But don't unsubscribe from this newsfeed yet, there will still be news to be had here!
I'd just like to remind everyone that as of two days ago _Electric Rogue_ is complete and available on itch.io, where you can show your support. An article about the graphics engine and plans for the future is in the planning stage. Thank you.
And so we get to the last edition of 2017. From the summary: the release of ASCII Mapper, the 13th anniversary of KOTOR 2 and tales from the prehistory of multiplayer online games. Enjoy the holidays, and see you next year!
One good thing about this new format is that even with very few links I can still make a newsletter in what passed for the usual length since the summer of 2015. From the summary: the gameplay of Electric Rogue, an interview with the creator of Pong and breadth versus depth in games. Thanks for reading!
It's only the second issue in the new format, and I can't believe how well it's working out. In summary: _Electric Rogue_ gets new features, text adventures are big news again, the challenges of selling the same on mobile, and a write-up on game difficulty. Have fun!
As promised, the first newsletter of the new series is here. Highlights include the announcement of a new game (and a map editor to go with it), two articles about roguelikes and their history, and a zine about procedural generation. Enjoy!
Hey, everyone. As you can see, I couldn't perform the promised transition on time, so we all get another day's reprieve. Otherwise, it's business as usual. Work on [Electric Rogue][electric] has continued, though it's nothing to warrant new screenshots -- mostly just nailing the core mechanic and game balance. Except for last weekend, which I spent making [a little interactive vignette][alone] in…
While this site isn't actively updated anymore, I still follow the news, and sometimes want to bookmark a headline. But this site used to have a linklog before, and it was a failure; besides, it feels like work now. So how about a simple webpage, updated by hand as things come up? One could call it a "rolling log" or some such.
Attack Vector is no longer available for download. This has been the case for a while but went unnoticed. The game's web page has been updated accordingly.
Several games in the roguelike section are now embedded from itch.io instead of self-hosted.
Sometimes it's hard to find the right place for a thing. My very first programming language tutorial moved back and forth once between this and my other site. And now it's back as a permanent mirror, in the archive section where it belongs, and with some tweaks for the modern internet. Hope someone finds this nostalgic!
Small update today, but it leaves room for improvements later: I added a page about diagramming languages to the graphics aisle. Not a new one; it's mirrored from my personal website, because reasons. If anything, it fits better here.
Almost forgot to post here again, but there's a batch of new pages on the wiki, one new, others copied from existing sections. Some patterns are starting to show, and that might mean more text soon.
One of the last parts of the site that's still actively maintained, the retrocomputing page now has a new section and better link selection, in addition to receiving a cleanup.
It's been a while, but I just added a page about ASCII art games to the wiki, not to mention a few links here and there.
Told you this site ain't dead. I just fixed some broken links in old articles from the Adventure and RPG section, and refreshed the metadata while at it. More to come.
While the site is now in maintenance mode, I still update it. These days, mostly the graphics section, specifically some new links, and better organization. Not gone yet!
Turns out there was one more place to fix: the newsletter archive for 2018, since it coexisted with the old wiki (in fact it was initially on Tumblr; good thing I grabbed all the posts way back then). Naturally, other problems stood out while doing that, so things took more fixing than expected. But it's all for the best.
After the recent changes in site structure, it turned out that a lot of links from the blog archive no longer pointed to the right places. Some of them had been wrong for years! They're mostly fixed now, apart from one article that's still trapped in the wiki backups, and another (part of Book 2) that vanished entirely, so I'll have to grab it from the manuscript instead. But I'll get to them…
The untimely demise of the wiki spurred me into action, and I recovered no less than four old articles about browser game development from backup. See at the end of the (newly rechristened) gamedev page.
Apologies for the long silence. I should probably thank my long-time host for this kick in the pants. With the wiki down and uploads being difficult for a while, it's time to shift the focus back towards the long-neglected homepage, starting with named sections and a new social media link. Going forward, most activity will be elsewhere, but keep following this feed. Thank you.
Took me a while, but as promised back in August, my project to expand the retrocomputing section continues, this time with a page about the Decker authoring tool. In turn, these new pages found their way in the interactive link directory I added not so long ago and forgot to announce. In retrospect they belong under Tools and Engines, but oh well. Hope this helps!
It's been a while since the last notable change in site structure. This one is small, too. I'm just trying to use the Links section a little better, and the only part that saw updates lately is the retrocomputing page. So I added one about my latest interest, the QBJS compiler. Hopefully just the first in a new series of lighter, fun pages about little things. This time sooner than ten months,…
Oops! A couple of weeks ago I installed a module on the wiki with plans to use it in the future. Instead, it broke the journal, and I only noticed belately. Oh well, it's fixed now. Even better, now OddMuse is finally upgraded to the latest version, so that should help.
Great news, everyone! Thanks to a new app I developed for just this sort of thing, the old articles that went into Book One of No Time to Play now have their own section on the site, complete with illustrations. Links have been updated, and the formatting cleaned up, but little else. Space on the wiki will be freed in the near future.