I have always liked gamebooks with interesting game mechanics (not so much the traditional CYOA or Fighting Fantasy) and one great source for that in the past was the annual Windhammer Prize for Short Gamebook Fiction that ran from 2008-2015. I believe all the books are still available for download. Many interesting experiments there and I really enjoyed some books (but it was a while ago and I can't name any of my favorites now).
The Lindenbaum Compatition is a newer attempt to do something similar and it has also resulted in some books that I enjoyed reading/playing several of the books from the first year (have not taken the time to look into the entries this year):
As much as I dislike AI slop, one of the first things I did when I first saw Chat GPT was to generate some gamebooks to use as test input-data for my gamebook-generator script. Description with a graph showing one of the stories:
https://intfiction.org/t/pangamebook/52856/17
It was useful for making those test gamebooks. I also thought (too much) about how it would be possible to use a LLM to generate gamebooks, but probably best to first randomly generate some kind of structure (directed graph) for the story and then make many smaller prompts to ask for the book to be written one branch at a time. However even if I ever get around to experiment with that I will certainly not release any code (or slop) because AI-generated gamebooks seems like the last thing the world needs.
It is old, but I do not know of any other books really on this topic. I enjoyed reading it anyway. One of the documents in it describes a simple manual algorithm for how to number the sections in a reasonable way (just randomly assigning numbers is not very reasonable, as anyone will learn from reading a book where the author did that). I implemented that in a simple pandoc filter:
He also makes some (non-free) tools that are fun (says me, not a real game dev or artist).
Asset Forge is for combining 3D models into bigger models. Fun to quickly bash his various free models together to make something more complex. Also comes with a bunch of sets of building blocks. I believe he used this tool to make many of the free assets.
Kenney Shape is like a simple pixel editor, except you also set the height of each pixel and then export the result to a 3D model. Can't explain it well, but it is fun.
I have learned it (somewhat) by playing around in TIC-80 and Löve2D (including LoveDOS).
Both Lua and Fennel are tiny languages. You can skim all the documentation in a short evening. Fennel does not even have its own standard library, so keep the Lua documentation close at hand.
I appreciate the simplicity of both Lua and Fennel. There are some ugly parts, but all languages have those.
Janet (later project by Fennel's creator) is a nicer language that is also portable and embeddable, and has a nice standard library, but Fennel runs anywhere Lua runs. Janet is great just on its own for scripting and not sure I would want to use Fennel for that anywhere Janet is available. But as a way to script games in e.g. Löve2D it seems like an excellent choice.
I looked at the documentation, saw it looked like a lot of stuff to learn, and went back to my plain org-mode files. Not sure what it is I miss out on?
What? Is that a common problem? And where are those text-only apps anyway? I have installed Termux and some vim app and a few interactive fiction games that are all text. Are those somehow causing trouble by not having enough graphics to look high quality enough for Google?
But Google Translate is correct about Dutch. It was just not one of the languages I tried before. I do not think it is a particularly difficult case for translation.
The reason I checked was in my native Swedish there is only one word (labyrint).
Was it really always two different things even in English? I looked the words up in Gutenberg's public domain Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (1890?) a labyrinth there was "an ornamental maze" ... "Labyrinth, originally; the name of an edifice or excavation, carries the idea of design, and construction in a
permanent form, while maze is used of anything confused or confusing,
whether fixed or shifting. We speak of the labyrinth of the ear, or of the
mind, and of a labyrinth of difficulties; but of the mazes of the
dance, the mazes of political intrigue, or of the mind being in a
maze." And from the definition of maze: "A confusing and baffling network, as of paths or passages; an intricacy; a labyrinth". Did the meaning drift a bit since then or was it only in mathematics that the words began to be used in the way that they are often used now for branching vs non-branching mazes?
This killed FreeDOS (and presumably all the other *DOS as well) on modern hardware unfortunately. It was fun as long as it lasted. I do not know what the next-best single-user, single-process, non-bloated OS would be to run on modern hardware that still has some reasonably modern software and can be used for distraction-free (hobby) development the way FreeDOS could.
I like mazes and I saw that distinction be made before, but I am not sure how universally accepted it is? Other than English how many languages even have two different words? I spent some time now on Google Translate and the only language I find (not that I tried ALL) is Finnish. Modern Greek for instance uses the same word (assuming Google is correct), so did people on Crete, whatever their language was, even have two different words?
I take notes in emacs with org-mode. It is not simple at all, in a way, but there is nothing that gets in my way either. No distractions since all features are hidden behind keyboard combos (I disabled the menu). Never felt like I had to switch to a simpler editor for certain tasks. And it runs on my phone in Termux (syncs with git) so I just use org-mode as my note-taking app.
I think having modern game engines reducing the need for game programmers to almost zero caused much of this, but it also resulted in some interesting games when artists could create games without a need to hire programmers.
It will be interesting to see if AI art (and AI 3D models) will mean that we see interesting games instead created by programmers without having to hire any artists.
What I do not look forward to is the predictable spam flood of games created without both artists and programmers.
If we are sharing favorite RAND books, this introduction to game theory from 1954 is lovely (I read it twice): https://www.rand.org/pubs/commercial_books/CB113-1.html I admit I skipped over much of the maths, since a lot of it is about clever tricks to manually do operations on matrices (might be fun to read about, but probably not very useful these days?).
And also this book from 1947 with ONE MILLION random digits: https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1418.html The foreword from 2001 goes into a lot of detail how and why the numbers were made (which is, I guess, more interesting than to download the book itself?).
That is the modern (well, DnD 3E and later, so this century?) style of RPG campaign, with pre-packaged bundles of adventures to play in series, designed to last some specific time and then it ends. The traditional oldschool form of RPG campaign, still the way many groups play, and definitely the most common form last century (even if there were a few pre-packaged campaign modules for AD&D as well) is to create a group of characters and just keep playing adventure after adventure, more or less connected, replacing characters as they died off or players got bored with their current characters, but not really having a well-defined end, probably just fizzling out in the end as players drop off or the group decide to start a new campaign.
(A bit extreme maybe, but I heard of shorter campaigns, but still lasting for at least a decade of regular play.)
And I think you underestimate how dedicated some people can be to playing games like CNA. It is a big game, but it is not absurdly long compared to other big board wargames.
Note how the thread starts out "25 years after playing my last game of CNA".
So called "monster wargames" was a trend around 1980, toward the sudden end of the era of board wargames being almost-mainstream. I do not know if CNA was the biggest of all, but I think not. It was part of starting the trend, but later games were probably bigger and longer.
That topic has come up a few times on wargame forums and there are those that claim to have played it one or more times. You need a big table to leave it set up and play with a group that can get together regularly, but that is not different from running a RPG campaign.
Today any group playing it is more likely to play it using (the open source tool) VASSAL (here is the free module to download to play CNA: https://vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:The_Campaign_for_North_...). I saw a thread on a wargame forum just a few weeks ago looking for players to start up a new game. Playing online probably makes it a bit more likely to be played (but also less fun than to gather around a huge table IRL?).
(Aside: By tradition, an old "gentlemens agreement", between the wargaming community and wargame publishers, when playing a game online with VASSAL every player is expected to own a physical copy of the game. You are not supposed to download the CNA module to play it for free without owning the game. There is no DRM or other attempts to police who plays what, but as long as the system is not abused too much the publishers are happy and most keep allowing those tools to exist. It is a nice contrast to how copyright is handled elsewhere, including in more mainstream tools for playing online boardgames. I guess it is only possible in a small niche hobby like that, and possibly only because the tradition started last century before there was big money in selling digital versions of boardgames.)
Back when I had more free time I played in some really long non-computer games like that. It was great to have a group that got together 1-2 evenings per week, played for a few hours to complete one or a few turns.
The alternative is to get together and play for a long day or weekend, but many games are much too long for that. I played one earlier this month with six other players (in two teams). We started in the morning and played til late in the evening, but we did not get halfway through the game. It was enough to see what side was likely to win. That is the usual outcome in my experience.
More common these days is to use a tool like VASSAL (https://vassalengine.org/) to play those games online.
https://www.arborell.com/windhammer_prize.html
The Lindenbaum Compatition is a newer attempt to do something similar and it has also resulted in some books that I enjoyed reading/playing several of the books from the first year (have not taken the time to look into the entries this year):
https://www.lloydofgamebooks.com/p/voting-is-open-for-202420...