Links
Katamari Damacy postmortem
By Game Developer Magazine:
We recently received a request to publish the Katamari Damacy postmortem from the December 2004 issue of Game Developer. It has been posted here in full for the first time in 2024 to celebrate the game’s 20 year anniversary. Please enjoy.
This article was written by the game’s director, Keita Takahashi, and has been translated into English from the original Japanese. I wish I could find the original text, but this is a great read regardless.
It’s easy to take a successful game and say “Here are its unique features and the reasons why we think they led to success.” But this portmortem also includes regrets from the game’s development, which gives a really rare, close look into what the team’s ambitions were and how they thought about the game’s design.
Dragonsweeper - A lovely minesweeper game
This is a really excellent take on minesweeper. Spaces can contain monsters of various strength, and you need to spend HP to defeat them. By collecting EXP and hearts to level up and heal yourself, the goal is to become strong enough to slay the dragon.
It took me a few tries to get a handle on the strategy, but this is super fun!
Litestack: All your data infrastructure
From the repository:
Litestack is a Ruby gem that provides both Ruby and Ruby on Rails applications an all-in-one solution for web application data infrastructure. It exploits the power and embeddedness of SQLite to deliver a full-fledged SQL database, a fast cache , a robust job queue, a reliable message broker, a full text search engine and a metrics platform all in a single package.
I’ve been learning Python for my small projects recently, but for something that wants a full stack I’ll definitely be checking this out.
Urban Isolation - Skateboarding in an empty L.A.
A very relaxing video by Russell Houghten showing skateboarders riding around L.A. with all of the cars edited out. It’s executed wonderfully. How much effort goes into something like this?Reimagining Chess with AlphaZero
Modern chess is the culmination of centuries of experience, as well as an evolutionary sequence of rule adjustments from its inception in the 6th century to the modern rules we know today. While classical chess still captivates the minds of millions of players worldwide, the game is anything but static. Many variants have been proposed and played over the years by enthusiasts and theorists. They continue the evolutionary cycle by altering the board, piece placement, or the rules—offering players “something subtle, sparkling, or amusing which cannot be done in ordinary chess.”
Using AlphaZero to evaluate modified rules, to see which would be the most productive is a really interesting application of the AI. You can evaluate beforehand whether a certain rule change would make the game less or more balanced.
Why Switch Cartridges Taste Awful
The Nintendo Switch is designed to be portable, so it doesn’t have a disc drive. Instead, its games come on cartridges, just like games for Nintendo’s handheld platforms stretching back to the original Game Boy. But there’s something different about Switch cartridges: They taste awful.
Update (March 2): In a statement emailed to Polygon, a Nintendo representative confirmed the theory that Switch cartridges are coated in a material that’s meant to dissuade people from putting the units in their mouths.
So Nintendo actually takes special steps to make their cartridges taste terrible, to keep people from swallowing them. That’s an attention to detail that I hadn’t even considered before.
Star Wars Oil Paintings
I’ll always have a soft spot for Star Wars things, but these paintings by Naci Caba are wonderful. The colors add a great bit of flavor especially to scenes in space that would otherwise be predominantly black and grey.
Box Line Text: A minimal whiteboard app
This is a great implementation of an extremely minimal whiteboard app. There is no UI, and you can click to add text or click+drag to add boxes and lines. Zoom options in your browser will change the size, and you can save the HTML if you want to keep a copy.
It’s probably not enough for work meetings, but I thought it was a great, fun product.
Wag Buys Shares Back from SoftBank
Wag was looking to raise $75 million. It went to SoftBank and was like “will you give us $75 million?” SoftBank was like “no haha we’ll give you $300 million,” because that is SoftBank’s whole thing, it loves to give startups vastly more money than they want or need. And so Wag took the money. And then like a year and a half later Wag will get rid of SoftBank by giving back, I don’t know, but I am going to say some number less than $225 million (“well below” the valuation at which it invested). Wag got the $75 million it needed for free.
So under the right circumstances, you can make more money with a flop than you can with a hit!
Wag wasn’t exactly a flop, but SoftBank’s aggressive investment strategy does result in some pretty unusual situations.
Leather Sneakers by Spingle
Spingle is a company based in Hiroshima, Japan that makes hand-crafted leather shoes, and they also have an excellent sneaker lineup. Because the leather molds to your feet over time, the shoes become more comfortable the more you wear them.
They are a little pricey, but they should last a long time and the cost is completely reasonable considering the work that goes into them. And there are plenty of sneakers that cost even more.
