Category Archives: News

The YoYo Games Slush Pile

And another Ludus Novus hiatus comes to an end. I left my previous job, and just a few days before my final work day, my computer was stolen. Everything’s straightened out now, and I’m working on some personal projects and living on savings while I figure out where to go next. I just need to figure out how to make my first million making and discussing video games.

Over at the YoYo Games “glog”, the creators of Game Maker put out a call to rate all unrated games. I’ve spent a few hours this afternoon combing through the chaff. A natural consequence of a system like Game Maker — where it’s so easy to make a video game with minimal programming experience — is that most of the games seem to be made by nine-year-olds. I’ve played games that were distributed as uncompiled .gmk files, games that crash on startup, games that do nothing on startup, racist games, and about 712 versions of Pong, Breakout, and Pac-Man.

When sifting through trash, you do sometimes find a treasure or two. I didn’t find any hidden masterpieces, but I did come across a handful of very solid games. You can check out my list after the fold.

Continue reading The YoYo Games Slush Pile

So I am not dead. Now that I’ve cleared up the over 7000 spam comments that accumulated during my absence from taking care of the site, I intend to get to work on a new episode. We’ll see how that turns out.

Gen Con Report

This past week I took a trip down to Indianapolis with a friend to attend Gen Con Indy 2006. I was scheduled to run four events, but I only ended up running three of them (people who’d registered for one of them didn’t show). Now, I haven’t talked about roleplaying much (if at all) on the show, but I think that tabletop and other roleplaying games fit in with digital games quite well. In my opinion, they’re the same form of expression, one that has a hundred names, all lacking, that I call “interactive art” (note that this term is also lacking, as it’s also used to refer to a form of expression that may be unrelated).

Anyway, I found time to see a lot of cool stuff at the convention.
Continue reading Gen Con Report

Birth of Ludus Novus

Welcome to the site! Ludus Novus is a podcast and blog discussing the art of interactivity; specifically, interactive fiction, digital games, and roleplaying. I intend for it to be a way to discuss the artistic and literary issues and potential surrounding these kind of games, and try to figure out how to take them beyond just trivial entertainment.

I’m going to do my best to be interesting and novel, and in order to do that, I’ve come up with a few guidelines for myself:

  • The target length of any one podcast will be twenty minutes. I think that’s long enough to say something, and not too long that a listener will get bored or not have enough time to finish in one sitting.
  • There will be one “segment” per podcast. I won’t bundle an interview and another discussion into one file. If I want to do them both, they’ll be two different podcasts. I might cover short news items in an introduction, but there will only be one big piece of content per podcast.
  • I will edit my podcasts for errors.
  • I will not beg for votes on podcast ranking sites.
  • When I discuss digital games, I’ll do my best not to automatically classify them by genre. There’s too much of a tendency out there to want to categorize games as first-person-shooters or action-adventures or RPGs.

I’m sure that I’ll be refining and modifying these rules as I go along, but for now, I’ll sign off. The first episode of Ludus Novus will discuss cutscenes. If you have any comments or ideas about the show or the topic of cutscenes, please post them in the comments section of this entry.