Press X to JSON
Things have been pretty quiet here at Warp Skip! lately, but it’s not for lack of trying; we’ve been busy in the lab cooking up the next generation of video games.
On this night before the launch of E3 2010, we’d like to introduce our first tool: the Press X to JSON API. This will please you with a depth that might surprise you.
The Press X to JSON API
All you have to do is send an HTTP POST request to http://api.heavyrainjoke.com.
Required Parameters
button- Must be “X”.
I Don’t Know What You’re Talking About
For the curl-challenged among us, a live demo which will still make no sense to you is available on hurl.it. More features may be added as we dare each other into wasting time on them, so stay tuned to the eventual home of all Press X To JSON API news, heavyrainjoke.com.
Team
Lead engineer on this project was Casey Kolderup, unfortunately enough. Special thanks to Adam Parrish and Rob Dubbin for nailing down the tricky details and agreeing on a standard for the API. If you want to get involved, you can send pull requests on github.
End the game saying “Grue win”
The voting deadline approaches for TWIFcomp, “a competition for tweet-sized interactive fiction.” You can view all of the entries here, and most of them can be played online. It’s amazing what the entrants have managed to do inside the constraints of the competition. I’m especially a big fan of the entries that work both as clever games and as expressive source code (utilizing Inform 7 to its fullest). A few of my favorites:
Tumbleweed Hero by Warp Skip colleague Rob Dubbin is among the most laconic entries in the competition, but also among the funniest:
"Tumbleweed Hero" by Rob Dubbin Desert is room. Description is "The desert is arid."; Instead of going nowhere: say "You roll [noun].";
FGBG (quoted in this entry’s title) does a great job of encapsulating the total grue experience, and is very satisfying to play:
cave is room a man fumbling is edible in cave instead doing something other than eating, looking: say "Shh. Eat." before eating anything: end the game saying "Grue win"
You See Chaos Here. by Andrew Plotkin wins my vote for technical proficiency and general mindbendingness (especially if you know a little bit about how the Z-Machine works):
"You See Chaos Here." by Zarf
Madness is room
Chaos is in it
Before doing anything: x
To x:
(- action = ActionData-->(1+11*random(64)); if (~~noun) noun = player; -)
Finally, Adam Thornton’s Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis deserves an award. It somehow manages to adhere to the letter of the rules while extravagantly skirting the spirit. I won’t reproduce the source code here, since it’s around five hundred megabytes, but it’s worth downloading and trying out. (If you’re wondering why the game wasn’t disqualified for its size, read the rules closely.)
—Adam
Retronauts: A Tengen Family Reunion →
On the most recent episode of the excellent classic gaming podcast Retronauts, Frank Cifaldi hosted a round table of 3 programmers who worked at Atari during the Tengen days. There’s some interesting stuff in this, and you get a real sense for how things were making games in the 80s, when you could have the license to “port” a game to a new platform but not have any source code or oversight from the original IP holder.
If you’re unfamiliar with Tengen, you can read more on Wikipedia. If you grew up on the NES you may remember their strangely shaped black cartridges, but it’s possible you didn’t realize what was going on there. At one point, one of the developers tries to draw a parallel between Tengen and people who jailbreak their iPhone— while I do think that the strict licensing methods of Nintendo during the 80s is a good comparison to Apple’s App Store, I’m not sure I’m willing to go that far.
—Casey
Shaun Inman's Notes on New Super Mario Bros →
Shaun Inman is working on a game for the iPhone/iPad called Mimeoverse: Mimeo and the Kleptopus King. As an avid iPhone (and future iPad) user, I’m generally skeptical of sidescrolling games on the platform (and games that make use of virtual “buttons” in general), but this game actually looks quite promising.
In order to start thinking about level design for his own game, Inman played through all of the DS game New Super Mario Bros and took notes on almost every level in the game. There’s a lot of interesting thought here, although I do hope he gets his Wii back soon and manages to play through New Super Mario Bros Wii with the same critical eye, since NSMB DS was an ultimately shallow and disappointing game.
—Casey
“Confusion” by Michael Nyman
While Enemy Zero has its flaws, it does have an amazing soundtrack by minimalist composer Michael Nyman. As I learned the hard way last week, however, it’d be better to just acquire the soundtrack and listen to it than play through this mess of a Saturn game waiting for short samples of digitized orchestral brilliance— too often a track from the soundtrack fades in during a tense cutscene only to stop almost immediately (and abruptly) seconds later when gameplay resumes.
I should mention that a big part of what got me on this Kenji Eno kick is that Ray Barnholt included this track in an episode of his awesome new video game music podcast “Sound Test” a few weeks ago and the following day when I was in a local used video game store I saw a copy of Enemy Zero, a game I hadn’t seen in stores in the past year or two that I’ve been paying attention to Sega Saturn games now that more and more of them are getting rare, which seemed like too much of a coincidence not to purchase. It doesn’t look like this game is particularly hard to find, at least if eBay prices are any indication, and that might have something to do with its awkward mechanics and lack of clear communication about the game’s plot and objectives, but there is something oddly charming about the game and it seems that it may be interesting to fans of Data East’s Silent Debuggers for the TurboGrafx-16 (which is on Virtual Console) in that it brings some similar mechanics into 3D.
—Casey
