Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Some (Sad) Photos From When I Sold My Retro Video Game Collection.


In the summer of 2013, I completely relocated from Austin, Texas to Portland, Oregon. In the process I gave away and/or sold the majority of my possessions. Amongst said possessions was my retro game collection I'd been acquiring/holding onto since the mid-1990s. According to the timestamp on the phone pics; I took in the games on August 16, 2013. And the above is only part of it. Sorting through it all required all of the available counter-space at the North Austin Game Over videogames location.

It included sytems, games, and accessories for SNES, Genesis, Turbografx-16, Atari 2600 (with 150+ games), Sega Master System, Gameboy, and TI-99/4A (with games, controllers, and text-to-speech synthesizer). I'd already sold my NES with games and accessories directly to a friend earlier that month. It's really difficult to decide whether this or selling my record collection hurt worse. But hey, a fresh start, and emulators are getting fancier all the time.


Procedural Room And Corridor Dungeon Generation For Roguelike Games.


Over at the blog of Bob Nystrom (author of Game Programming Patterns) he has an article discussing the finer points of randomized dungeon generation. He covers stuff that has frustrated me before in roguelikes, namely the randomization placing objects or even the protagonist in rooms with no exits, effectively ending the game. He also covers balancing corridors (like, hallways and such) with rooms to create more dynamic dungeons. It also gets under the hood of randomized dungeon generation, comparing and contrasting various generators. The article includes several active examples that generate completely random dungeons every time you click to illustrate the points. Really cool stuff.

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