“Most things in the world are broken,” noted RAD Game Tools owner Jeff Roberts in a 2013 vodcast with programmer Casey Muratori. Roberts was talking about the busted, often unusable state of technology in our every day lives. You’ve probably seen examples of this when you’ve simply tried to install
If you like the sound of a visual novel with both computer science puzzle and romance elements then Code Romantic is for you. So far, creator Pretty Smart Games has released two of the game’s chapters, with more to come a little further down the line. Unlike Zachtronics-style programming games—where
“What do you get when you take a painter with a penchant for the peculiar and a programmer fluent in pixels?” That is the question posed by JJ Walker’s short documentary, Canvas+Code, which follows Ryan Ford and Brad Henderson, the painter and programmer that make up Globhammer. The documentary has
Somewhere in Microsoft’s New York offices right now, an artificial intelligence is busy repeatedly trying and failing to climb a hill in Minecraft (2011), as if a modern day reenactment of the Sisyphus myth. This AI is being watched by a team of five computer scientists, and its many deaths are bein
Colossal Cave Adventure (or, Adventure for short) isn’t exactly a familiar title today. Developed during the early 1970s, Adventure was written by programmer Will Crowther while working for Bolt, Beranek and Newman. Crowther was an advent cave explorer, and had vast experience surveying the Kentucky
Tomorrow Corporation already showed an aptitude for making players do small, seemingly innocent tasks that fuel a nightmarish machine with Little Inferno. In Little Inferno, you must solve destructive puzzles by burning an unlikely array of objects to unlock more objects to be burned in their Little
Using a programming gun to solve environmental puzzles is one of those ideas that works great in theory more than it does in practice. That’s what Space Budgie discovered upon releasing the first alpha build of Glitchspace last year, at least. Yes, despite the positive reception from early critics a
Return of the Obra Dinn is an upcoming Lucas Pope game with visuals so quietly gorgeous and ghost-like that only a haunting story about being lost at sea could match it. Pope, seemingly having observred the beautiful 8 to 16-bit games coming out over the past couple years, has decided to double down
It’s the little things that makes Vane one of the most gorgeous looking games in development right now: the graceful twirl of leaves loosening from thin branches, clouds of dust that kick up behind a small, running figure, or the beating of a bird’s wings against the hot desert air. In games, beauty
Several lines of command-line text fade into the left side of your monitor. The sounds of primitive processor clicking and ancient operating system chimes remind you of the birth of the PC. The opposite of the clean and intuitive UI designs that we’ve all grown accustomed to jumps out at you, in an
What will you do when the robots take your job? It’s only a matter of time until we’re all melted down and shoveled into vats as our flesh becomes a more valuable resource than our labor. So it’s about time you start planning ahead for your (f)unemployment. Your options are severely limited to 1) le
Sometime in the 1820s, Nicéphore Niépce created “View from the Window at Le Gras,” an image from his countryside estate that would later become the world’s oldest surviving photograph. Nearly two centuries later, people snap, discard, and forget about pictures more precise and vibrant than anything
With the technology industry considered male-dominated, many have wondered how to encourage more women into coding. Alexandra Diracles and Melissa Halfon have an idea: change the language. The result is Vidcode, interactive software geared toward teenage girls that enables them to customise Instagra
The intersection of photography and computers generally connotes Photoshop and Instagram. The first is a tool for refining and altering photos, enabling manipulation far beyond what’s possible in the darkroom. The second is a sort of casual dumping ground, a worldwide clothesline sagging with millio
