grep ‐‐week 41

Your weekly news aggregator…

John Carmack says VR devs are “coasting on novelty”
@gamesindustry.biz
“Find old-timers, anybody that worked on an Xbox or an original Gamecube or something like that, and tell them your minimum clock speed is 800 megahertz or something. They’ll say, ‘Megahertz?!'” — Carmack forever.

Algorithms for making more interesting mazes
@gamasutra.com
A dense and not terribly well-written article, but full of fantastic algorithms for generating interesting puzzles (with pictures!).  There’s probably endless ways to procedurally explore these ideas.

The self-destructing game of 1986
@polygon.com
Fascinating look at an early permadeath implementation, one which actually destroyed your copy of the game if you died.

IRDC New York 2016
@roguebasin.com
Still catching up on these massive info drops from IRDC (not to mention the Roguelike Celebration).  Here’s some homework for you: dive into this paper about how to algorithmically “examine the variety of generated levels and the impact of changing input parameters” on your level generators, as opposed to hitting ‘refresh’ a thousand times and saying to yourself, “eh, that seems alright.”