Technologies

New Life Interactive is pursuing lightweight technological experiments intended to lay a foundation for game development during the next decade. Given the rise of the GPGPU and many-core processor, we believe that the industry is on the verge of a forward leap, not just in processing power but in the types of simulations that will be applicable to games. Our projects are geared toward realizing unexplored forms of gameplay made possible by massively parallel computing.

Nonetheless, we can't resist doing smaller technological experiments now and then. A couple of the more useful projects are available as freeware on this site. (See below.)

Game Blocks

Written by alloplastic
Thursday, 18 October 2012 12:10
Overview Game Blocks is a free, open source library for making games. It is mostly of historical interest now, since it has been many years since the underlying platform, BYOB, was replaced by Snap! (The BYOB link below will take you to Snap!) You may be able to get these blocks running in the old BYOB, though, by checking the BYOB Archives. I actually made a good run at recreating this toolkit in Snap!, toward the end of my teaching stint, then I was plugging away at a fully custom engine, as programmers are wont to do, which would have achieved an ideal I was shooting for (super-easy to build games & stories, a sharing/publishing model, slightly more professional output than BYOB/Snap!, etc.) But that became one of many ambitious, half-finished projects littering my past. Maybe I'll get back to it someday. There must be an easier way to introduce students to game development than the hide-and-seek UIs of most game engines. Back to the historical article... A purely visual programming toolkit, Game Blocks was built with BYOB (Build Your Own Blocks, now redirects to Snap!) from UC Berkeley, which is built on top of Scratch. Scratch is developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. See http://scratch.mit.edu Game Blocks was developed as a teaching aid by game developer Sheldon Pacotti for a course at the University of Texas entitled "RTF 344M: Writing and Narrative Design for Video Games." (See the syllabus.) The library allows novice game designers to experiment with storytelling, animation, physics, interaction and standard game types like adventure games, platformers, and arcade shooters. Projects can be compiled into executables for Mac, PC, and Linux. The library itself, running within BYOB, is cross-platform as well. Downloads The following free downloads are available from this site: Game Blocks v0.2.4 Library and Examples Game Blocks v0.2.4 Source Code Support For the latest information on community projects, bugs, and ongoing development, please visit the NLI forums. Tutorials For the easy path to learning about Game Blocks, please browse the following series of videos. (You'll need to allow popups.) - Intro - Introduction Getting Started - Writing - Emotes Tutorial Cut Scenes Tutorial Talk Trees Tutorial - Game Systems - Player Movement Tutorial Game Levels Tutorial Inventory Tutorial - Enhancements - Cartoons Tutorial Physics Tutorial - Game Types - Platformer Tutorial Arcade Shooter Tutorial Simulation Game Tutorial Point and Click Adventure Tutorials (Watch the Game Levels and Inventory tutorials.)
Last Updated on Tuesday, 10 February 2026 00:57

Story Generation Language

Written by Administrator
Thursday, 18 October 2012 12:05
The "S Language" is a fun little toy for generating random phrases, sentences, and even stories. It's now quite old software, written in an ancient version of Visual Basic. I also "redesigned" the language, in a spiral notebook, back in 2013, but there it remains, in blue ink. I remain fond of formal representations of meaning, especially after working at the "old AI paradigm" company Cycorp. Even with the advent of LLMs, I still believe that the coming AI architectures will incorporate hybrid thinking strategies, which will include transparent formal reasoning, perhaps as a probabilistic learning target. All of that said, if you're curious about the language, follow the link below. A future version would need to be built on top of a modern language parser, like ANTLR, but maybe the old app can still provide some amusement. The full documentation and interpreter can be viewed here.
Last Updated on Tuesday, 10 February 2026 00:53

Main Menu

New Releases

Errata