No, you made my childhood! I was kind of a lonely kid and discovering computing (via the Mac) and getting these shareware discs and playing Ambrosia games was like finding something really magical. Thank you! And if anyone is reading this now, please make more games like Escape Velocity! (Or re-release them for modern systems!)
I made that game in college with the help of some very talented artists, and my friends who helped with the sound effect. It was written on a Mac IIsi IIRC! We def had fun making it (and playing it while making it) /andrew
Omg you're on here too! Please Andrew let me take this moment to tell you that there is a huge market of people who will absolutely throw money at you if you make a new game. look at the success of the kickstarter for cosmic frontier and that's a relatively small endeavor. If you try to make something new people will freak out.
I know it's been a long time but I hope that spark is still there. I and many others grew up playing your games and we are hungry for more.
Oh wow. I just wanted to say thanks to you and any other people here from Ambrosia, EV was easily the best game of my childhood. Saving up for a Kestrel took me... a lot of cargo runs. But I loved every minute.
It's telling that of all the objectively better, more expensive, more complex space games I've played since my middle school years... Escape Velocity still ranks #1 in terms of sheer joy.
It feels a lot like Populous: more fun than the sum of its parts, and only explicable as tapping some Miyamotoesque yearning in the zeitgeist.
Yeah, definitely. I think a lot of that for me was that the universe felt very alive - ships coming and going from planets, comms, recurring characters. I haven't found anything quite like it since, though Starsector comes close in some ways (and is extremely good in its own way, you should check it out if you haven't).
To this day Basilisk mac emulator is one of the first things I install on a new PC build just so I can play EV!
26 years or so and I still love that series
Thanks so much!
Author here. I'm familiar with optimizing images via webpack and the like; there's an article I wrote on the same site as this one detailing just that (amongst other things):
The issue is that for many larger sites that are content-managed, the images aren't known at build time. So you need some kind of mechanism in place to deal with optimizing user-uploaded images.
Obviously you don't want truly decorative images indexed; but that's not what the article is discussing (except in the "SO WHEN IS IT GOOD?" section). It's discussing the abuse of CSS background-image for content images, something I've seen as being quite prevalent.
As the article mentioned, this is bad for accessibility, SEO, performances, and other lesser issues.
Author here. What advice is "bad" in your estimation?
As for not following my own advice, that's not quite right. I'm using picture and img tags rather than div's with CSS background-image, which is the main thrust of the article.
I'm also using srcset for performance, and webp as a progressive enhancement for browsers that support it.
The only thing I'm not doing is using the new loading="lazy" because the website was creating long before the article.
Given that all the images in the article are purely decorative, why you using picture and img tags rather than CSS background-image? You're also supplying alt attributes, so someone with a screen reader will hear a random "Bad boy doggo" in the middle of an article about HTML and CSS.
Andrew Welch / el presidente