Playful Text
summary
A practical tour of playful text grounded in Kentucky Route Zero: procedurally generated tiki drink and takeout menus built from template grammars plus tagged rarity tables produce a combinatorial explosion that far exceeds human reading; the talk traces roots to Queneau’s 10^14 sonnets and Perec’s lipogram, and demos modern tools Tracery and Botnik alongside mez breeze’s Mezen‑gel and parser/Twine work. Also presented: a custom multi‑pass text renderer that fakes bold/italic and a spooky shader for the word zero, integrated into branching dialogue and interludes, no voice acting.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Start
- 0:17Jake Elliot
- 9:33Exquisite Corpse
- 15:37City Peace
- 19:41All the Delicate Duplicates
- 24:22Dimmer Italic Text
- 27:40House of Leaves
- 29:28Guillaume Apollinaire
- 37:18The Spooky Shader
- 38:45Procedural Text Generator
- 39:46Branching Dialogue
- 42:02Video Games Are Not Games
- 43:56Design Process
- 49:53Coloratura
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