Making a Concession Stand
It takes a lot of concessions to make a game feasible. Some of these are made early on, settling on a conservative and traditional design paradigm that has already been well explored by other games: Some of these are made…
Category Art Design
The Shape of Things
Isn’t it strange the effect that shapes can have on us? Where do they depart from abstract form and become meaningful and evocative? A cylinder, with a bit of reshaping, begins to look like a thigh… and, once we begin…
No Accountability
Something I always liked about playing Final Fantasy games in particular and JRPGs in general is the way random deities tended to turn up as various monsters in the world. These creatures usually had approximately fuck-all to do with their…
Solipsism
He also programmed robots to write books and magazines and newspapers for you, and television and radio shows, and stage shows, and films. They wrote songs for you. The Creator of the Universe had them invent hundreds of religions, so…
Eve DevBlog 20: The First Titan Seed Digest
I’ve been doing daily updates over at Eve’s new DevBlog, Titan Seed, but for those of you who are interested in the project but don’t feel like checking in daily I’m going to providing these weekly digests. Now, up until…
Strange Places
There is something bleak and beautiful and strange about old games that will always pull at my soul. Is it nostalgia? Perhaps. Nostalgia is certainly a component. It’s always a bit strange seeing a movie I loved as a child,…
Existing in a Space
So this raises the question: Why games? Frankly, it didn’t have to be games for me. It could have very easily been literature or film or visual art. These are all forms which I find interesting, each of which I…
Abstraction Layer
Video games are, at their most fundamental level, a collection of numbers. Anyone who’s done any programming has seen this in action, of course, and had a direct hand in what those numbers are and what they represent. There are…