Insight
The first lesson I was taught about drawing was: Don’t draw what you know to be there, draw what you see. We know the hand has four fingers and a thumb, but sometimes fingers hide behind each other, sometimes the…
Category Essays
Uncanny Valleys
It feels, now, so naive to believe that higher resolutions, faster framerates, and more polygons could ever lead to something which appears truly real. Every step we take toward making things look realer becomes a step into the uncanny valley:…
Good Idea
One of the hardest lessons for me when it comes to art is that it’s not always possible to take a piece that is unsatisfactory and work on it for long enough to make it good. This is counter-intuitive, especially…
Faceless
The mechanics of a game shape our perception of its characters. Samus, of the Metroid series, was perceived as stoic and resourceful, largely because the design of Metroid demanded resourcefulness of its players and had no real way to express…
Here and There
The scariest thing about art to me now is not the tyranny of the blank page, but the certainty when I begin that I have no real idea where I’m going. I have meticulously planned out every moment of my…
Escort Quest
There’s this guy who watches these Dark Souls streams called Problem Machine, and he occasionally gives me shit like: “He’s not going to do it this time,” you know, just like “This is going to be a bad podcast,” “he’s…
Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving was a couple of days ago, but I’m still feeling the holiday spirit, such as it is. Thanksgiving is a good holiday wrapped in a bad holiday. It’s a time for coming together and taking stock of the many…
Love of Money
The saying that the love of money is the root of all evil is both very useful and very misleading. It is a specific case of a principle that one can easily generalize: The love of means over the ends…
Aftermath
President Trump. President Donald fucking Trump. The last few days have been strange. There was a kind of trick we played on each other as kids, where we’d hold one fist on the other person’s head, hit it lightly with…
Art as Design
As games have become larger and more complicated, development teams have grown bigger – and, as development teams have grown bigger, we break down the work that needs to be performed on a game into smaller and more specific categories…