Built From Ideas
There’s an argument that’s been floating around in game design circles for a while that if, say, you have an idea for a game, if you could possibly express that idea using any other medium then you probably shouldn’t be…
Category Essays
Merciful Criticism
I understand feeling threatened by criticism. I mean, at the point where you’ve invested enough of yourself into something to really care about it – and that’s what art asks of us, that we care – that you spend time…
City On Fire
There are certain common threads that run through stories about violence. Violence has consequences – this is almost the very definition of violence. When you forcibly enact your will upon the world, things change, and often not in the ways you…
Object Orientation
I’ve been playing around with the Source Filmmaker animation tool a bit; it’s a strange experience. We spend so much time crafting illusory people, characters constructed piece by piece out of textures and polygons and recorded lines of dialogue, and…
Tragedy Minus Time
There’s a smarmy and not particularly accurate saying: “Comedy equals tragedy plus time.” This is only true for some very specific forms of comedy, and those mostly not the funniest sort, but there’s still an element of truth there. Old…
Battleblock Theater
It’s strange how many games have announcers and narrators now. Though Bastion was noteworthy for the extent and character of its narration, the seeds were sown earlier – somewhere in the gap between the expected announcers of sports games and…
Tyrannical Play
The discussion of what’s fun and interesting in games is necessarily also a discussion of what’s boring and tedious. Finding the points where a design begins to work against itself, begins to push the player down paths of rote task…
A Future
I’ve been thinking. Not on purpose, it just happens. I’ve been thinking about where I’m going, with my work, with this blog, as a person, as an artist, as a symbol representing an artist or person in the mind of…
JazzPunk!
Yeah. the title just didn’t feel quite right without an exclamation mark. I’m not sure why ‘JazzPunk!’ isn’t the official title, because if any game deserves exclamation marks it’s this one. The entire experience of JazzPunk revolves around Surprise! With…
The Swapper
moderate spoilers Space is fucking cool. I mean there’s a lot more to say about The Swapper, but I think that may be its most lasting impression of the game on my mind. No other 2d platformer has captured the…