Our Only Everything
It’s a new year, and I feel very odd. Estranged from myself – not by some sort of sudden disconnect, but as though I’ve grown so far from the architecture that defines me that I no longer feel like I…
Category Life in the Machine
The Pattern of the Woven World
I was thinking about the line “beauty is truth, truth beauty” – which, it turns out, is from the poem Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats, but I first heard on The Simpsons and had not until now…
Power/Fantasy
I don’t think game designers talk quite as much about player empowerment now as they used to, and that’s probably a good thing. Power, from the player’s perspective, could be said to be that which lets them affect intentional change…
Better Mousetraps
I think if there’s one idea I’d seek to dismantle, it’s the idea that there’s a single correct way to do something. I believe that this approach creates problems for two reasons: First, similarity of approach tends to lead to…
Execute
I still find it fascinating to think how often we make stories about machines rising up to destroy us. There’s probably a few anxieties tangled up together in these narratives, and it’s intriguing pulling on those threads to see where…
EverEnding DevBlog, November 2020: Shading
It’s been a weird month in a completely different way from the way that last month was a weird month. I started off trying to do more animation work, but found myself making very little progress – a few frames…
In the Shade
I’ve been spending much of the last year, and particularly of the last couple of weeks, finally seriously pursuing a field of programming I’ve long found fascinating: Shaders. This is the perfect field for programmers who are also visual artists,…
Thematic
After you spend a little while doing creative work, you tend to notice certain themes recurring throughout your creations. I have written here about my current project, EverEnding, but seldom in terms of its story and themes – I haven’t…
Miniature
Stories are terrifyingly powerful in a way we frequently don’t notice. Everyone knows the difference between fiction and reality, or they think they do – and, indeed, they probably know the difference between real and fictional events, but that’s not…
Other Minds
I’ve been thinking about empathy, and about the role it plays in game design. There’s a fair amount of discussion of ‘empathy games’ – games created by and from the perspective of marginalized creators, games created to push you into…