The Sneak Attack
I’ve been thinking about the role that humor plays in a narrative. We often regard humor as an end in and of itself, something that adds entertainment – who doesn’t like to laugh? This approach is natural and worthwhile, but…
Category Narrative Design
Fallout
I’ve been playing and replaying old Fallout games – there may be some kind of tenuous connection between that and the release of Fallout 4, but mostly I just finally got around to playing through New Vegas and that whetted…
Talking Simulators
The problem with dialogue system components in RPGs tends to be that they’re components in RPGs. I’ve been playing Fallout: New Vegas: This game, like the earlier Fallout games, is premised on making important dialogue choices which can have a…
Simulations
I’ve recently seen people complaining about the (admittedly trite) fiction writer statement about how a character’s behavior can come seemingly out of nowhere, like they’re coming to life and acting out a will of their own, completely taking the writer…
Meaning It
Children will believe basically anything. That’s their job. At some point later in life, there’s usually some form of disillusionment, and we learn to distrust the motives of others, to believe that we are being manipulated. Afterwards we find that…
The Earnestness of Importance
Television has changed a lot over the last couple of decades. No longer bound to the yoke of short run times and advertisements, TV shows have started becoming more like movies: Longer, more intricate, with a consistent story told between…
EverEnding DevBlog 137: Programmitis
Another week on programming this entity’s behavior. A few days in and I was getting close to having it all working when I ran into the dread disease programmitis, bane of programmers everywhere. No I’m not talking about carpal tunnel…
EverEnding DevBlog 136: Foretold
I started working on all of the behavioral programming stuff, then I got completely sidetracked for a couple of days when I realized that I didn’t have any centralized document with all of my story content in plain language. Up…
Tiny Gods
One appealing aspect of religion is that it lets us presume our world is crafted with the same care and intent that we put into our art. The difference here isn’t a matter of intelligent design vs unintelligent design – to…
The Unknowable
Games tend to offer us questions just so they can supply the answers. In life, a vast amount of information is lost forever. Most of it is unimportant: For most people, it’s impossible to know, say, what they had for…