Protagonists
There’s this desire to make stories huge epics, covering vast expanses of space and huge worlds of consequence. There’s also a desire to make the same stories be personal, relatable, grounded in the lives of a few people and their…
Category World Design
Explorers
Playing games is largely a process of exploration. Often this is in a very literal sense, where you’re given a simulated physical space and part of the challenge is learning the ins and outs of it, but just as often…
DevBlog, April 2018: Rabbit Holes
Well, I keep on getting distracted, but the distractions are all part of the project itself. There’s a distinction between the process of making a game and the process of making the game engine, the game editor, the game tools,…
DevBlog, March 2018: Foundations
The new project is underway. I frequently miss working on EverEnding, and so far I haven’t gotten to do the sorts of things I really came to this project for, but I’m also getting really excited about some of the…
Surface Level
Way back when I started this blog, one of the first essays I did was about conceiving of a game as the combination of three related spaces – physical, mechanical, and narrative – and gameplay as the act of allowing…
Wearing War
Not too long ago, and for a lot of the history of video games, the visual quality of a game has been decided entirely on how ‘realistic’ the graphics are. Using photo textures, true-to-life lighting models, and increasingly sophisticated shading…
Hidden
Games, as a medium, have been rediscovering the art of the secret, of the hidden. For a while, around the mid ’00s, it was incredibly rare for games to be anything beyond just what they appeared to be – and…
EverEnding DevBlog, February 2017: Threads
I’m doing a terrible job of sticking to the schedule I came up with. I keep getting sidetracked by new tasks, improvements or things I forgot to put on the schedule. This last month, I finally got around to looking…
EverEnding DevBlog, January 2017: Technicolor
It’s been kind of a strange month for the project. I’ve made next to no progress on the task list I’ve created for the game, but I’m still largely satisfied with the work I’ve done. That is to say, I’ve…
EverEnding DevBlog, December 2016: Animated
It’s been a bit of a slow month for work on the EverEnding project for reasons which are largely obvious. About 10 days of the last 30 were taken up with a big holiday trip, under which circumstances I wasn’t…