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…
Category World Design
EverEnding DevBlog, October 2016: Schedule
This was an eventful month! Following my devblog post last month, I started sharing the project on a couple of game dev forums, and through a logical process which eludes me now 30 days later determined that a) I wanted…
Somewhat Sincerity
There’s a narrow line that games have to walk when it comes to story. On one side, we have a story that seems not to acknowledge that it’s kind of stupid that you spend most of the time in it…
A Sense of Place
I don’t know where the bottomless pit began. Maybe it’s always been there. How can something with no end have a beginning? But I think most of us first encountered the bottomless pit playing Super Mario Brothers, falling off the…
Undertale: Reflections
In this post I take a more in-depth look at the design of Undertale. If you haven’t played the game yet I’d strongly recommend doing so before reading, since I pretty much spoil the entire story, and also just generally…
EverEnding DevBlog 168: Landscaping
After a bit more programming work, I’ve finally got the core game to a point where I can spend some quality time actually building content. In this case, I’ve been working on building the first areas of the game. Actually,…
Simple Appeal
Sometimes it’s embarrassing how simple our tastes really are. You know, we can write essays about why we love what we love, what works and doesn’t, about the delicate structure of ideas that play against each other in this particular…
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…
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…
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…