Vacation: Music Time
I’ve ended up on an impromptu vacation due to someone else cancelling. This wouldn’t necessarily keep me from writing a post, but no ideas have readily sprung to mind and I haven’t had the motivation to wrack my brains for…
Small Magic
Magic sucks. We’ve fucked it up. We’ve made it boring. We’ve taken something that, conceptually, contains the range of all things unexplainable, extraordinary, and mystical, and compressed it into essentially an invisible sack of hand grenades. This isn’t just a…
Filling In
Things don’t happen the way we remember them. We smooth out the rough edges, add new elements in where they seem like they should be. After a certain point, memory stops being history and becomes our story, a narrative with…
Estus
In all the excitement over Dark Souls’ intricately detailed world, subtle storytelling, and tough-but-fair challenge, I think the simple extraordinary elegance of the estus flask is often overlooked. For those of you who are not familiar with the systems of…
EverEnding DevBlog, July 2016: Underground
It’s going better now. Rather than hammering my head constantly against the glacial mass of animation work that needs to be completed, I’m approaching the project from many angles now, largely with a view towards completing a vertical slice of…
Recognition
There’s a moment in art which drives me. It’s hard to name – you might call it a twist, except that means something else already, similar but just different enough to be insufficient. It’s the moment of friction between the…
System and Story
‘Interactive’ is a convenient buzz-word that we’ve been using to describe games for some time. What separates games from other art, so we say, is that the audience acts upon the game and the game in turn acts upon them,…
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…
Empirical
As time goes on and I write more posts for Problem Machine, I notice certain themes emerging, repeating themselves in slight variation. One of these is the idea that there are no good or bad elements of game design, only…
Disparity
I liked playing through Dark Souls 3, but something seemed off about the experience to me. Immediately after starting the game, in the menu, the silence of the Dark Souls menu and the spooky music of the menu in Dark…