I’ve been falling pretty far behind on these little nominally-weekly essays again. These delays probably started with Elden Ring, but the reasons why I haven’t gotten caught back up are a bit more nuanced and interesting – though some of…
One of the most valuable skills I’ve been developing, mostly without realizing I was developing it, is an understanding of what my limitations are and of accepting those limitations. This is not an understanding I readily relinquished myself to: My…
March is over, marking the one-year mark since I started working on this project – a project which was originally meant to last one month. I’m not sure how to feel! Obviously I didn’t expect this game to take this…
I don’t deal well with scheduling. Any time I try to schedule myself, to block out what I’m going to be doing and when, days or weeks ahead of time, I get frustrated. I can’t help but rattle against the…
As a rule, I usually avoid writing about “fun.” I don’t feel “Fun” is a very useful term for analyzing game design – it’s poorly defined, it’s subjective, it’s regarded as a self-evidently good thing to have. In short, “fun”…
There is much to be said in favor of creative systems-oriented thinking. Many problems can be solved by breaking them down into sets of mutually influential factors, many occurrences can be understood by tracing the thread of causality from one…
Several months ago, I had the idea that I was almost done with the initial vertical slice of the game, and wanted to push to make that happen. Now I’m a month away from the one-year anniversary of the project,…
The vampire, as a storytelling trope, makes for stories that alternately fascinate and frustrate me. As something which is both human and not, alive and also dead, eternal and fragile, they can be a powerful lens through which to view…
We educate ourselves in the arts trying to learn how to create better art, but the process of improvement is a strange and unsteady one and the paths we take don’t always lead where they seem to. The main thing…
Almost no actual development work happened over the last month; I left for a trip on the 11th and got back on the 24th, and several days on either side of that were spent either preparing for or recovering from…
