Today I saw a clip floating around from the movie Free Guy, a recent moderately-well-received cinematic pastiche of video game tropes, in which the hero wins the day through, essentially, the power of licensing – retrieving iconic virtual movie props…
I don’t know how anything ever gets created. The moment a single creative decision gets made, everything shifts around it. If you’re writing a story and a character has a little two-paragraph flashback, the information contained therein affects every other…
It’s only been a couple of weeks since the last update – I’ve been letting these updates drift later and later behind schedule and into mid-month, and now finally trying to adjust it back to the start of the month…
Brevity is the soul of wit. To elaborate: A story is only as good as the best parts the audience remembers. The more extraneous crap is added on top, the less enjoyable that experience might be. Past a certain threshold,…
This update is coming rather late. I’ve been recently trying to not count DevBlog’s as weekly posts, since it feels a little bit like cheating my way out of the work of finding a topic and writing an essay. This…
This essay is almost entirely about spoilers for the game Everhood. If this is a game you intend to play, I would recommend doing so before reading this. It’s a pretty neat game, and I would cautiously recommend it, although…
Horror and comedy can be particularly tricky genres to create in. Both rely to some degree on shocking and surprising audiences, and seeking to create shock and surprise tends to lead towards uncomfortable and loaded topics. This can be difficult…
In a traditional narrative medium, moral choice often enters in when a character discovers they can do something that goes against their beliefs to gain some sort of an advantage or object of desire. The audience may perceive the character…
One of the trickiest parts of art – with the understanding that art is entirely made of tricky parts – is the comprehension of proportion and perspective. There is, in one sense, a lot of wiggle room here – we…
