Overlooking Us All
I was sitting in the waiting room of my doctor’s office when I happened to glance upwards. There was a cutout between the first floor, which I was on, and the walkways of the second. This rectangle was lined by…
Problem Machine
The Building is in the Building is in the Building is in…
There are two kinds of bad procedural content: The first is the generic kind, made by connecting a bunch of random rooms and hallways together, all technically unique but functionally identical. The second is made by connecting pre-authored pieces together…
EverEnding DevBlog, December 2020: The Finishing Touch
Every month continues to be weird in new and interesting ways. I have to resign myself to getting less done during December at the best of times, what with all of the distractions of the holidays – this year, there…
Our Only Everything
It’s a new year, and I feel very odd. Estranged from myself – not by some sort of sudden disconnect, but as though I’ve grown so far from the architecture that defines me that I no longer feel like I…
The Pattern of the Woven World
I was thinking about the line “beauty is truth, truth beauty” – which, it turns out, is from the poem Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats, but I first heard on The Simpsons and had not until now…
Power/Fantasy
I don’t think game designers talk quite as much about player empowerment now as they used to, and that’s probably a good thing. Power, from the player’s perspective, could be said to be that which lets them affect intentional change…
Better Mousetraps
I think if there’s one idea I’d seek to dismantle, it’s the idea that there’s a single correct way to do something. I believe that this approach creates problems for two reasons: First, similarity of approach tends to lead to…
Execute
I still find it fascinating to think how often we make stories about machines rising up to destroy us. There’s probably a few anxieties tangled up together in these narratives, and it’s intriguing pulling on those threads to see where…
EverEnding DevBlog, November 2020: Shading
It’s been a weird month in a completely different way from the way that last month was a weird month. I started off trying to do more animation work, but found myself making very little progress – a few frames…
In the Shade
I’ve been spending much of the last year, and particularly of the last couple of weeks, finally seriously pursuing a field of programming I’ve long found fascinating: Shaders. This is the perfect field for programmers who are also visual artists,…