Thematic
After you spend a little while doing creative work, you tend to notice certain themes recurring throughout your creations. I have written here about my current project, EverEnding, but seldom in terms of its story and themes – I haven’t…
Problem Machine
Miniature
Stories are terrifyingly powerful in a way we frequently don’t notice. Everyone knows the difference between fiction and reality, or they think they do – and, indeed, they probably know the difference between real and fictional events, but that’s not…
EverEnding Devblog, October 2020 – Frames
This was not the best month for the project so far. As last month ended I was quitting caffeine and consistently having my ass kicked from the fatigue of doing so, and the tail end of that continued into this…
Other Minds
I’ve been thinking about empathy, and about the role it plays in game design. There’s a fair amount of discussion of ‘empathy games’ – games created by and from the perspective of marginalized creators, games created to push you into…
Show and Tell
“Come in, come in,” he mutters, edging around the heavy dark desk, moving carefully, perhaps a bit stiffly, to avoid knocking over the books and papers piled, half-read, along its outer reaches. “I’ve been hoping to see you for a…
Matryoshka
I watched the movie Synecdoche, New York last night. I say this, not to position what follows as a review, but to give context. I often worry that the connections my brain makes might come off as garbled nonsense to…
EverEnding DevBlog, September 2020 – Grass
At the conclusion of last month’s DevBlog, I mentioned I’d be spending a couple of weeks house-sitting, and that I wasn’t sure what sort of work I’d be able to get done during that time but that I hoped to…
Patient Zero
We think of art as something which we create and then put out in the world, where it affects others and perhaps, in some small way, changes them. What we often ignore or disregard is that in addition to being…
Breaking, Unbroken
Something I used to think about a lot was what we mean when we use the term ‘free will.’ Some people argue a great deal over whether it exists, which has always seemed a bit silly to me: The so-called…
Septembers
The lights are projections on slate-gray screens A sneak preview of a nuclear winter The orange seeps in like rusty water A sneak peek at a burning eternity Every moment is a tiny apocalypse The world is ending for somebody…