Presence Tension
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…
Problem Machine
Defunned
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”…
A Frayed Knot
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…
Join the Madness Devblog, February 22nd: The Game of the Game
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,…
Lowering the Stakes
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…
Between the Bones
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…
Join the Madness DevBlog, January 2022: Open Structures
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…
Balancing in the Middle
For a while there was a trend of providing a moral choice to players: The choice between Good and Evil. My understanding is that this idea probably started with Ultima IV in 1985 – but when I think about “moral…
Some Steam Reviews I Wrote
Something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and which I’ve been perpetually putting off, is writing some short Steam reviews for the games I’ve played over the past few years. I have read from many sources that hitting…
Submissions
For the past few months, the higher-ups at game company after game company have announced that they’re going to be integrating NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) into their games. For those unfamiliar with the concept (probably not as many of you as…