Making a Concession Stand
It takes a lot of concessions to make a game feasible. Some of these are made early on, settling on a conservative and traditional design paradigm that has already been well explored by other games: Some of these are made…
Problem Machine
Eve DevBlog 36: Stalled
I’m super frustrated with how this is going. I don’t think working on programming a bit here and there is working very well, and problems which should take me a few days to solve are bloating and taking me weeks.…
Backtracking
And just like dreams the games we play fall away from us when they are complete, and just like dreams they are easily forgotten and then remembered at random many years later, and just like dreams they slip by in…
Rules vs Mechanics
The discipline of game design is only recently, spurred by the financial and popular success of modern video games, beginning to be explored in a formal way. Because of this newness, there tends to still be a lot of ambiguity…
Eve DevBlog 35: Reversing the Movement Vector
If I’m gonna get stuck on something, it may as well be a problem I can make a bunch of obstacle related puns with, right? Okay, this was not a good week for progress. I got about halfway through implementing…
Struggle
I’ve just begun playing Dark Souls. I’m not very far into it. I’m not used to this degree of relentless pressure, this viscous viciousness that must be pressed through to progress. It’s clear that there is a path to victory,…
Restraint
Entertainment isn’t what it used to be. Then again, it never is. Every new form of entertainment comes with new problems to solve– some of them logistical, some of them ethical, and some of them legal. Thus it is with…
Eve 34: Colliding With Obstacles
It’s been a pretty mixed week, all told. I finally got the particle system all ironed out, (that’s good), but it turns out that the caching thing doesn’t work as well for mass particles as I’d hoped, (that’s bad), but…
Sleep
“I don’t know. Why do things happen as they do in dreams?” Things are a bit confused. Things start blending together. I’ve been sleeping a lot. I remember at one point I was hanging out at one of the community…
Discomfort Zone
Art in general and games in particular have an uncomfortable relationship with discomfort. People don’t like being made uncomfortable– at least, not when it’s called by that name. Really, though, discomfort tends to come hand-in-hand with novelty. Anything that’s new…