Conflicted
They say there’s no story without conflict. I don’t really understand why this is said so often and with such confidence, but that seems to be how we teach fiction-writing around these parts because I’ve heard it a lot. I…
Category Game Design
Progress
Games are about progress – I can state this with some confidence since it’s a natural outgrowth of games both as narrative works and games as systems which generate results from input. Even games that are technically endless are built…
DevBlog, April 2018: Rabbit Holes
Well, I keep on getting distracted, but the distractions are all part of the project itself. There’s a distinction between the process of making a game and the process of making the game engine, the game editor, the game tools,…
Roles
The term role-playing is applied very loosely to games. Not only has it come to mean something completely different when used to describe video games than the pen-and-paper games that originated it, but it has drifted away from its obvious…
Words
I don’t consider myself exceptionally awkward in social situations, but I don’t think I’m particularly comfortable in them either. Much of the time, particularly in emotionally loaded moments, I have no idea what to say – no idea what an…
Expert
I want to be good at things. Obviously I would like to be good at art and music and such in order to make good art and to make money to support myself – and, yes, there’s the darker aspect…
DevBlog, March 2018: Foundations
The new project is underway. I frequently miss working on EverEnding, and so far I haven’t gotten to do the sorts of things I really came to this project for, but I’m also getting really excited about some of the…
Force
You’re writing a story. You know what happens next – what has to happen next in order to complete the narrative arc you’ve been planning out. You’ve got a Big Picture you’re trying to paint, here. The only problem is,…
Components
It turns out that the skill of making games is more than just the skills of making the components of a game. This is something I feel like I’ve had to confront more and more: Despite spending a lot of…
Risk and Reward
One of the most common ways to evaluate a game design decision is in terms of “risk and reward”. Usually we assume that that whenever the player takes a risk it should be to attain a commensurate reward, and so…