Not too long ago, and for a lot of the history of video games, the visual quality of a game has been decided entirely on how ‘realistic’ the graphics are. Using photo textures, true-to-life lighting models, and increasingly sophisticated shading…
I’ve been playing a lot of Dishonored over the past couple of weeks, and I’ve been, for the most part, loving my time with it. Of course, the more I enjoy a game, the more frustrated I get with the…
Playing a game is learning a set of habits, a set of reactions, and trying to tune and optimize those habits and reactions towards those that most frequently successfully achieve the game’s goal. Calling it a strategy might, sometimes, seem…
Difficulty can serve several important roles in a game’s design: It can create an aesthetic sense of danger and foreboding, it can make the actions of the player feel more consequential, and it can push the player to vary their…
A thing about video games that I wonder sometimes if people really understand is that they’re made to be completed by the player. Dark Souls is made to be completed. Cuphead is made to be completed. The most challenging (or…
A week or two ago I was watching someone play through the first Silent Hill game, and I was thinking about the role that combat plays in horror games. In many cases, the entire idea of combat has been phased…
It’s been a bit of a weird month. I haven’t worked deeply on much, but made a lot of slight progress on different things, and have also made some substantial revisions to the game design. Well, first things first, I…
For a long time I didn’t like to use a microphone while playing games. I’m still not thrilled about the idea of talking into my computer while playing with strangers, but I’ve gotten used to the concept enough to be…
Anyone who’s been playing games for a while has probably, by now, encountered the concept of experience points and leveling up in a number of different contexts. I find nowadays that I’m enjoying this design trope less, that I’m less…
Most games are power fantasies. It would be nice, perhaps, if games focused on providing more diverse and interesting experiences, but, still, there’s nothing wrong with a good power fantasy… right? However, sometimes creating that fantasy of capability involves undermining…
