Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving was a couple of days ago, but I’m still feeling the holiday spirit, such as it is. Thanksgiving is a good holiday wrapped in a bad holiday. It’s a time for coming together and taking stock of the many…
Category Game Design
Art as Design
As games have become larger and more complicated, development teams have grown bigger – and, as development teams have grown bigger, we break down the work that needs to be performed on a game into smaller and more specific categories…
Somewhat Sincerity
There’s a narrow line that games have to walk when it comes to story. On one side, we have a story that seems not to acknowledge that it’s kind of stupid that you spend most of the time in it…
Difficult Designs
Difficulty is a difficult subject. What makes a game harder or easier is intricately tangled in what makes it work as an experience: Just as you can’t take a difficult game and make it easy without losing something, you can’t…
Pigmote Isle
I’ve been taking the opportunity of finally getting kind of burned out on Dark Souls to go back through my massive Steam backlog and try out some of those games acquired over the last decade but never actually installed or…
Small Magic
Magic sucks. We’ve fucked it up. We’ve made it boring. We’ve taken something that, conceptually, contains the range of all things unexplainable, extraordinary, and mystical, and compressed it into essentially an invisible sack of hand grenades. This isn’t just a…
Filling In
Things don’t happen the way we remember them. We smooth out the rough edges, add new elements in where they seem like they should be. After a certain point, memory stops being history and becomes our story, a narrative with…
Estus
In all the excitement over Dark Souls’ intricately detailed world, subtle storytelling, and tough-but-fair challenge, I think the simple extraordinary elegance of the estus flask is often overlooked. For those of you who are not familiar with the systems of…
EverEnding DevBlog, July 2016: Underground
It’s going better now. Rather than hammering my head constantly against the glacial mass of animation work that needs to be completed, I’m approaching the project from many angles now, largely with a view towards completing a vertical slice of…
System and Story
‘Interactive’ is a convenient buzz-word that we’ve been using to describe games for some time. What separates games from other art, so we say, is that the audience acts upon the game and the game in turn acts upon them,…