A Sense of Place
I don’t know where the bottomless pit began. Maybe it’s always been there. How can something with no end have a beginning? But I think most of us first encountered the bottomless pit playing Super Mario Brothers, falling off the…
Category Game Design
Disparity
I liked playing through Dark Souls 3, but something seemed off about the experience to me. Immediately after starting the game, in the menu, the silence of the Dark Souls menu and the spooky music of the menu in Dark…
Difficulties
I think it’s interesting that, even as I consider myself someone who enjoys thinking about art, I find myself growing increasingly distrustful and annoyed by art debates. Even civil debates are often incredibly tedious, since the nature of a debate…
Tabula Rasa
Perhaps the greatest enemy of learning is knowledge. Once we learn something, our ability to learn new – and perhaps contradictory – information is compromised. This is usually a worthwhile trade-off: It may be harder to learn new and…
Principles
Playing through Titan Souls, I was impressed by the constraints that the designers had chosen to work within. The concept of Titan Souls is that it’s a game where you can die in one hit or win in one shot,…
Undertale: Reflections
In this post I take a more in-depth look at the design of Undertale. If you haven’t played the game yet I’d strongly recommend doing so before reading, since I pretty much spoil the entire story, and also just generally…
Undertales
I played Undertale and I’m not sure if I’m going to actually be able to write about it. It’s a remarkable game, but I don’t know what to remark. I guess I’ll try, even though I’m sure people have written a…
Cooperative
We often think of art as having its meaning baked into it by the artist, of having a shape entirely formed by intent, and that the role of the audience is to simply partake of that message. The meaning of…
Core Souls
From Software (yes, that’s the actual name of the company) seemingly came out of nowhere in 2009 with the sleeper hit Demon’s Souls, which was followed in 2011 by its better known and hugely successful successor Dark Souls. Well, it…
EverEnding DevBlog 168: Landscaping
After a bit more programming work, I’ve finally got the core game to a point where I can spend some quality time actually building content. In this case, I’ve been working on building the first areas of the game. Actually,…