What role should frustration have in the player’s experience of a game? It’s a tricky question. For a while game designers assumed the answer was ‘none’, that frustration was an inherently unpleasant experience with nothing to offer, that it stood…
Sometimes it’s embarrassing how simple our tastes really are. You know, we can write essays about why we love what we love, what works and doesn’t, about the delicate structure of ideas that play against each other in this particular…
It’s interesting how much goes into a game that the player never sees. Old versions, unused content, hidden details of construction, or simply paths the player never takes. As we play the game, this stuff is invisible – sometimes we find…
For a while now, I’ve thought of the point and click adventure as a more-or-less static genre. We understand the design, its conventions, what it can achieve and how. And yet, while sticking close alongside those conventions, Dropsy turns the…
I’ve been thinking about the role that humor plays in a narrative. We often regard humor as an end in and of itself, something that adds entertainment – who doesn’t like to laugh? This approach is natural and worthwhile, but…
I’ve been playing and replaying old Fallout games – there may be some kind of tenuous connection between that and the release of Fallout 4, but mostly I just finally got around to playing through New Vegas and that whetted…
The problem with dialogue system components in RPGs tends to be that they’re components in RPGs. I’ve been playing Fallout: New Vegas: This game, like the earlier Fallout games, is premised on making important dialogue choices which can have a…
This was a fairly productive week. I finished all of the outstanding prototype animations for the enemy entity I’ve been working on and implemented them into the game, where they mostly look pretty good. The new idle animations definitely have…
I’ve recently seen people complaining about the (admittedly trite) fiction writer statement about how a character’s behavior can come seemingly out of nowhere, like they’re coming to life and acting out a will of their own, completely taking the writer…
Well it’s not quite what I wanted to have done but I made a good little chunk of progress this week. I mostly focused on the test enemy entity like I was planning, fixing little bugs in the pathfinding and…
