Control Freaking
One of the moments I enjoy most in a game is that just before a combat encounter happens. In these moments I plan my approach, my position, look at the lay of the land, look at how the enemy is…
Category Game Design
Living Failures
The way games treat failure has shifted significantly over the years. The earliest commercial games were coin-operated, so in this case the loss of the coins used to play the game in the first place provided a self-evident punishment for…
The Meta-Game
Some game design decisions are hard boundaries — if you jump off a cliff you die, if you try to walk from A to C you will be blocked by a wall, and so forth. Just as often, though, design…
Bound City DevBlog, December/January 2022/2023 – Building Up
Well, clearly I’ve fallen behind. I ended up combining two months of DevBlogging here partially because I fell so far behind on putting up a DevBlog and partially because January ended up being a very low-progress month, with about half…
Bound City DevBlog, December/January 2022/2023 – Building Up
Well, clearly I’ve fallen behind. I ended up combining two months of DevBlogging here partially because I fell so far behind on putting up a DevBlog and partially because January ended up being a very low-progress month, with about half…
The Corruption
I find most game stories extremely obnoxious. Beyond the irritations with craftsmanship and cliche, beyond being merely bored and annoyed, there are patterns I see over and over again in intros and cutscenes and store pages that are distastefully tedious…
Bound City DevBlog, October 2022 – Little Lives
This has been, to my chagrin, the least productive month of the project so far. I’ve already talked about most of the things pushing back against my progress, and all of those continue to do so. The arc of progress…
Bound City DevBlog, September 2022 – Connections
This was another weird month, in part due to a sort of mental backlash against the whole deadline thing from last month. While I didn’t quite reach said deadline, the whole perspective of this as a thing that could be…
Sheeple
I played through Cult of the Lamb a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been meaning to write about for a little while but got derailed by a general failure to write anything. Cult of the Lamb is a roguelite…
Bound City DevBlog, August 2022 – Incomplete Completion
First thing’s first: I didn’t hit the deadline. I didn’t honestly expect to, but it was worth a shot, and I think just considering the project in terms of a deadline helped guide my efforts in the right direction –…