Play
The names we give things can be so unexpectedly revealing sometimes. I saw a play a few days ago. It was a good play, but that’s not relevant. This was the last staging of this show, though, and as someone…
Category Game Design
Life in the Problem Machine
As I’ve been maintaining this blog, the focus of my posts seem to have shifted a bit. I’ve been drifting further and further away from the study of what games express, how they express it, and the limitations of our…
Eve DevBlog 67: Planning and Polishing
It’s been kind of a slow week. I started off by adding those features to the map editor which I’d noticed were missing last update, but since then I’ve just been trying, bit by bit, to polish the collision detection…
Eve DevBlog 66: Renewal
Well, things still feel slightly frozen in place. I’m still trying to recreate a daily routine after the holidays shattered my schedule, and it feels like habits have been broken, both good and bad, and I’m remaking them now for…
Ludum Dare 28: Crash and Burn
This wasn’t a good weekend for me. Here’s the thing, and maybe I didn’t entirely acknowledge this, either publicly or personally, before I started: I didn’t just want to participate in this Ludum Dare, I wanted to win. I wanted…
The Dark
I would almost say that fear of the unknown is the only real kind, but that seems difficult to defend. Certainly, the fear that the guy who told you he would cut your arm off at 3:15pm next Tuesday will…
Line Disconnected
When we control something we become it. When we steer the car we feel the texture of the road and adopt its dimensions as our own, and feel the tiny scrapes and impacts that scar her surface in our teeth…
Heroes
The problem with always saving the world is that it necessitates that the world be always broken. The problem with the world being always broken is that it surrenders the idea of it ever being better. Our games cast us…
Hearthstone: A Review Apparently
I’ve been playing the beta for Hearthstone, Blizzard Entertainment’s upcoming online collectable card game. It’s actually difficult for me to justify this as time well spent. It’s not that it’s a bad game – quite the opposite, in fact. I…
Crafting the Path
It is often observed that playing games and making games are different activities. This is kind of obvious, but whatever the technical college advertisements might have you believe, there is more involved in developing a game than playing through it…