Defunned
As a rule, I usually avoid writing about “fun.” I don’t feel “Fun” is a very useful term for analyzing game design – it’s poorly defined, it’s subjective, it’s regarded as a self-evidently good thing to have. In short, “fun”…
Category Game Design
Join the Madness Devblog, February 22nd: The Game of the Game
Several months ago, I had the idea that I was almost done with the initial vertical slice of the game, and wanted to push to make that happen. Now I’m a month away from the one-year anniversary of the project,…
Join the Madness DevBlog, January 2022: Open Structures
Almost no actual development work happened over the last month; I left for a trip on the 11th and got back on the 24th, and several days on either side of that were spent either preparing for or recovering from…
Balancing in the Middle
For a while there was a trend of providing a moral choice to players: The choice between Good and Evil. My understanding is that this idea probably started with Ultima IV in 1985 – but when I think about “moral…
Some Steam Reviews I Wrote
Something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and which I’ve been perpetually putting off, is writing some short Steam reviews for the games I’ve played over the past few years. I have read from many sources that hitting…
Submissions
For the past few months, the higher-ups at game company after game company have announced that they’re going to be integrating NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) into their games. For those unfamiliar with the concept (probably not as many of you as…
Join the Madness DevBlog, December 2021: Unspoken
With one thing and another, it’s tough to get much done during December, so almost all of the progress in this update happened in either the first or last week of the month. As I mentioned at the end of…
Join the Madness DevBlog, November 2021 – Carnifex
One of the biggest outstanding tasks on my list, from the moment I started this project thinking it was a one-month game jam project, has been that of the first boss. It has come to stand in my mind as…
Inscryption – Curses, Sacrifices, and Roads Untraveled
I finished Inscryption a few days ago and feel I should write about it, but I don’t entirely know where to start. Well, let’s start at the outside and work in: Inscryption is, to begin with, a roguelike deck-builder –…
Join the Madness DevBlog, October 2021 – Menagerie
Last month I said I wanted to get a few enemies done to flesh out these early areas. I also said, somewhat optimistically, that I thought I might be able to do them all in a week – this turned…