Spiraling Shape
This could lead to excellence Or serious injury Only one way to know Go, go, go Go ahead, wreck your life That might be good Who can say what’s wrong or right? Nobody can There is no coherent way for…
Category Life in the Machine
A Light Touch in the Dark
I distrust certainty. I don’t trust people who are certain what they want, because it seems to me that they haven’t asked enough questions, and how can you trust people who simply accept what they’re told or, worse, maybe, always…
Resume From Last Checkpoint
A common problem in games, and one which is rarely solved well, is how to get a player who has left the game for a month or more caught back up on whatever’s going on at any given moment. I…
Eve DevBlog 10: Thanksgiving
Okay there’s a lot to go over here. First, the screenshot: Right here I’m experimenting with adding some simple but processor-intensive screen post-processing effects and I’ve finally gone ahead and added support for a static background image to be used…
Lessons
Something that a lot of game players and developers like to talk about is those semi-rare occasions when a study comes out discussing the benefits of playing games, as opposed to how they are turning people into murderous drones. That…
This is Halloween
Short update today, things have been busy. I think I have some bonus material I can put up to compensate on Monday morning though… I, like most white people, am fond of Halloween. There’s a few things I like about…
Eve DevBlog 6: More blog, less dev!
Worst week for the project thus far! May as well just get that out there right away and say it, and I’m not thrilled about that since last week was also pretty bad. Oh well. There’s gonna be bad weeks,…
Artificial Neuroticism
In games everything has a clear cause and effect. If you get your face stomped by a cyclops, it’s because you forgot to re-equip your Axe of Extravagant Evisceration after using the Feather Duster of Tidiness for that side-quest, or…
Hard Mode
An enduring problem with single player games that rely on challenge for appeal is that they allow for mastery. Once these games are mastered, there is no longer any challenge to them, and thus no appeal. Due to fluctuations in…
Easy Mode
I just played FTL for the first time. As the game recommends, since it was my first time playing I went ahead and played on easy mode, and everything was going pretty well up until the last couple of star…