Most of this month was taken up working on tweaks and changes to the dialogue system, which is definitely not how I had hoped to spend this time. One fix to the system required another more fundamental fix, which led…
Around the start of July, I went on a trip for a couple of weeks. I mention this to explain why this is another two-month DevBlog: When a trip like this coincides with the start of the month, it’s easy…
One of the most hazardous unquestioned assumptions of game design is that a game should be balanced. Don’t get me wrong, it certainly can be an issue if one tool is too strong, or many tools too weak, particularly in…
“What do my science fiction stories have in common with pornography? Fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world, I’m told.” -Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. One of the most interesting and useful angles with which to examine any art is that of what…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 –…
