Edge of Empowerment
Power is defined every bit as much by what it can’t achieve as what it can achieve. Even an indestructable man can’t save himself from drowning, even a walking god can’t reverse death. Omnipotence is a contradiction, a rock made…
Category Narrative Design
Dark Souls
People in dreams are perceived in reverse order. When we are awake, we see a face, a body, a set of mannerisms, a manner of dress, and we recognize the familiar, and we put a name to the person. In…
A Painless Death
Sometime within the past 15 years or so, game developers collectively came to the realization that death sucks. They reacted to this by making games easier, by reducing the consequence for failure, by allowing the player to quickly get back…
Prisoners
A couple of years ago, I was driving across the Bay Bridge when I realized it wasn’t over. That makes it sound like I was in a way darker place than I really was, but there was a part of…
Detraining
There is a process which repeats, a cycle with no end in sight. As my skill grows, my ability to recognize my own flaws grows with it, and thus, from my perspective, it appears that I’m not growing more skillful…
Technique and Aesthetic
There’s a danger in getting better at things. Well, there are probably several, but I have one in particular in mind right now. As you improve in your chosen field, art or music or writing or whatever, you gain the…
Verbosity and Concision
With game design, as with any sort of design intended for human use, simpler is, generally speaking, better. The history of game design is a history of streamlining and simplifying, merging similar ideas together and glossing over the technicalities. Firearms…
EverEnding DevBlog 70: Hodgepodge
Phew. Okay I’m actually like super tired right now so I’ll try to make this brief. First thing’s first, sound and music are tested and seem to work! So far at least. There’s obviously a lot of tests I’m going…
Passive
I spend a lot of my time in games. I work in games, I play in games. Sometimes I dream in games. When the energy it would require to actually play feels like too much, I’ll watch someone else play.…
Writing In Colors
It’s hard to know how much to expose. There is a skill to knowing how much to let through our filter. The truth and character of a piece of writing come from how honestly we express what’s in ourselves – the…