Depths
When we create, most of our work is never seen. Most of what we pour into our art is too dense and sinks to the bottom, where, though it cannot be observed directly, somehow its presence is still felt. It’s…
Category Narrative Design
ProMaRaRo 4: Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus
I didn’t play it. Well, technically I did. I played for 40 minutes or so. That was long enough for me to remember what an unpleasant, albeit intriguing, world that Oddworld is. Abe, the player character, seems to be the…
ProMaRaRo 3: Anodyne
I like Anodyne. I liked it more than I expected to, in all honesty: I was expecting a solid and aesthetically pleasing retro-gaming experience, but what I found was something much stranger and more beautiful than I had anticipated. Anodyne…
A Real Sum of a Glitch
Around this time last week, I discussed how games have a hard time portraying the unreliability of memories because this erodes the player’s ability to trust the information they’re receiving from the game. I’ve been thinking about that, and it…
Life Story
Every time something new enters our lives, we rewrite our story to accommodate it. We project it into our future, and sometimes into our pasts, in order to construct a story for ourselves that makes sense and tells us who…
Making History
We are connected, each day to the last, by the path of our history. Your memories are the map, and every so often you compare the landmarks of your life against what you see on that map and, invariably, if…
Dynamics
All things are relative. There’s a phenomenon that’s been ongoing in the music industry for the last 30 years called the Loudness War. It goes like this: Audio producers are pressured, both internally and externally, commercially and artistically, into creating…
Bitter Man
I seem to be hating a lot of things recently. I’ve always been mature for my age, so I think at 30 I may have started to cross over into crotchety old man territory. If I had a lawn and…
First Impressions
Something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is how games and other works ask us to engage with them. Each work of art exists within a greater context, and how we parse the messages those works engender is affected…
Eve DevBlog 38: Character Interaction
Well, I’ve finally fixed the collision code to a point where it is, if not release quality, at least decent enough that I don’t mind leaving it like this for a while while I work on other more interesting challenges.…