The Shape of Things
Isn’t it strange the effect that shapes can have on us? Where do they depart from abstract form and become meaningful and evocative? A cylinder, with a bit of reshaping, begins to look like a thigh… and, once we begin…
Category Narrative Design
Eve DevBlog 28: Half Lives
This week I was more or less constantly harried by real life obligations and stresses which made work on the project difficult. I kept my head in the game, so to speak, but boy am I feeling the stress at…
Saving Worlds
The nice thing about having to save the world is that it’s a goal most people can get behind– particularly since the world happens to be where most people live. Nearly any other objective we could set would probably suggest…
Connections
“If this is so, then what else is so?” My brother introduced me to this particular precept of improv acting a few weeks ago. The basic idea is, something comes up about a character or a situation or circumstance: Following…
Eve DevBlog 27: What a Twist!
This was a pretty good week. I managed to eventually struggle my way through the first part of chapter 3, The Descent, a task which proved to be far more difficult and greater in scope than I had imagined it…
Immortality
It is difficult for games to create truly memorable characters. Because the characters who populate our worlds can behave in many different ways, based on the design of the game and the role they play within it, it’s an awkward…
Eve DevBlog 25: Writing the Angles
Kind of a weird week since I spent all of my Eve time on writing more level flow and story. I know it’s real work, but it don’t always feel like it… Here’s where I’m at. There are four chapters…
Other Lives
Isn’t it strange how complex and overwhelming our feelings about fictional people can become? There is a conflict of impulses: The sympathetic and the dramatic. We want characters to be happy for the same reason we want our friends and…
No Accountability
Something I always liked about playing Final Fantasy games in particular and JRPGs in general is the way random deities tended to turn up as various monsters in the world. These creatures usually had approximately fuck-all to do with their…
Eve DevBlog 24: Flow State
This week was mostly dedicated to writing out level flows. I’ve planned out most of Chapter 2 in general terms, and all that’s left to do to complete this phase of Chapter 2’s design is to plan out a few…