I don’t know how anything ever gets created. The moment a single creative decision gets made, everything shifts around it. If you’re writing a story and a character has a little two-paragraph flashback, the information contained therein affects every other…
It’s only been a couple of weeks since the last update – I’ve been letting these updates drift later and later behind schedule and into mid-month, and now finally trying to adjust it back to the start of the month…
This update is coming rather late. I’ve been recently trying to not count DevBlog’s as weekly posts, since it feels a little bit like cheating my way out of the work of finding a topic and writing an essay. This…
This essay is almost entirely about spoilers for the game Everhood. If this is a game you intend to play, I would recommend doing so before reading this. It’s a pretty neat game, and I would cautiously recommend it, although…
In a traditional narrative medium, moral choice often enters in when a character discovers they can do something that goes against their beliefs to gain some sort of an advantage or object of desire. The audience may perceive the character…
The ‘roguelike’ genre started, appropriately enough, with the game ‘Rogue’ in the year 1980. Rogue was an appealing but simplistic game, a primitive ASCII-based RPG. Soon more robust imitators came along, extrapolating on its mechanics to make more complex worlds,…
There are two kinds of bad procedural content: The first is the generic kind, made by connecting a bunch of random rooms and hallways together, all technically unique but functionally identical. The second is made by connecting pre-authored pieces together…
I don’t think game designers talk quite as much about player empowerment now as they used to, and that’s probably a good thing. Power, from the player’s perspective, could be said to be that which lets them affect intentional change…
After you spend a little while doing creative work, you tend to notice certain themes recurring throughout your creations. I have written here about my current project, EverEnding, but seldom in terms of its story and themes – I haven’t…
