Overlooking Us All
I was sitting in the waiting room of my doctor’s office when I happened to glance upwards. There was a cutout between the first floor, which I was on, and the walkways of the second. This rectangle was lined by…
Category World Design
The Building is in the Building is in the Building is in…
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…
EverEnding DevBlog, August 2020: Mist
Last month I had just started working on a system for transforming the color of sprites. I finished it pretty early on into this month, and immediately afterward made an post-processing effect which performed the same effect but across the…
Protagonists
There’s this desire to make stories huge epics, covering vast expanses of space and huge worlds of consequence. There’s also a desire to make the same stories be personal, relatable, grounded in the lives of a few people and their…
Explorers
Playing games is largely a process of exploration. Often this is in a very literal sense, where you’re given a simulated physical space and part of the challenge is learning the ins and outs of it, but just as often…
DevBlog, April 2018: Rabbit Holes
Well, I keep on getting distracted, but the distractions are all part of the project itself. There’s a distinction between the process of making a game and the process of making the game engine, the game editor, the game tools,…
DevBlog, March 2018: Foundations
The new project is underway. I frequently miss working on EverEnding, and so far I haven’t gotten to do the sorts of things I really came to this project for, but I’m also getting really excited about some of the…
Surface Level
Way back when I started this blog, one of the first essays I did was about conceiving of a game as the combination of three related spaces – physical, mechanical, and narrative – and gameplay as the act of allowing…
Wearing War
Not too long ago, and for a lot of the history of video games, the visual quality of a game has been decided entirely on how ‘realistic’ the graphics are. Using photo textures, true-to-life lighting models, and increasingly sophisticated shading…
Hidden
Games, as a medium, have been rediscovering the art of the secret, of the hidden. For a while, around the mid ’00s, it was incredibly rare for games to be anything beyond just what they appeared to be – and…