At The Gates
Games seldom allow you to experience them all at once or in any order you choose. Though open-world design has become more popular, there are usually some obstacles to exploring the world in its entirety, even if in some cases…
Category World Design
Starbound
I’m dropped on a planet with nothing but a few simple imperatives to point the way. The sensation is familiar, but the world is a stranger. Mushrooms grow maybe 30 feet tall here. Strange creatures wander around, and some of…
Crafting the Path
It is often observed that playing games and making games are different activities. This is kind of obvious, but whatever the technical college advertisements might have you believe, there is more involved in developing a game than playing through it…
True Ending
Endings are hard. Endings are weird. Our effects as humans, as entities and processes, will outlast our lives, never ending but blending instead seamlessly into each other, on and on, forever. Our stories will outlive the process of our bodies,…
In-Between
Just as some people seem realer to us than others, some places seem to be solid while others are ephemeral and hypothetical. Our map of the world is akin to a sensory homonculus, exaggerated out of proportion in our homes and…
ProMaRaRo 6: FEZ
The world is a big place. And just when you think you’re starting to understand how big it is, you find that the world you’ve been living in is just the shadow of something greater, just a two-dimensional projection of…
ProMaRaRo 5: The Mighty Boosh
Adventures are everywhere. Monsters are everywhere. Dangers that aren’t dangerous lurk around every corner, and exotic locations all across the world are apparently always a day’s drive away. The legends are true. The legends are always true. In The Mighty…
Eve DevBlog 51: Under Attack
Well, the crouch attack animation ended up being much more work than I had previously anticipated. I had expected it to take a day or two to get it finished and implemented, but it ended up taking the better part…
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…
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…