Making a Decision
I’ve been playing a lot of XCOM 2 recently, and after a discussion on the differences between it and its precursor the other day I started thinking about the nature of decisions in games. In XCOM (the first one), you’re…
Tag The Walking Dead
Things Unseen
It’s interesting how much goes into a game that the player never sees. Old versions, unused content, hidden details of construction, or simply paths the player never takes. As we play the game, this stuff is invisible – sometimes we find…
Hexagon
The biggest difference between Super Hexagon and other similar games, fast paced reaction endurance challenges like Flappy Bird and Canabalt and Race the Sun, is that the presentation is inverted. You aren’t running away from or towards anything, but rolling…
Built From Ideas
There’s an argument that’s been floating around in game design circles for a while that if, say, you have an idea for a game, if you could possibly express that idea using any other medium then you probably shouldn’t be…
Tragedy Minus Time
There’s a smarmy and not particularly accurate saying: “Comedy equals tragedy plus time.” This is only true for some very specific forms of comedy, and those mostly not the funniest sort, but there’s still an element of truth there. Old…
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…
Obligations
In all honesty, I just now was lying down to sleep and remembered that I needed to write something. Fuck. It’s like that dream where for reasons you don’t understand you’re giving a presentation on a subject you haven’t studied…
Making a Concession Stand
It takes a lot of concessions to make a game feasible. Some of these are made early on, settling on a conservative and traditional design paradigm that has already been well explored by other games: Some of these are made…
Eve DevBlog 29: Pandemonium
I spent most of the time I had available this week planning out Pandemonium– It was an incredibly chaotic week, all told, and I wish I’d been able to get more work done than I did, but I’m quite excited…
Solipsism
He also programmed robots to write books and magazines and newspapers for you, and television and radio shows, and stage shows, and films. They wrote songs for you. The Creator of the Universe had them invent hundreds of religions, so…