In all the excitement over Dark Souls’ intricately detailed world, subtle storytelling, and tough-but-fair challenge, I think the simple extraordinary elegance of the estus flask is often overlooked. For those of you who are not familiar with the systems of…
It’s going better now. Rather than hammering my head constantly against the glacial mass of animation work that needs to be completed, I’m approaching the project from many angles now, largely with a view towards completing a vertical slice of…
There’s a moment in art which drives me. It’s hard to name – you might call it a twist, except that means something else already, similar but just different enough to be insufficient. It’s the moment of friction between the…
‘Interactive’ is a convenient buzz-word that we’ve been using to describe games for some time. What separates games from other art, so we say, is that the audience acts upon the game and the game in turn acts upon them,…
I don’t know where the bottomless pit began. Maybe it’s always been there. How can something with no end have a beginning? But I think most of us first encountered the bottomless pit playing Super Mario Brothers, falling off the…
As time goes on and I write more posts for Problem Machine, I notice certain themes emerging, repeating themselves in slight variation. One of these is the idea that there are no good or bad elements of game design, only…
I liked playing through Dark Souls 3, but something seemed off about the experience to me. Immediately after starting the game, in the menu, the silence of the Dark Souls menu and the spooky music of the menu in Dark…
This is happening exactly the way I worried it might. I’m coming to think I have some sort of attention disorder. I have a very difficult time focusing on almost any tasks for more than an hour at a time,…
I keep on circling around thoughts about how not to be manipulative, how to respect your audience, and I end up not writing them down because, well – obviously, right? It seems obvious to say you should respect your audience,…
Say something true. Now say something else true. Keep doing it. An hour or a day, or whatever pace you feel comfortable with; any pace will eventually take you to the same place. Don’t repeat yourself. Say something new, say…
