Sheeple
I played through Cult of the Lamb a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been meaning to write about for a little while but got derailed by a general failure to write anything. Cult of the Lamb is a roguelite…
Bound City DevBlog, August 2022 – Incomplete Completion
First thing’s first: I didn’t hit the deadline. I didn’t honestly expect to, but it was worth a shot, and I think just considering the project in terms of a deadline helped guide my efforts in the right direction –…
Rolled Flat
There’s a very special kind of annoyance when it becomes obvious that a work of art that you really like has actually impacted its medium for the worse. For instance, while I quite like the film Inception, for years afterwards…
Hellbound
A while ago I had the opportunity to see the stage show Hadestown, a jazzy operatic retelling of the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. We had to drive a while to get there and I wasn’t sure how much down-time…
Growing Green
I’ve noticed in myself that recently whenever I see gameplay footage of a new game I tend to have a kneejerk negative reaction. In part this is simply because I’ve gotten sick of a lot of game design and writing…
Bound City DevBlog, July 2022 – Deadlining
The end of June and beginning of July were dominated by travel, several trips in quick succession over about 3 weeks, over which I made very little progress on the project: Perhaps a few ideas popped up, a plan or…
Sword and Shield
The power of empathy is an idea that is simultaneously talked about way too much while hardly being understood at all. There’s two things that we get wrong when we speak of using empathy to resolve conflict. We talk about…
Animalistic
Something that frequently bothers me is the way animals are treated in games. There are a few dimensions to this: Often, the only animals represented in a game are those which pose a direct threat, aggressive predators which attack at…
Cross-Pollination
I admire innovative game design. It’s always fascinating to see new ideas for expressing things through gameplay, new ideas for things to be expressed through gameplay, new ideas for what sorts of play could even be considered a game. At…
Join the Madness DevBlog, June 2022 – Worries
It feels like progress has really slowed down recently. I think that has a lot to do with what sorts of work on the project feel like progress and which don’t. A lot of the last week or so has…