We’re surrounded. Surrounded by art, ambushed by narrative, pinned in place by poetry. Art in the age of mass production has become ubiquitous, and in its omnipresence has become invisible. We tell stories – yes, through novels and through television shows,…
This time last week I was adding detail to areas, trying to build out something that felt kind of finished and polished. This week I found out why you don’t want to do that until you’re working with at least…
We often think of art as having its meaning baked into it by the artist, of having a shape entirely formed by intent, and that the role of the audience is to simply partake of that message. The meaning of…
It’s weird how quickly time passes when I’m working on these levels. In some ways it’s hard work, and I often feel quite tired afterwards, but in the moment the hard work is effortless, an endless series of tiny changes…
From Software (yes, that’s the actual name of the company) seemingly came out of nowhere in 2009 with the sleeper hit Demon’s Souls, which was followed in 2011 by its better known and hugely successful successor Dark Souls. Well, it…
This week I decided that my game levels needed to have a background layer as well as the normal front tile layer I’ve been using. This solves a couple of problems: First, it lets me add a lot more detail…
I feel like there’s a hole in the way we discuss soundtracks. We talk about using certain instruments or techniques to evoke certain kinds of emotions and associations without ever talking about the specifics of how we do that and…
The bulk of this week was taken up by completely overhauling the game’s tile system. I’ve created a new template for all future tilesets: Because this is standardized, I’ve updated the in-game collision data to match the template, which means…
We are writing the ghosts that haunt us. We write them out onto the page hoping that they might continue long after we have gone. Someday they will haunt the world, but for now they just haunt us when we…
After a bit more programming work, I’ve finally got the core game to a point where I can spend some quality time actually building content. In this case, I’ve been working on building the first areas of the game. Actually,…
