Brevity is the soul of wit. To elaborate: A story is only as good as the best parts the audience remembers. The more extraneous crap is added on top, the less enjoyable that experience might be. Past a certain threshold,…
This update is coming rather late. I’ve been recently trying to not count DevBlog’s as weekly posts, since it feels a little bit like cheating my way out of the work of finding a topic and writing an essay. This…
This essay is almost entirely about spoilers for the game Everhood. If this is a game you intend to play, I would recommend doing so before reading this. It’s a pretty neat game, and I would cautiously recommend it, although…
Horror and comedy can be particularly tricky genres to create in. Both rely to some degree on shocking and surprising audiences, and seeking to create shock and surprise tends to lead towards uncomfortable and loaded topics. This can be difficult…
In a traditional narrative medium, moral choice often enters in when a character discovers they can do something that goes against their beliefs to gain some sort of an advantage or object of desire. The audience may perceive the character…
One of the trickiest parts of art – with the understanding that art is entirely made of tricky parts – is the comprehension of proportion and perspective. There is, in one sense, a lot of wiggle room here – we…
This one-month project persists in being a not-one-month project, and I’m surprisingly fine with that. What drove me crazy with EverEnding, and which frankly still hangs over my head to some degree, is not knowing when or if it will…
Nowadays, opportunities to express misanthropic and cynical viewpoints are thick on the ground – cruel and duplicitous politicians who still bafflingly find true believers, fantastical and murderous conspiracy theories, betrayals and close-mindedness, callousness and cruelty everywhere. It makes so much…
“A game is a series of interesting choices” – Sid Meier The above quote is one of the first foundational ideas one encounters when studying game design. Sid Meier, most well known as the designer of the Civilization series of…
