Puzzles in videogames, especially point-and-click adventures, are strange things. Mysteries and puzzles in movies are all about ingenuity, wits and thinking outside of the box. In games, though, they’re about working out what the designer…
The Saturday Paper: Dungeon Feng Shui
Level design is a tricky business. As you creep around Dunwall or drive through Liberty City, you’re influenced by the architecture, the passageways, the placement of other characters and the location of treasure. Handcrafted levels…
Play Games, Help Science #1 – Georgia Tech
Doing science with videogames is all well and good, but the only way to know if you’re doing it right is to get real people in front of what you’ve made, and get them…
The Saturday Paper: Minecraft and Monet
Procedural content generation is a popular piece of technology, to say the least. From Minecraft’s rolling hills to Dwarf Fortress’ intricate world histories, we love games that can generate parts of themselves each time we…
Hyperbole
I was fortunate enough to be one of the guests on the latest season of Joe Martin and Harriet Jones’ podcast, Unlimited Hyperbole. The episode has just gone up, and is perfect coffee break listening-size. In it,…
The Saturday Paper: Making Magic (Spells)
Depictions of character classes in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion If you’ve ever played a role-playing game, from Final Fantasy V to Skyrim, you’ll know that the genre loves its tropes. From orcs and goblins…
The Saturday Papers
This evening I found a few tweets from Jonathan Blow that disappointed me a bit. Here they are: I wrote code to do A* today, for the first time since I was in college. Long…
ANGELINA on Gamasutra & Eurogamer
It’s the first day of EvoStar 2013 today, and I’ve already seen plenty of confusing and exciting talks, drunk a week’s ration of coffee, and confused the locals with my attempts to speak German. I…
Brief Update: Spritely and A Rogue Dream
Apologies for the silence over here – I have begun work on my thesis, which is delaying anything exciting happening! Here are some things that are happening, though: Next week I’ll be in Vienna at…
A Rogue Dream
This was originally intended to be a non-research post over at Cut Garnet Games, but since it sprang out of work I’d been doing on ANGELINA I wanted to talk about it over here in…