Hey everyone, I wrote a short story a couple months ago called The Feast. It’s about a family that gets trapped in a cave by a host of demons, and must tell it stories in order to escape. The story is told in an old-timey fairy-tale sort of voice, and I think it worked out…
Tag: Story
A Meier Modification
One of my favorite game design quotes has always been Sid Meier’s “Games are a series of interesting choices.” I was thinking a lot about it last night, and I think if I were saying it now I’d make a slight modification that, I think, might make Mr. Meier’s meaning a bit clearer to the…
A book recommendation – Kingslayer Chronicles
Some friends of mine bought me this book for Christmas and I thoroughly enjoyed it, so I figured I’d mention it here: The book is The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. it’s the first book in a trilogy, and the other two are being written as we speak. The book, without spoiling too…
Classic Game Designers: They walked the earth…
Miyamoto talks about Super Mario Bros for 25th anniversary This is an amazing article for a number of reasons, but it affected me deeply for one in specific: Namely, it’s eye-opening to me to understand that these classic games were made by game designers. It’s weird to say it, but up to this point (unbeknownst…
Guest Post: Colin Munson – “Challenging Challenges for Thinking People”
My friend and fellow designer Colin Munson asked if he could write a guest post for my blog, and my answer was “HELLS YEAH!” Colin and I worked together for 5 years at Insomniac, and he’s one of my favorite Game Designers in the industry. I found the following editorial fascinating, and I’m proud to…
Idea: Using Movie Structure to Inform Game Design?
I’ve been reading a lot about storytelling recently. Besides rereading “Characters and Viewpoint” by Orson Scott Card, the most recent ones I’ve read have been the “Save the Cat” books, by Blake Snyder (great reads, if you’re at all interested in screenwriting). Snyder proposes a very analytical breakdown of the plots in movies. He has…
Idea: A Pen-And-Paper RPG Meta-System
My gaming group is quite odd, as it turns out. It’s HUGE. When we get everyone, we have 11-13 people. This is great, but most games are made for 4-8 people. They tend to bog down when you get up above 8, and most pen-and-paper RPG designers aren’t trying to solve the problem of having too…
Oblivion Exploration Analysis
I’m really slammed at the moment, so I though I’d post some excerpts from some analysis I did a while back on the exploration in Oblivion. Note: I didn’t remove all spoilers or grammar errors, but I got a bunch of em. Summary One of the coolest things about Oblivion is how “free form” the…
Game Story Seed
So there’s this story today about a US satellite and a Russian Satellite colliding. US and Russian officials yesterday confirmed that the satellites – an Iridium communications spacecraft and a Russian Kosmos-2251 military satellite – collided at about noon GMT on Tuesday. The first known example of a satellite collision in space occurred about 800km…
Eduardo the Samurai Toaster – This game looks awesome
http://www.semnatstudios.com/screens.html Another reason to get me some WiiWare gift cards — take notice, potential gift-givers! Eduardo the Samurai Toaster is a 2D sidescrolling run ‘n gun action game featuring frenetic combat spread across 13 diverse landscapes. Up to four players can fight alongside each other to defeat their foes or just to annoy each other….