“Vertical slice” is a word that gets thrown around a lot in the land of game development. The idea is to create an incredibly polished 5-minute-or-so demo meant to represent a morsel of a larger experience, and after playtesting Tales from the Minus Lab for nearly a year, I’ve come to the conclusion that this really [...]

This was probably the most abstract talk I heard at GDC, but I thought Eric Zimmerman did a good job of organizing a lot of ideas that have been floating around regarding how we talk about games. The first part of his talk was a plea to stop being apologetic of games. An example he used [...]

This talk was given by Scott Lawlor, the sound designer of Fallout: New Vegas , about the dynamic music system he built for the game. None of the techniques are all that surprising, but it’s still interesting to see how a large-scale project handles music in a world where the player can go anywhere at any time. [...]

The Slipstream Archipelago Atlas

I’m still working on the narrative behind the initial setup of my world, but for now it starts out with you stranded on a desolate junkyard-covered asteroid (I haven’t modeled the junkyard yet). High above in the starry sky, a deadly meteor storm looms closer and closer, leaving you with a limited amount of time [...]

Atlas: My atlas will take the form of a dusty old user’s manual the ship’s previous owner left crammed inside the glove compartment: Table of Contents: – Do a barrel roll: How to fly your Space Shanty. – Roughing it: A brief overview of the airlock and life support systems. – Slow cooker: The does and [...]

For now I’ve decided to focus solely on the spacecraft players will use to explore Brittle Hollow (and other regions of space).     The spacecraft’s interior can be broken into 3 primary nodes (the cockpit, observation pod, and main cabin), which are connected by short tubes. The cabin is further divided into cozy (but not [...]

Observation: Treadmills are mass-produced devices that allow one person to walk or run in place.   Implications: – Personal fitness is valued, but not as much as time or convenience. – A significant portion of the population is overweight. – Normal methods of transportation are significantly faster than walking or running. – For many people (at least [...]

Spelunky is a platforming rogue-like in which players are challenged to descend as far as possible into a network of randomly-generated caves. Death happens frequently and forces players to restart the entire experience from the beginning. I’ve broken my analysis into a few major observations, each informed by specific details from the game.   This world is extremely [...]