Design and Development
106 posts
This year I went to PAX West having scheduled a series of appointments to see some Indie titles that I have been anxious to see since they were first announced and I set alarms to remind me of the sign ups for Nintendo’s Warp Pipe Pass that could get me […]
Like many people, when I first started playing Forgotten Anne it felt like I was playing inside of a Studio Ghibli film. The game is a cinematic adventure platformer that contains beautifully illustrated graphics, amazing and adaptive choregraphed music and seamless animations. At many times it looks and feels like […]
I hadn’t had a chance to get back to State of Decay 2 for a while, but recently I booted it back up and picked up my community where I’d left off. Right now, I have nine people and only two of them are clearly visually coded as white. In […]
When I first heard about Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery, I was extremely excited, as any Harry Potter fan who plays games would. I played the PC games when I was younger dozens of times. It helped that I do not play mobile games very often and have been looking for […]
Episode 171: Take the Cannoli: How Mafia (the game) Can Serve As a Model for Video Game Design (Click to download, or find us on iTunes, BlogTalk Radio, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). This week we have a conversation with Alisha Karabinus and Rachel Atherton (@wrathertweets) about their research on how analog games, like the […]
I saw TERA for the first time on the Playstation Network. Though originally released in 2011 the MMORPG was ported to North American consoles this March. The game is developed by Bluehole Studio based in South Korea, which is important to note for several reasons. The first is that, though […]
Vampires do not appear to hold the same appeal in media as they once did, but why? Portraying and playing with our deepest fears, not least of which is death—or worse, becoming the monster ourselves—some of these creatures spent the ‘90s, the aughts, and the first half of the 20-teens struggling with what they are, striving to reconcile their monstrosity with the human they long to still be, and, typically, falling in love with human women.
In many games, mental disorders are very much defined as auxiliary to the characters within the game. They are used to derive a sort of mechanic and are ignored narratively as they relate to character development and seriously dealing with these topics. Games like Amnesia, Don’t Starve, and The Evil […]
Content Warning: This post details sensitive and controversial topics that occur in Doki Doki Literature Club! It also contains plot and character spoilers. In my last post I went into detail on the unconventional gameplay of Team Salvato’s visual novel Doki Doki Literature Club!, while also mentioning the unexpected disclaimer that appears upon […]
Disclaimer: There will be heavy spoilers in this article regarding the nature and content of Doki Doki Literature Club! If you have any interest in the game, I would recommend checking it out before reading this article; however, please refer to the warning list beforehand and play at your own […]
Episode 165: Thunderbird Strike and the Power of Indigenous Game Design: A Conversation with Elizabeth Lapensee (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, BlogTalk Radio, Stitcher, Google Play, or TuneIn). This week we had an amazing conversation with the fabulous Elizabeth LaPensee, Indigenous scholar, artist, and game designer who talks with us […]
Spoiler Warning: The ending of several Legend of Zelda games up to Skyward Sword are going to be disclosed. I will unfortunately not be discussing Breath of the Wild in this article, as I have yet to play the game and I am attempting to avoid plot elements so I […]
This month’s Blog of the Roundtable topic over at Critical Distance is a very intriguing one. We often talk about peripheral things that happen in games as being some of the most important and impactful (though hidden). The way video games deal with player death is certainly no exception to […]
This past week came with the release of three big (and much awaited…for me) titles, Super Mario Odyssey, Assassin’s Creed: Origins, and Wolfenstein II. Most of us are well aware of the uproar surrounding Wolfenstein II before its release. Certain segments of the internet were irrationally angry about the idea […]
Yesterday, the news that EA was shutting down Visceral Games and passing off their developing Star Wars title in order to shape it into something else dominated a great deal of community discussion. As more details emerged, one thing became clear: for EA, at least, with their “games as service” […]