That's why they call it the Diamond City Blues

WARNING: This post "spoils" an early quest in Fallout 4 and a later quest in Fallout 3.

The "Diamond City Blues" quest, one of the better quests of Fallout 4, begins at an upper-class bar in Diamond City. Most of the bar patrons are snooty rich one-percenter caricatures who will categorically refuse to talk to poor people like you, even though you're richer than God and they literally sleep on filthy mattresses in trash shacks, so you basically kind of hate these people from the beginning.

Over at the bar counter, a woman is drinking to forget her unhappy marriage, while the grizzled bartender-owner dude implies he's having an affair with her. Suddenly, her weak jealous husband tries to confront the two but he ends up getting humiliated.

When you run into the jealous husband again, outside of the bar, he wants to hire you to help confront the bartender. So you go back to the bar...

"Rinse and Repeat" technical post-partum / how to do over-complicated wet skin shower shader effects in Unity

This is a technical overview of how I built certain parts of Rinse and Repeat. It spoils the game, so you should probably play it first if you care about stuff like that.

Rinse and Repeat took about 1-2 months to make. For these sex games, my development process can basically be summarized as "art first" -- my very first in-engine prototypes are usually about establishing mood and texture, and setting up the character you'll be staring at, and these are by far the most important parts of the game.

The limits of a conceptual VR student game; and what would a "better" game about 9/11 look like?

The internet has been abuzz about "8:46", "a narrative driven experience designed for virtual reality, which makes you embody an office worker in the North Tower of the World Trade Center during the 9/11 events."

The game itself suffers from a lot of problems. If I were to ignore the politics, there's plenty of production values to critique -- the characters have blobby sculpts, inconsistent lighting, and stilted voice acting -- the particles are really really awkward -- and the one thing I like is the floorplan, especially the cramped corner office you begin in, which feels like a pretty authentic detail of old NYC office buildings.

But who are we kidding, this game is totally a political work, and it is much more generous to the developers to interpret it that way. Most people are just going to talk about this game instead of actually playing it, which is OK, and that's what compels me to write about it: I think this is a very flawed conceptual work, and I want to talk about why that is.

(1) TECHNOLOGY. Using virtual reality was not a good idea for this project, especially in this early generation of VR where it is mostly positioned as a nascent platform and consumer market that desperately needs to prove itself. Anything using VR in these early years is, inherently, saying, "look at me, I'm using VR!"

That's an OK thing to say, but it centers the technology instead of what you're saying with the technology, which is probably not what you want to do for a 9/11 game that's supposedly about respect for the dead rather than how this cool new peripheral? To be clear, I think you could make a game that powerfully critiques Western attitudes toward the dead and who is allowed to talk about the dead; I don't think this is that game.