Sunday, June 30, 2013

"Handle with Care" at Queer Arcade, July 27-28 in Toronto

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The original Half-Life 2 mod version of Handle with Care will be on-display, alongside much better games with queer themes, at the "Q...
Friday, June 28, 2013

Radiatorpalooza 2013: "Technical criticism"

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The Fall games conference season is in the works. (Get excited.) Here's my current schedule, subject to change... September 14th: No S...
Saturday, June 22, 2013

"Press F to Intervene": a brief history of the Use Key Genre

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There are NO *detailed* spoilers for BioShock Infinite in this post, so relax. I try to speak in a really general / vague way about what h...
Saturday, June 15, 2013

Design reboot: Thief.

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This post relies on familiarity with the gameplay / affordances in Thief. You may want to read Dark Past or my write-up on "Assassi...
Friday, June 7, 2013

Amnesia, Among the Sleep, and horror economics.

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I used to have a low opinion of the many busywork-type interactions that fill survival horror games. To me, it seemed like these games we...
Sunday, June 2, 2013

No Show Conference is an intimate game dev / game crit conference at MIT. And they want talk proposals.

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Last year, last No Show Conference , I had a pretty good time. I met many MIT games academics, East Coast indies, Canadian indies, and inter...
Friday, May 31, 2013

Design futures: AutoBrushes, levels that build themselves, and the politics of procedurality.

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If Bethesda's detailed GDC presentation about modular level design kits for Fallout / Skyrim showed me anything, it's that modula...
Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Cubemapped Environment Probes: Source Engine-style cubemap implementation in Unity 4 Pro

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I wanted a static baked-in solution for doing cubemap-based reflections in Unity. Using cubemaps instead of (or with) traditional Blinn-Pho...