The short version? Balatro is my game of the year right now, and there’s very little hope of anything else replacing it. I have my gripes, which I’ll get to, but it executes an interesting premise far, far better than it needed to. Roguelite Poker The basis of Balatro is making poker hands. Every hand […]
Game Review: Hogwarts Legacy
[Content warning: anti-Semitism, transphobia, politics] [Note from the future: I wrote the majority of this review shortly after playing this game, which was a while ago. I’m sick right now, and have a policy of working on things that aren’t my main writing while feeling sick, so decided to read this over and finish it […]
Game Review: Underhill
Note: This review contains no screenshots, because this game doesn’t actually exist. The dwarves are mining, the bugbears are lumbering through the mushroom farms, the imps are scurrying to and fro, and all the traps at the entrance to the dungeon are armed and ready. From a bird’s eye view, it seems as though everything […]
The Exclusionary Principle: Post Mortem
I wasn’t originally going to write a post mortem for this, but the final word count is above 80,000 words, and it’s certainly been a unique project, so fuck it, what do I have a blog for if not this? Spoilers for Worth the Candle follow. Link here, in case you haven’t read The Exclusionary […]
Puzzling Out Puzzle Games
I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, mostly to crystalize some thoughts that I’ve had while playing puzzle games, particularly in terms of what I like from them. A lot of what’s here is drawing from my experience of my favorite puzzle games like The Witness, Baba is You, Snakebird, A Monster’s […]
Adventures in AI Text Generation, pt 2 (of ???)
I’m still trying to get an LLM to write me a novel, and experiencing the first major setbacks while working on chapter 2. I’ve got an outline, a central conflict, a major payoff to some setups that need to be a part of early chapters, and am trying to get some kind of a workflow […]
This Used to be About Dungeons: Post Mortem
Post mortems for the longer things I’ve written have become a bit of a tradition for me, and this one is coming hot on the heels of finishing. The body is still warm, which is the best time for a post mortem. Let’s dive right in! I worry that if I say SPOILERS you’ll think […]
Adventures in AI Text Generation, pt 1 (of ???)
I’ve been trying my hand at writing with the assistance of ChatGPT and occasionally other tools. Mostly, it sucks, delivering the occasional turn of phrase that I like but not having an understanding of how prose should flow and often eliding the things that are most interesting about a scene. I think there’s promise there […]
Addendum to the AI Art Apocalypse: Theft
This is one of those things I didn’t include in the original post, for a few reasons. The first is that it’s an incredibly long digression into legal, moral, technical, and practical matters, and the second is that I don’t find it all that interesting as it’s largely a social and philosophical discussion. Anyway, this […]
The AI Art Apocalypse
This image was created by an AI, MidJourney. All I had to do was type in a prompt (“wildfire”) and aspect ratio. This AI is pretty good, but nowhere near the state of the art, and AI like it are, over the next few years, going to make art like this available within seconds at […]
Writing: An FAQ
This is my writing FAQ. There are many like it, but this one is mine. The purpose of this FAQ is largely to dissuade people from asking questions for which there are stock answers. These are all questions that I’ve seen a lot that I don’t want anyone to ever ask me unless there’s some […]
Game Review: Elden Ring
Having finally finished Elden Ring, playing probably more than I should have, I felt compelled to write a review of it, not of the “you should or should not buy this game” variety, but of the “this is what this game made me feel and what I felt was worth talking about” variety. Full spoilers […]
Game Review: Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
I’ve been playing Assassin’s Creed game since the first, though usually not right when they come out. Typically I’ll wait long enough that I can pick them up on sale with all the DLC included, which is great for getting the version of the game with the most polish and the fewest bugs. I tend […]
Narrative Legos and the Monomyth
In 2016, Ken Levine (of Bioshock fame) gave a talk on “Narrative Legos”. I just got done watching it, and think it misses some fundamental aspects of what makes storytelling work, and because I have a blog where I can talk about things that I don’t think are much interest to people other than me, […]
Programming the Monomyth
I’ve lately been watching a bunch of GDC (and other game conference) talks, specifically about how to do narrative when you have to worry about the player doing something stupid and unexpected. Some of this interest has been because I’ve been playing Wildermyth of late, and little things have been, if not bugging me, then […]