Music Hacker - Finale

I wanted to go out with a bang. You get this instead.

Infiltrator Part 25: Direction

So a little while back I mentioned that Infiltrator had almost enough gameplay and mechanics to form the base of a real game rather than a profitless unending project for fun. Upon reflection, I think if I change the direction this game was originally going I can finish this sucker at some point and have a mildly playable game in my portfolio. I don't know if any of you have know, but neither of the two games I've finished are really that great, much less an accurate representation of my current skill as both are more than two years old.

Gameplay vs. Story

I've done an awful lot of writing about game design. I kind of assumed this was a given, but I've never really stated it before: I think videogames should be an artistic medium. I don't agree with a lot of videogame artists on many points, but we all agree on this one. I think a lot of us also agree that being an artistic medium, it's unique story telling abilities are something we can't give up. This is the driving force behind this post. How do we use gameplay to tell a story anyway?

More Revisions to the Posting Schedule

Looking back over this blog after I discontinued Cognitive Observations, I see a lot of filler posts. I see posts that are more updates than entertaining content, or posts that are basically quickly scraped together excuses for content. This was never what this blog was about. I think this may become an even bigger problem once I stop doing Music Hacker.

*gasp*

Yes, I'm going to be discontinuing my webshow once I finish season 2. The reasons and everything will be discussed in the season finale. The point is that webshow updates made up a  little over one sixth of the posts here, and that kind of content being removed doesn't magically make up for itself. After a lot of analysis, I arrived at the conclusion that I want to choose quality over quantity. That means I want to chisel my posts down to two per week. Where will these posts go in the week? One of them will go on Saturdays, obviously, and the other will be moved from Wednesday to Tuesday.  That way my terribly busy Wednesdays will get a little slack, and there will be new posts for you to read in your spare time on the weekend.

These changes are effective tomorrow. That way I don't have to have anything ready until Saturday. ;P


            --LazerBlade

Music Hacker: Because I Like Trance

This episode about Hard Trance leads marks the last tutorial style episode in the second season. That means that my special edition season finale is in only two weeks!

Choice in Gameplay

There has been a TON of talk about videogame choice and how it should be done. I have no particular reason to believe that what I have to say hasn't been said before, but even if it has been said a thousand times my repeating it can only add pressure toward applying it. That said, I want to talk about implementing choice in terms of gameplay mechanics and systems. I'm not here to talk about the artistic or writing side this time.

New Album Officiated: Rhyme or Reason

Yep. I've got enough track time not on any album to justify another album project. This time it's flying under the name "Rhyme or Reason." Theme: there is no particular rhyme or reason to why the tracks were put next to each other. ;)

Thus far I've got about 6 tracks filling about 25 minutes, so I'm nearly halfway done already. This should prove rather interesting, as I never really thought I'd keep doing this to the point where I had four albums.

        --LazerBlade

Infiltrator Part 24 - Fighting Fighters

This session was actually finished a few days ago, but I wanted to add a few extra features before I wrote about it. I then found out that said features were quite a bit more complex than I thought, and I ended up moving it to the list of long term features. Anyway, I have some interesting new bells and whistles to show you all.

Video Game High Score Systems

So after a short break, I'm back to hit you all with a new article. This time I want to discuss video game high score systems.  These have been around for quite awhile, so there has been plenty of experimentation with the concept, leaving us with a wealth of knowledge we can use to analyze it.

Early Bird

I'll be going offline for a bit and won't be able to post my episode at the regular time, so I've decided to put it up a day early.