Sorry about how patchy blog posts have been recently. I’ve been having a lot more schoolwork and a lot of minor irritating problems with the XMICYOA system that preclude having anything good to talk about. Fortunately, as of about five minutes ago, I have stuff worth talking about again. I mentioned that I was going back to make the XMI parser more efficient and flexible, and a large part of that was cutting it into two discrete parts; one to call the parser and one to actually parse the files. Continue reading “Project Update: Pardon My Mess”
Month: March 2014
Thursday Review: Shadowrun: Dragonfall
Shadowrun: Dragonfall is an expansion for Shadowrun Returns that takes place in the Flux-State of Berlin. Being an anarchic, crazy, and generally awesome place, there’s a lot of good, in-depth, but really quintessentially “cyberpunk” characters to meet and work with, and while it does the same good job of putting you into contact with interesting characters as the original Dead Man’s Switch, it tends to do so with more depth and a lot more life to it.
Game Design: Choice Paths Part 1: Linear, Option, Divergent, and “Dinner” Paths
Since the majority of games (or, perhaps it is better to say, pretty much every major game out there) relies almost entirely on pre-scripted advancement techniques to handle plots and narratives, I figured I’d write a little article on choice paths in games. Choice paths are something that I used a ton when I was working on Orchestra over on Story Nexus, and they’re a great way to see what you’re doing. Continue reading “Game Design: Choice Paths Part 1: Linear, Option, Divergent, and “Dinner” Paths”
Thursday Review: Tom Leveen’s Sick
Sick is a novel by Tom Leveen. It first came to my attention with a reference from a professor of mine over at Arizona State University in his class on young adult literature. It’s set in a high school at the outbreak of a zombie epidemic, and it makes for a remarkably good read.
Continue reading “Thursday Review: Tom Leveen’s Sick”
Project Update: Still Alive
I wasn’t able to do anything with this blog all last week because I was so busy; between school and a little bit of normal-ish-but-kinda-rare family events that I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here, I didn’t have as much free time to work on things as I would have desired. Fortunately, I still made a little progress.