Writing N' Video Games

Beyond Eyes, an indie art game about a girl and a cat. She's also blind.  This game was released in 2015 by Tiger & Squid, and for me, it finally came up during quarantine for a certain global pandemic. The indie game backlog is as endless as any, so I picked a game that has really been installed on my hard drive for three years. What I found was a fun adventure that slowed me down for a few hours and even moved me a little, though I am pretty willing to let these small scale games move me emotionally. So is it a walking simulator? Sort of. The key difference is that the average walking sim involves puzzles and beautiful landscapes to gawk at while a story happens around you. In Beyond Eyes, Rae is blind, so as you control her, she has to physically get close to things for them to appear. Without her power to find things without sight, the screen would remain blank, endlessly white, unlike the average two-legs-simulator. I found the washed-out watercolor art pretty for ...

Race the Sun is a familiar game, an endless runner turned to minimalism. Maybe developer Flippfly knew the endlessness of the standard smartphone runner was futile, one dimensional, and sought to comment on that with their own game.  They've taken the formula, running, picking up items, and avoiding obstacles combined with colorful environments and sharp sound effects, and stripped it to the bones.  In Race the Sun, you're the pilot of a grey solar-powered ship, space-worthy, but skimming the ground.  The sun is setting, and you need to go.  There are only a handful of collectibles spread sparsely throughout the zones.  And, an ending can be achieved without crashing, but it is almost an equal failure.  Fly forward constantly avoiding obstacles is the game, of course, but you've got free range to lean far to the right or left as you'd like, or can without crashing, and the game will generate new obstacles.  The obstacles take on a pseudo-random g...

Hue is a puzzle platformer about finding color in a black and white world.  Eight colors, to be specific. The color of the world is nil.  The skies have greyed and the sea is black.  Hue finds a letter that tasks him with exploring the area around his home for the actual blocks of color absent from his world.  The woman who reads the letter knows him and begs him to find her.  And you're off.  You're technically off to the races and puzzles before learning any of the aforementioned, which is all learned in the first moments.  I always enjoy a game that slaps you right into the action and lets you learn to play before it gives you a cutscene.  Yes, it's easier to do that with a game of this scope, a sidescroller, but giving control to the player first is still welcomed.   Hey. Hue gives you one color to start, the bright blue of the sky, a color people can see every day.  New zones begin in grey, and only one color can...

Introduction Tom Clancy's The Division was one of the first mainstream looter shooters that grounded the formula in theme, gameplay, and art style (or at least crammed in as much graphical detail as possible to achieve realism).  Finally, we could shoot and loot in New York, not some fantasy world or far-future Russia.  During 2016, the year of its release, The Division was about as successful as most triple-A games that year.  The era was that of mildly broken games released with large day-one patches that only ever fixed some issues.  As of 2019, that problem lingers.  It's better, but it creeps up occasionally.  Still, it gained a large audience that was vocal enough to have the developer, Massive Entertainment, delay production of post-launch content to fix bugs and mechanics that weren't functional.  The procedure went well enough for a sequel to have launched to quite the acclaim for a publisher, Ubisoft, that gets its fair share of online v...

And we're back! On this part we'll be talking about everyone's favorite blue race of aliens and their respective ark. Embrace Eternity Great White Buffalo I think my biggest problem with the Asari in Andromeda is that they aren't properly utilized as a race. Every Asari feels the same, almost as if they're all still in their rambunctious maiden phase. Even the veteran Asari on the ark seem to make costly and short sighted decisions. In a way, I can see a good explanation for this behavior being that only young Asari decided to come on this expedition. Matriarchs wouldn't bother with that type of venture and certainly wouldn't commit to such an impulsive effort with no clear outcome. But the game doesn't offer this explanation. I made this point in my Retrospective: Peebee (and many other Asari) essentially feel like humans with a blue paint job. Her mannerisms are human, the words she uses are based on human concepts, and she has absolutely no ...

Hey guys.. so... I've been misspelling Kett this entire time. That's my bad and totally on me. It's Kett and not Khett. I've fixed it in the faction entry and will be using the correct way from now on. I don't know why I did that or what part of my brain decided to google translate it that way. Big whoops on my part. ... Hike? Second String - Blue 42 Right, so the director has been kidnapped by some random, clearly human, operative in N7 armor. And now, the only people remaining are the second string of leaders on the Nexus. I pondered on the last part whether or not to just get rid of the Nexus leadership from the vanilla game. Much like the game's premise, they're not terrible concepts, it's simply the tone and direction of their scenes that are god awful. Foster Addison is the worst offender, not just because of her meme face but because her dialogue and your ability to respond is handicapped hard. She challenges you with no way to challen...