Things Roundup 30.9.2024
The Imaginary Engine Review has an examination of minimalist metroidvania OVERWHELM that goes deep on the forms of difficulty and game poetics.
I'm happy there's already so many entries in Marc Normandin's retrospective on Dragon Slayer, a game series I know very little about but I can already see a is a root text for a lot of modern games.
I initially didn't feel like I needed to check out Space Marine 2 when I've got Helldivers 2 right here, but between Dia Lacina's review (and the delightful original) and just thinking about WH40K, I realized I do want to check it out. The WH40K setting has been around for so long, so many things mimicked it, caught up to it, and fallen away, it has an almost quaint feeling that I need to see for myself. I started reading my first novel in the setting yesterday.
I have been directly asked how I make games so quickly, and many more people have asked Xalavier Nelson how Strange Scaffold do it too. There's no one answer, but I resonated with Nelson's quote:
Nelson feels developers have become "increasingly good at making games," but "terrible at producing them."
I probably should spin up a longer post about how game design and game production differ but are shackled together, and you have to be good at both.