That difficulty post got me thinking about other things and how I generally kinda strongly dislike videogame advice that attempts to 'flatten' the medium. "You have to do this, you never should do this, use this trick all the time" blahblah you heard me talk about Coyote Time.

So here is one I loathe. "Players shouldn't think about the controls! They should be invisible! It's your job to put the player's intentions on screen. If the player isn't getting what they want, it's a failure of the...

Y'all are gonna want me to go back to posting about wrestling

[some time passes]

Alright, real game-dev talk.

lol my friend (ty Miko) sent this to me as a gag so I could have a jump scare but we were talking about Sakurai and why he's kinda a real one. Sakurai doesn't talk about Coyote time. He doesn't tell you how you should design jumps. He tells you how jumps usually are, and then why you might change parts of that to get different effects. He's not teaching you how to design a ju...

This kills me. This is right by the Shrine of Winter in Dark Souls 2. This tiny bit of rubble — one that would take two big steps to clear — is responsible for half of your epic journey. You spend hours tracking down powerful souls and risking your life, rather than just finding a stool.

I call this mechanical irony. Mechanical irony is when the limitations in control we have over our character become all too real. “If only I could climb over that” or “if only I could jump off this ladder” or...