A happy little message for anyone still following this dusty old blog. I am still writing! Not a lot, but I am making quality free content. I just do it on Substack, which is a properly maintained blogging site with nice features and a working captcha. So if you want to experience more ranting, please subscribe to the new Bottom Feeder! Hope to see you there ..read more

Once, to survive in the arts, you needed someone like this: The profoundly rich product of centuries of inbreeding. This is a blog post about making a living writing art. Like, say, indie games. So expect a certain amount of despair. In ye olden days, many talented people wanted to be artists. However, very few of them sold their art for enough money to make a decent living. So they would get a patron. A patron is a very rich person who is amused by you. They provide you with a tiny chunk of their wealth, and you continue to exist as an artist in order to please them. (This system came into ..read more

All new. All different. Now that we've finally released our new game, Queen's Wish: The Conqueror, we're finally free to talk about it! Nerdy game-design talking! We have been writing role-playing games for a very, very long time. It's what we do. One of the ways we stay sane while doing this is to change things. Every game or two, we like to change stuff: The graphics. The setting. The game system. Doing new things inspires us and keeps our brains fresh. After 25 years, we want to innovate. Stretch the form. Take risks, win or lose. The problem is that whenever you make a change some peopl ..read more

A Queen's Wish screenshot. Note that I use game art that I like to look at. This is necessary because I'll be staring at it for years, and I don't want to go mad. A week ago, I put up a blog post called "Why All My Games Look Like Crap." It really blew up. A lot of people read it. Some were highly supportive. Others took precious time out of their days to let me know I am a gigantic, gigantic bozo. Thanks to all! When you're trying to get attention for a small indie game, there's no such thing as bad publicity. Basically, my blog post said, "Some people like my art, but I am still super-bad ..read more

We spent years working on this game. We're betting our family's future on it. So. Why does it look so bad?We've been writing indie games for a living for 25 years. My wife and I run a humble little mom-and-pop business. We make retro low-budget role-playing games that have great stories and design and are a lot of fun. Also, they look like crap. The first game I released, in January of 1995, looked like crap. It achieved financial success (among the blind, apparently), which funded many more games that looked like crap, enabling me to build a solid reputation. Based on this reputation, we h ..read more

Players can get a deep feeling of satisfaction from games that literally play themselves. How cool is that?Last week, I began my discourse on how video games can warp your brain chemistry to bring you pleasure in order to make lots of money and how difficult, delicate, and awesome that process is. I have eight observations about how video games cause your brain to secrete delicious dopamine. Here are the last four. If you can master this dark art, endless success awaits. 5. Different Genres of Games Provide Different Dopamine Delivery Systems Role-playing games let your characters earn smal ..read more

Get those numbers up! Those are rookie numbers!I've been reading a lot about Anthem. It's that gigantic, mega-budget looter-shooter from BioWare and Electronic Arts. Apparently, it doesn't give out enough loot for the monsters you kill. For a game like Anthem, this is BAD FORM. Apparently, when you spend three hours killing a boss, the increase in your character's numbers isn't generating a sufficiently pleasurable dopamine hit to justify the time invested. So Bioware releases a patch, and good loot suddenly drops like crazy. Our characters numbers shoot up and up, causing a pleasurable, sus ..read more