Art: A How To on the Do's and Does of Doing It; That is to say, Art

As I increase in age I reflect on my days as a teenager and young adult prattling on to my peers about art and the creation of art and self-reflection and philosophy and the occasional dirty joke. As time went on those peers had grown into contemporary artists who all have reflected to me some strange shared delusion that I managed to impress meaningful perspectives and approaches to them.

Now, I would never claim to be anything more than a madman with a computer (the modern day's sandwich board) but it is plain to see that I have had many strong opinions regarding art throughout my life that tend not to fail me in producing art that is said to be "quality" or "effective."

Given that I have this dusty blog that I never use, I figured I would this opportunity to express some of my perspectives on art in a radically condensed format. If you read this and feel enlightened or inspired, then bravo! Perhaps you can apply this in some way to your approach moving forward as an artist and I hope it benefits you greatly. If you read this and think I'm a madman, then cheers and I hope you were entertained.

Dr. Bitsy-Love, or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Small Projects

Hmmm, I seem to remember having a blog... whatever happened to-

Oh.  Oops.

Yeah, to say the least it's been a minute or so since my last post.  But, hey, I've been doing lots of stuff and accumulating things to write about and share so why not hop back into my bloggin' shoes and talk about what's up?

Let's start with the journey I took in making several games using Bitsy.

A (Relatively) Short Dissection of Rocket Knight Adventures, My Favorite Game

I write a lot about game design on this blog.  I write about how to do it right, how to do it wrong, and why certain concepts are really important to consider.

Now, considering how much I perseverate on these topics, you might be wondering what the ideal is for me.  Sure, I've brought up some games I really like, such as Super Mario Brothers 3, Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, Saint's Row: The Third...

But what is the ideal?

The ideal is Rocket Knight Adventures on the Sega Genesis.

Let's start

Why isn't Terminator 2 a Terrible Movie?

Terminator 2: Judgement Day is an amazing movie that is a huge part of 90's culture.  It had video games, t-shirts, action figures, a theme park attraction, comic books, and today has a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes.  Why?  It's fucking rad as hell, that's why!

So why does it look so absolutely horrible on paper?

GameMaker: A Creation Suite for Novices to Professionals

GameMaker, a product of YoYo games, is one of those project managers that people love to hate.  While browsing the Steam Greenlight, you might often hear comments like, "This looks like some kid made it in GameMaker."  Its name evokes stigma.

However, recently, GameMaker's true potential has finally started to reveal itself.

Follow-up on "Worst Levels Ever"

A few days ago (as of writing this, as I am offsetting the publish for this post, it's probably been roughly a week) I posted a blog article about Mario Maker and bad levels.

In it, I had a section all about ultimate deductions to the "worst levels" possible in an old-school Mario game.  I described levels with no obstacles, levels with way too many enemies, and even levels with no level at all.

Mama mia!

After having a chat with my good friend Gabriel Priske (the dude I made See No Evil with) of Noetic Games, I came to some deeper inspection of what "bad" can mean in this context.

Do NPCs In Video Games Really Die?

Mortal Kombat

Since the early 90's, old people who had no idea what video games are and Florida lawyers who are willing to spin the grief of parents who have lost their children to violent crimes to make a quick buck have tried to question the issue of violence in video games.  I mean, it's undeniable that video games depict a lot of simulated death.

Now, those disrespectful politicians and opportunists who I mentioned above have tried to rattle our ears with the concept that our brains can't understand the differences between reality and video games; that these video games will rot our minds and turn us into killers.

Half-Life 2

Those crusty old farts are full of it.  We know that now.

But, what if we actually are all killers?  What if those virtual characters, packed with "AI", are actually living things that we're killing?

A Brief Explanation of Educational Computer Games

Math Muncher

If you grew up in the 90's and early 2000's, then you remember playing some serious educational games either in school or at home.  The funny thing about them was that they never really felt like they were teaching you stuff.  You were just having a lot of fun.

But you did learn.  You had to!  It was the only way to play the game.  How can you munch math in Math Muncher without knowing the math?

These games were great ways of teaching children how to learn while having fun with the topics.  But there's not that much of this anymore.  What happened?  Where are the games that, dare I say, made learning fun?

Mario Maker: Know this about bad levels

Image courtesy of IGN

Mario Maker recently released for the Nintendo Wii U, and dang do I love games like this!  Even back to when I bought the PS3 for the express reason of playing Little Big Planet, or further back when the only thing on my 3rd grade Christmas list was Jazz Jackrabbit 2 so I could play with the Jazz Creation Station, my love of level editors would likely receive a large chapter in the biography that nobody is going out of their way to write about me (yet).

Putting game design in the hands of the player gives the actor the chance to play director for a while, and I feel like this gives a great deal of perspective to gamers that they don't always get.

And sometimes it just results in terrible levels.  What gives?

What's it like to live twenty years with undiagnosed ADD?

That's Attention Deficit Disorder to those who don't know.  I've had it forever and wasn't diagnosed until a couple years ago.  I've only taken my meds for it for a year now and wow there is a huge difference.

So what's it like?  I'm here to try to put the often joked about and somewhat actually really scary disorder into an understandable perspective.

Trying Out Inklewriter

So, lately I've been trying out Inklewriter, a free Choose-Your-Own-Adventure creating tool on the internet.

I thought I'd write a bit about what I've been doing with it.

Amazon's Fire Devices: What The Heck Happened?

Something has been bothering me: Where did Amazon go wrong with their Fire devices? I'll tell you, and it's easy to explain.

Image courtesy Geekwire

Feeling Your Game

Anybody who graces themselves with the title of "gamer" knows a thing or two about the term "game feel," or at least have heard it mentioned.  Game feel is a pretty apt name for the concept- literally, how a game feels when you are playing it.  So, how does your game feel?

No, no... not like that

I want for this blog to be more than just a promotion for my projects, but a chance to discuss some ideas about developing games, so I'm going to initiate that conversation by talking about game feel a bit, as well as how I think that it really impacts a gaming experience.