On Duty and Humanity

[Spoilers from The Wheel of Time up to the end of The Gathering Storm follow. Read at your own risk.]

So we knew that Rand was somehow destined to die at the rocks of Shayol Ghul, fighting the Dark One, as mentioned several thousand times throughout the series. It’s truly astounding to see the progress Rand has done since he first saw Moiraine at the front of Winespring Inn; from that innocent farmer, whose biggest trouble was the condition of his father’s herd, to some world-dominating mythical evil who ripped an entire castle with its dozens of inhabitants from existence in a moment, just to eliminate one single person.

This immense difference is a topic for another entry, though. What I want to talk about, is different.

Continue reading →

On Hobby Projects and Teams

OK, this is sort of a more personal entry where I blabber without reaching any kind of conclusion.

When you work for some company, your primary concern probably becomes money. Of course, you might like the people, the work you do, the game you are making. But you need money, and you are working on that game for money. If you aren’t making that game, you will be starving. On top of that, you have resource limitations, like time, money and people. Eventually, the game takes shape around those resource limitations; features added or cut, parts of story being cut, some parts of the game itself being cut, voice-overs being cut etc. Even with all the initial planning and designing, you witness a great deal of sacrifices for the game to be released, and, you guessed it right, to make it bring money.
Continue reading →

On Soul and Common Sense

[Spoilers from The Wheel of Time -up to Lord of Chaos- and Mass Effect 2 follow. Read at your own risk.]

When Rand saw Sulin after returning from Shadar Logoth, she was in all the servant’s white clothes and, actually a servant. I know this ji’e’toh is complicated and mean business. It’s designed to be that way. We saw Rand’s struggles to catch just an understanding of it. He did well enough, apparently. After taking the thought for a couple of moments, and remembering her treating servants like Maidens before leaving for Shadar Logoth (whatever that is supposed to mean), Rand managed to figure out why she was doing so. To be honest, I didn’t (I will be more than glad if someone will be able to shed light upon the matter). Continue reading →

On Reluctant Authority

Ok, so since Tweets aren’t large enough for me, I decided to write things down here. I wish I wasn’t spending my time trying to chop sentences down to 140 chars up to now and started a blog earlier, but this will have to do.

[Spoilers from The Wheel Of Time -up to Lord of Chaos- follow. Read at your own risk.]

I’m about forty percent through sixth book, Lord Of Chaos, and our main pals have got to possess a certain amount of badassness. All three ta’verens are some sort of lords. Perrin literally rules Two Rivers, Matrim has an army in his hand, which also sounds like a bit… uh… fanatic let’s say, and obviously Rand; he’s an entirely different character now than he used to be in first two books, running of all by himself to Tear was the beginning of madness for him.

But what Nynaeve just did in Salidar was the sort of things I always wanted to do if I were a protagonist of a story who is surrounded by reluctant authority. Continue reading →

On Game Development and Setting

Leave a reply

When you go and think about creating a game, you try to define the experience and visualize things in your mind. There is a scenery which you try to achieve through the development process, a scenery in which you want to make the player… sense the experience you designed. You design all the components of the game pointing in this direction. There is a reason for each.. thing in the game to exist, a reason given by you. Everything that you put in the game together form that experience.

From what I understand, this first “Oh my! That’s totally gonna be so cool!” design, is somewhat personal. People usually fail to deliver this enthusiasm to people around them, so they get the game done by themselves. Or if they are not alone, they get to decide on important matters. The “other” team members are of course contributing to the project, but mostly by doing the tasks given to them.
Continue reading →