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I'm looking forwards to No Man's Sky

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This is a pretty video-heavy post. I wanted to keep the numbers down but it's nice to be able to directly show what I am talking about. Sorry about that! Keep that tab-opening finger on the trigger! I recently realised that my younger self spent a lot of time  in some  very  interesting virtual spaces . If you'd followed those links you'd have found that they are all different games which involve sitting in a spaceship, zooming around and blowing things up. They belong to a fantastically nerdy game genre, 'Space Sims'. The wonderful coincidence that space is very empty and that 90's video cards could only manage a few thousand triangles meant that these sort of games were everywhere. As the 00's rolled in, and as Star Trek stopped being shown on TV for the first time in decades, this genre died out miserably leaving only few poorly translated games coming in from the East. Time's moved on still, and very recently mysterious market forces (crowdfundin...
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Games are data, not Renderers

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Was Quake 3 the same as American McGee's Alice the same as Soldier Of Fortune? Are Astroneer, Moss, Unravel the same games? The answer is clearly no, even though each set of these games share roughly the same platform technologies. The variety of experiences we create from the same technologies are bounded only by tooling and input data. This doesn't ignore the fact that those experiences owe to a renderer. In reality though that we are ultimately trying to achieve by making games is to key into the overall consciousness of the players, meaning their imaginations, possibility space, and thought processes. Something running at a decent framerate with graphical detail is the cherry on top . Why are so many creators obsessed with underlying technologies? Why has that obsession bled out into the players consciousness? I'm a victim to this technology first way of thinking. I ultimately want to create and share thematically interesting interactive experiences, though too oft...
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Procedurally Generated Thoughts

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While discussing how Sim City and it's city-building model could be adapted for non American cities the importance of history came to my mind. In London you see history wherever you are. Near to my house there is the disused picadilly line York Way tube station. If you stand near it and look out at the view that presents itself you see the old Victorian kings cross station next to the glass building of St Pancras Int. and many cranes helping turn abandoned industrial buildings into new skyscrapers and arts university campuses. It's a rich and interesting landscape. Another bustling recently gentrified street nearby is Upper Street which owes its original path as far back as to the Celts. In turn, London grew organically from Thames access, one of those mechanisms making up the majority of your GCSE geography knowledge.. The city just wouldn't make sense being anywhere else. History and iteration are also fundamental to how nature constructs life. Although for each gene...
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