It's only been one month into the new year, and already things are looking dour for the video game industry. Last year we witnessed million dollar games flopping and investors pulling out of sizable deals, and now there's a swarm of layoffs and cancellations to add on top as well. I've actually been meaning to write about this topic for months, but recent events have gotten so extreme I moved this article forward in the queue.| vertette.github.io
There are many stereotypes surrounding indie developers: we're pretentious, we can't handle criticism, we use the term "retro" to excuse our lack of art skills and so on. Though it might hurt to hear, we have to acknowledge that this reputation we have is well-deserved. It's even better to actively fight it, not just for the medium but to better ourselves as people. The stereotype I really want to tackle in this blogpost, however, is this: we drag our feet through the mud like a cow walking t...| vertette.github.io
"I'll try to write something every two weeks at the very least"... Right, when was the last- ah snozzberries.| vertette.github.io
Whenever video game enthusiasts start spewing the fires of the classic "are video games art" discussion everywhere again, certain titles typically come up regularly: Mother 3, Shadows of the Colossus, Journey and such. If you include gaming journalists' opinions into that discussion, however, you get some other more experimental titles in the mix like Gone Home, Sunset and Where the Water Tastes Like Wine. This blogpost won't delve into the many arguments over whether games count as art and w...| vertette.github.io
Since the dawn of humanity, we've marvelled at the stars, wondering "what could be out there?" The answers we have right now might not even be that exciting, but the fascination we have with space continues anyway. The unknown never stops being interesting, and space is either an infinite unknown or very close to it. And like many of humanity's most thought-provoking questions like "what would you do if the world fell apart tomorrow" and "what if vikings were real", Bethesda made a game that ...| vertette.github.io
It was late 2019. I was bored out of my skull, waiting for DJ Coco to fix up a build for Paperball so I could get back on testing, but I didn't feel like working on any particularly big project at the time. I looked around my hard drive looking for anything to do and found some old mock-up graphics I made for an old, abandoned project. A feeling of nostalgia immediately washed over me.| vertette.github.io
Were Paperball's character designs a success? It's a hard question to answer for me.| vertette.github.io
Welcome to my blog, my name is Christopher Stephens. By day I do boring IT work, by night I work on games. I've worked on games like Paperball, Salaryman Shi and Onlink. (They're not very well known so don't think you've been living under a rock if you've never heard of them.) This blog is where I'll put up articles discussing and/or analyzing video games from a developer's perspective. Some of the games I'll talk about will be ones I've been involved with developing, though not all of them.| vertette.github.io
Remember family computers? Before we had tablets, middle class families would buy overpriced computers from dodgy computer stores that the whole family got to share. As they were mostly used by children and adults who didn't have the slightest understanding of technology, it didn't take long for the family computer to down to a crawl, plagued by shady Kazaa downloads and suspicious Internet Explorer toolbars. Between a lack of money to buy a better computer, no easy way to buy digital games i...| vertette.github.io
