In my days as an amateur magician, I noticed that as a magic-practitioner myself, I watched other magicians’ performances with a different eye than I had, when I was merely a normal spectator. I stopped being surprised or amazed when cards were discovered in unlikely places or when the shapely lady who, just moments ago,…
Economy of scale is an economic concept which, in brief, suggests that if you make more of something, each individual instance will cost less. For example, creating one t-shirt might cost you $20, but if you were to make 100 of them, they would only cost you $2 each; one tenth the price. There are…
I’ve mentioned before (and some may have guessed purely from the infrequent postings on my only-half-joking game review site) that I’m a nut for highly polished games; games which show a strong attention to the craft of making games, with love and attention lavished upon even their most inconsequential nooks. So yesterday, I took advantage of…
Warning: long, meandering musing about some basic UI design follows. Feel free to ignore this; I’m just trying to work some things out in my head. When designing a user interface, one of the critical choices that must be made is how the user is going to give commands to the program. Traditionally, there are…
I’ve long held that one of the most important continuous jobs when creating a game is authoring and obeying The Contract. The Contract is a term I’ve co-opted from films; it’s an implied agreement between the movie studio and the audience. In the case of a film like Jaws, it might go something like this:…