As you can tell by the timestamps on the posts below, this blog hasn’t been updated for a long time. If you’d like to see more recent writings by Mike, check out http://www.chaoticstupid.com. Mike also occasionally posts articles on websites like Gamasutra.com and Tutsplus.com. Finally, Mike is on Twitter and likes to talk with people…
Oblivion Analysis: 2015 Update
Note: Five years ago I wrote an analysis of the exploration in Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. For those of you who haven’t played it, it’s like Elder Scrolls: Skyrim but not as user-friendly. It’s pretty cool, but hard to read the way I originally wrote it. I vaguely recall I was swamped at the time, so…
Unity: MonoBehaviour Singletons Template
There are a lot of tutorials on singletons and what they are, so I’m gonna skip that. I wrote a class that’s a template for making Unity MonoBehavior Singletons that can run with an update and stuff, and which don’t suffer from the usual “null” pointer tedium. I’m not going to do too much explaining…
A ‘Madlibs’ Game Design Doc: Part 2
Warning — I didn’t give this post my usual level of editing and scrutiny because I haven’t been feeling too well. I wanted to post it, even in its raw state. Hopefully you’ll find some use from these rough notes, and when I move on to the later parts I’ll develop them more fully. Think…
Magic: The Warcraftening
I’ve been playing a lot of Blizzard’s new digital-only collectible card game Hearthstone, and I really like a lot of the decisions they made. There are a few things I really miss from playing Magic: The Gathering, though — and I’d love to give the following “merger” of the two a try some time: Magic:…
A ‘Madlibs’ Game Design Doc: Part 1
A quick note. The following work is considered public domain information. Use it however you want. If you’d like to tell me about it afterwards, I promise you it will make me a happy man — but if you don’t I won’t lose any sleep. On twitter the other day, I decided on a whim…
Confessions of a Nerd who is Learning to Love Football
When I was a kid, I had plenty of reasons (or so I believed) to hate the sport of football — but I think I can trace it back to one week in particular during 7th grade. I’m an August kid. For those countless masses of you of you lucky enough NOT to have been…
Why do games cost so much to make?
This was an FAQ I got from a lot of people, most recently from Youtuber Rebellion3112. My most recent attempt to explain it got so long that I thought it might just be better to post it here so that everyone can enjoy (and so in the future I can redirect people here and lazily…
Short Story: The Feast
Hey everyone, I wrote a short story a couple months ago called The Feast. It’s about a family that gets trapped in a cave by a host of demons, and must tell it stories in order to escape. The story is told in an old-timey fairy-tale sort of voice, and I think it worked out…
At least two types of players….
I found this post I made on a gamasutra article, and I thought it might make good blog fodder. It was in response to a comment about games that felt “disrespectful” of their players. —- It seems to me like there are at least two types of players who want different things. One type likes…