Brent Knowles's Blog, page 61

Creating Emotion in Games – Guilt as Gameplay Mechanic

The Day My Horse Died

There's a drive from several studios in the videogames industry to start building emotional experiences, hoping to hook player's into storylines and franchises by using more sophisticated storytelling methods. Many of these, like the detailed movie-eque conversation systems that the Mass Effect franchise use have achieved significant strides in this area.

But even in a longer developed industry like movie making, 'creating emotion' is still very difficult. Drama can...

Smarter than me – blogs I read, part 1

Every once in a while I'll be tossing out links to some of the blogs I read regularly.

Here's the first batch.

David Brin – scientist and best selling author. His posts vary on topic, but he often has keen insights into government functioning or lack thereof.
Peter Watts – hard science fiction author, often with interesting posts, hoping for more of these again now that his recent legal troubles have been resolved.
eReads – Richard Curtis writes this blog, generally about electronic publishing, ...

How do you write?

After working many years with BioWare, much of those being spent helping to design tools that writers use, I've gained a fair bit of experience with understanding how creative types, create. As a writer myself, I've often used my own experience to help guide tool development and even created my own writing platform YourOtherMind . I have tried many things (different software, work methodology, et cetera) but over the last year I've stuck with a couple approaches that seem to be working well.

S...

Illustrated Stories

One of the highlights of placing in the Writers of the Future Contest is that my winning story will have an illustration created for it by one of the winners of the Illustrators of the Future contest. I can't wait to see what part of/character(s) in the story will be illustrated.

I have been lucky though and have had illustrations for a couple of my previous stories.

"The Tale of Lady Spite" in Tales of the Talisman had a nice sketch of the 'old lady by the river — complete with chains' done b...

Vancouver Canucks – yes, a hockey post, finally

Despite being Canadian I'm not a crazy hockey fan. Probably most people who know me from university and beyond wouldn't even know that I watch hockey. But I do often catch games, when I can, and being from British Columbia, have always followed the Vancouver Canucks.

They are in the playoffs this year, and if they don't win tonight, they're out. I'm hoping for a good game, and would like to see them win, but I'm certainly not obsessive about it.

Anymore.

Years ago, I owned a van. It was a...