persona 3 | Line Hollis

A sampling from my site stats showing a variety of Google queries about why Limbo was such a disappointment.

Dear Miss Bonelihearts

August 24, 2012 / 0 comments

People come to my site via Google for all kinds of reasons, be it wanting to see Fenris naked, intense fury at having played through Limbo, or wanting to see Isabela naked. Every once in a while, though, someone lands at my joint with a search string that suggests deeper questions in need of an answer. In…

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Dakkon from Planescape: Torment. A bald man with a moustache in a plaid tunic and spiky fantasy armor, with a remarkably large sword.

Difficulty Factors as Character Traits

July 15, 2012 / 0 comments

If difficulty is one of the things a game can use to make characters interesting, it’s worth asking just what difficulty communicates. For one thing, difficulty isn’t just one-dimensional. There are different kinds of difficulty, and not all of them are difficult for every player. I may love both Wrex and Nami, but I’m fairly…

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A screenshot from Persona 3. Dialogue text reads: Keep in mind the meaning of each card and the direction it faces, and use your inspiration to create a story.

Game Stories and Fortunetelling

August 9, 2011 / 0 comments

One of the reasons it’s hard to tell stories in videogames is that there are so many variables flying around. You want to give the player a sense of freedom in the story space; but the more freedom they have, the more changes to the world you have to track. Is so-and-so dead or alive?…

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Persona 3: Your relationship seems to be in a rut.

July 17, 2011 / 0 comments

Here’s a new thing I want to start doing. Most of my posts are either reviews of short games, or feature pieces that discuss several games at a high level. As a result, I rarely get a chance to write about the long games I play in any depth. In order to improve on this…

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AI and Character

June 17, 2011 / 3 comments

I’m starting to set up some of the basic AI programming in Mouthwash, my work-in-progress conversation system. (Some background here.) I wasn’t planning to get to that stuff so soon, but it became apparent pretty quickly that a lot of other stuff depends on the speakers having “goals.” So I’m having to deal with planning…

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