Commonplace Book of Kostya Kushko

I love Dave Rohrl's definition of game polish: "when your audience doesn't have to forgive anything."

Deepen your shots. Almost every scene should have at least three things in different light intensity and should occur on at least three planes. The close-up against a wall is the hallmark of cheap filmmaking. Don't rely too heavily on such simplistic shots. Create a whole scene.

Нельзя [в творчестве] уподобляться человеку, который бросает собакам тухлое мясо и удивляется, как они это жрут

When prototyping I always bring human-scale figure and copy it all over the place. This gives perfect scale and proportions understanding.

The sea squirt "eats its own brain" as part of its life cycle. Or rather recycles it to make other, more useful organs.

Объект Главная сложносочиненность

Взять енота из хлеба.
Изменение масштаба объекта енота на 1.69 м Увеличить количество объектов енота до 36.
Объект должен быть сделан нанятыми чернокожими рабочими.
Экспонировать готовый объект на улице, поместив в клетку.

He’s pretty sure at least one of the dogs is so dumb he’s actually barking at his own echo, often for hours on end.

Метафора объясняет
Что такое кумкват? Я бы сказала, что это маленький апельсин, у которого горькая шкурка, как у грейпфрута, и сладкая серединка, как у персика. Чтобы объяснить новое, я сравнила его с чем-то знакомым: апельсином, грейпфрутом, персиком. Так же мы осмысливаем всё новое — через сравнение с привычным.

Медузу Turritopsis Nutricula по праву можно считать бессмертным созданием. Это животное, достигнув зрелости, оседает на дно и превращается в полип, покрытый хитиновой кутикулой. Затем на полипе под кутикулой образуются почки, в которых и формируются будущие медузы. Самое интересное, что подобные метаморфозы повторяются бесчисленное количество раз, а смерть этого существа возможна, только если его съедят другие хищники.

The original seven words are:
Shit
Piss
Fuck
Cunt
Cocksucker
Motherfucker
Tits

Когда-то я создал эту страницу для своей собаки, но теперь она сама зарегистрировалась.

Эдди сам не знал, что одержим, пока его зубы не выбило изнутри.

Как критиковать фотографии:
- для любого фото можно сказать, что оно станет лучше, если чего-нибудь обрезать;
- если обрезать уже совсем нечего, можно сказать, что «хочется больше воздуха».

некомильфотный

Space Invaders was largely designed and created by one man, Tomohiro Nishikado. He even went so far as to build his own hardware from scratch, as Japanese microcomputers of the time weren’t powerful enough to program and run the game. Even with his specially-designed, pimped-out hardware, the game wouldn’t run the way he envisioned it. The processor just couldn’t make the antagonistic aliens move as fast as Nishikado intended. However, as the player shot more and more aliens, thereby removing entities from the screen, the processer had less and less sprites to render, and the game sped up.

The Effect: That’s right. The way that the aliens moved faster and faster as you thinned their ranks, making the game more difficult as you played? That was a glitch. Nishikado chose to keep this bug in the game instead of trying to compensate for it, because he realized the potential benefits that it could have for the industry (and also his wallet). Other video games of the day would generally be uniformly difficult throughout, and Game Overs just happened when the player ran out of patience or made a dumb mistake. All of that changed which Space Invaders introduced the industry to the concept of a difficulty curve.

This is one of the few innovations that could be considered to have universal influence across all genres of video games (save for purely multiplayer games). Nowadays, any video game worth its salt has a similar difficulty curve. It starts (relatively) easy and gets more difficult as you progress through the game. If the game stays easy the entire time, the player gets bored. Their skills are improving through practice, and if the game doesn’t provide new challenges, it becomes less engaging. The rewarding sense of accomplishment that comes with a finely-tuned difficulty curve is one of the things that made Space Invaders so addictive, turning it into a worldwide sensation (even if it did start as a glitch).

Миф о ёжике, запасающем яблоки и грибы, появился благодаря Гаю Плинию Секунду, римскому государственному деятелю, учёному и историку. Он утверждал, что ёж, готовясь к зиме, катается в яблоках, упавших на землю, и цепляет их на иголки. В действительности ёж физически не способен кататься на спине, протыкая при этом плоды, да и вообще ежи в большинстве своём яблоки не едят.

Steve Gaynor on Gone Home

I remembered the false wall in the mom’s closet from a previous playthrough and tried to open it, and could’ve sworn I couldn’t trigger the hotspot.

SG: The level design trick going on there — I do increase the interaction distance, for the secret passage, after you read the note. It’s easier. We don’t want people to accidentally open it while looking for stuff, but we also want to let people wonder and actually open it from the beginning. Because… I think the core loop here is “explore to gain knowledge to explore to gain knowledge” and so on. Our game is not about hardcore challenge or puzzles, but I still think there’s an opportunity for mastery. By the end, you’ve gained all this knowledge about the house and how everything connects. It was important for me that you can just walk up to the [spoiler] and get the attic key and speed-run our game in 90 seconds.

High concept is the enemy of the writer. The friend of the writer is the human being, the full-blooded character interacting with another character.

Shared joy is a double joy; shared sorrow is half a sorrow.
Swedish Proverb

Aesthetics don't make the story, but bad aesthetics can certainly distract from an otherwise wonderful one.