The earliest versions of Anomalous Ruins began at an airship crash. The player simply walked the protagonist outside the debris and found some ruins. But the protagonist grew into a character with the name Clo. She came from somewhere. This “somewhere” eventually become Origin City. I didn’t need to build the city of her birth. …
My first post on Anomalous Ruins introduced the idea of a a city built in the clouds. The Minecraft adventure map is almost 1 year old now; it currently has 1,154 downloads. Not bad for some no-name Joe with too much time on his hands. Download the free Adventure Map for Minecraft Java. I have…
The Once and Always King The idea of a monarchy influenced the Old World for millennia. In the ancient West of the Middle Ages, there was one church, one God, and one king. There were “debates” on who that one king was. These debates took place on the battlefield and had very little to…
Seven years ago I embarked upon a trip to the moon. Not in a practical since but, spiritually. In other words, I stretched my composition legs out and wrote an orchestration dedicated to the Apollo missions. Moonscape is a symphonic tone poem. The piece opens with a theme for the moon which seems very distant…
Story is a very important element for most modern games. Do you need one to make it great? In The Art of Touch I pointed out that Gameplay is King. A game should allow us to touch or affect–via controls–most of what we see. If you were to simplify the other elements–visuals, music, sound design,…
In previous posts, I’ve talked about art’s connection to our 5 senses. For the past two years, I’ve taught a Fine Arts Survey class. In my research and prep work for the class, I have come up with a workable definition for art. I say workable because in all honesty, there are many ways to…
A bird’s eye view from one of the many rooms in the large floating ANOMALY found in my adventure map Anomalous Ruins. Download the adventure map here. PC only for now. Right click the file/ unzip it/ Search on your computer’s start menu for the desktop app “run”/ Run “appdata”/ Click “Roaming”/ Click “.minecraft”/ Drag…
This post is a very focused exploration of art and should not be taken as an exhaustive history, thus I will be ignoring some of the rather unusual and fascinating styles out there such as Impressionism, Cubism, Expressionism, Surrealism, and other such avant garde tangents. I’ll do a post on those at a later time. …
The first form of art was likely a simple story. We don’t know what the story was about, nor can we say who told it. I imagine it began naturally as a response to that age old question, “how was your day?” This would have been the first time one dared to ask the…
Hello world. It’s me— Representation —a nerd enraged. It’s been a while since my last rant. That’s because I couldn’t find anything worth ranting about. Our little Earth is oh, so perfect. And here was perfect, little ‘ol, six-foot-five-inches me, going to the movies to watch the newest sci-fi flick Lock Out. It’s about this…
Deepwell Bridge 