The MA Is Done.
I’ve finished my MA in Indie Game Development.
That sentence has been sitting in my head for a while, waiting for me to stop working long enough to write it down. Now it’s down.
It’s been a genuinely challenging couple of years, not in the vague, LinkedIn-post sense, but its generally helped me grow.
What it actually did for me
I came into the MA already comfortable with design theory. I’d been teaching, writing, and thinking about systems for a long time. I’ve done many external projects and been involved with various aspects, but the MA covered much more of the whole process and how to take a concept all the way through end including all that lovely admin.
Falmouth and the course also encouraged creativity. It was great to be able to look and develop more creative visions.
THANATOS
My capstone was THANATOS, a third-person shooter in UE5 built around a question I couldn’t stop poking at: what happens if you take the combat of the Soulsborne games and apply it to ranged combat?
Souls combat works because of commitment. You choose an action, you pay for it in frames, and the space between intent and outcome is where the tension lives. Shooters, by design, mostly erase that gap. Aiming is continuous, firing is instant, and the fantasy is precision rather than commitment. Putting those two things in the same room and making them cohabit turned out to be a much harder problem than I expected, and a much more interesting one.
It’s wrapped in a neo-mythological aesthetic. I’m not happy with it, but it was a great learning process.
Where the PhD comes in
The MA answered a lot of questions. It also left me with others
We are, as a discipline, remarkably imprecise about emotion. We talk constantly about wanting players to feel dread, or relief, or grief, or the specific hollow satisfaction of a hard won victory. And then we build toward those targets almost entirely on instinct, borrowed patterns, and iteration until it feels right. When it works, we struggle to explain why. When it doesn’t, we struggle to diagnose it.
MDA gave us a vocabulary for the relationship between mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics. What it didn’t give us, and what I don’t think anyone has adequately given us yet, is an operational framework a developer can actually work backwards through. Something that lets you start from the emotional outcome you want and reason systematically toward the mechanical decisions likely to produce it.
That’s the research I’m now building a PhD proposal around. Not a theory of emotion in games for its own sake, but a working tool: a framework that supports developers in designing deliberately for affect, and gives them a way to interrogate their own work when the feeling isn’t landing.
It’s an ambitious target and I’m aware of how many ways it could collapse into either untestable theory or a checklist that flattens the thing it’s trying to describe. Threading that needle is most of the work. I’m looking forward to it.
More writing, more often
Alongside the research, I’m opening this site up properly.
Expect more here, and more regularly:
- Tutorials — practical, mostly Unreal and Unity, aimed at the things I had to work out the hard way
- Articles — design analysis and theory, including a lot of thinking out loud as the PhD work develops
- Reviews — games looked at as design objects rather than products; what they’re doing, how, and whether it works
I’ve spent a long time consuming other people’s writing on this stuff. Time to put more back in.
If there’s something you’d like me to break down , a system, a mechanic, a game that’s doing something strange and interesting, tell me. I’m taking requests.