The Odd Magpie

The Odd Magpie

Michael Murphy-Burton

Gamedev

I do most of my game development as Perfect Minute Games, but there are also a bunch of posts on this blog documenting my experiments with games and game design. You can access both sets from this page.

  • On Horizon Zero Dawn, Cultural Appropriation, and Game Design

    First, read this, because the writer’s perspective is better-informed than mine and elaborates the issues here in a way I’m neither capable of nor interested in trying. Horizon Zero Dawn is, firstly, a beautiful game. It’s got a ton going for it. And as with anything at the top of the heap, it has done…

  • Why I Stopped Playing: Star Squad

    Play Store: Star Squad Dev: Hardscore Games Pub: Kongregate Graphics: Cute and functional, but nearly too small for a mobile screen. Sound: Off, as usual Writing: Perfunctory, but the fonts are nice! Gameplay: The module system makes individual battles entertaining, but the campaign is nearly a duplicate of many other space-battle-with-collectible-crew games, and it’s the thrust of the game…

  • Review: Space Marshals

    I’ve been playing a game called Space Marshals this week. It’s an isometric twin stick shooter from a company called Pixelbite. It appears that Pixelbite do their games App Store-first. They’ve just released a sequel there, in fact. It also appears that they’re bringing pretty much all of their Apple-first releases to Android. And that’s good news, because Space Marshals…

  • Roleplaying – Islands of Content

    This is the second in my series of posts on roleplaying. Last time I talked Emotional Experiments, which I’ve tried from both sides of the table, but this time I want to talk a bit about a refinement I’ve developed while running games. I used to find being the GM deeply unsatisfying. I was worried that my players…

  • Games and limits

    I was talking to LGW about GTA the other day. That game pushes boundaries, obviously, but the play discussed here takes that to its extreme, and I see that I have a line beyond which I no longer feel art trumps healthy social mores. It is pretty far down the hall, perhaps, but it exists.…

  • On being a web tycoon

    I have what you might call a substantial number of domains to my name Most of these are tied to one or more projects, but over the last two years my income has radically failed to keep up with my expenses, and I’ve had to look at which of these I might actually care about.…