Essays about game development, thinking and books

Grainau: hiking and beer at 3000 meters

How it all looks from the ground.

How it all looks from the ground.

For her vacation, Yuliya decided to show me the beautiful German mountains and took me for a couple of days to Grainau — it's a piece of Bavaria that's almost like Switzerland. At least, it is similar to the pictures of Switzerland that I've seen :-D

In short, it's a lovely place with a measured pace of life. If you need to catch your breath, calm your nerves, and enjoy nature, then this is the place for you. But if you can't live without parties, you'll get bored quickly.

What's there:

  • The highest mountain in Germany plus a couple of glaciers.
  • There's skiing in winter. If you really need it, you can find a place to ski in summer, but the descent is short, and the lifts are turned off.
  • A large clean lake and a couple of smaller ones.
  • A huge number of trails for hiking.
  • A huge number of waterfalls, streams, and a couple of mountain rivers.
  • Restaurants with beer.
  • Beautiful fallen trees in the forests, private property, fences, cows with bells, and "racing tractors" (I don't know how to name this phenomenon better, but tractors are moving fast there :-D).

This is briefly, and now in detail.

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«Slay The Princess» — combinatorial narrative

My favorite version of the Princess.

My favorite version of the Princess.

It's hard to impress me as a player and even harder as a game developer. The last time it happened with Owlcat Games in Pathfinder: Kingmaker, when they added a timer to the game's plot.

But Black Tabby Games managed to do it. And they did it not with some technological complexity but with a visual novel on a standard engine (RenPy), which is cool in itself.

I'll share a couple of thoughts about the game and its narrative structure, while I'm still under the impression. I need to think about how to adapt this approach to my projects.

ATTENTION: SPOILERS!

If you haven't played Slay The Princess yet, I strongly recommend you to catch up — the game takes 3-4 hours. You'll not regret it.

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