Planners vs Pantsers

M. J. Magee - Saturday, the 24th of October, 2015

When discussing the creative writing process, people often talk about writers in two different camps: ‘planners’, those who outline upfront then write to that outline, and ‘pantsers’, those who write spontaneously. Or by the seat of their pants, as you’d have to say to understand why bloomers were suddenly brought into the conversation.…

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The best laid plans of programmers and artists

M. J. Magee - Saturday, the 17th of October, 2015

There’s a saying about the best laid plans… Hmm, maybe I should have planned this post better and googled it.

L. Whyte and I decided at the beginning of this (overwhelmingly large) project that she’d create her (overwhelmingly beautiful) artwork in vectors and pass it on to me in a scalable vector graphic (SVG) format, which can be scaled up and down to fit any screen size or device without losing image quality.…

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A salesman, by any other name, would BS as much

M. J. Magee - Saturday, the 3rd of October, 2015

In fairy tales, characters rarely have names. Who they are isn’t as important as what they are – jealous step-mothers, kind-hearted wives of ogres, dim-witted butter-under-their-hat-wearers…

That’s what drives the story to its end.

Its inevitable, gory, eyes-gouged-out-by-birds end.

Birds - ending every fairy tale happily ever after since 1697. Spoiler: every single fairy tale ever written.…

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Throwback Thursday: the princess, the dog, and the crowd-pleasing comic relief

M. J. Magee - Thursday, the 17th of September, 2015

Back in primary school (think elementary school but with painfully blue uniforms and unintelligible accents), I decided I was going to write A Play.

Nicole, who would have been my BFF had sassy acronyms been invented in the nineties, but was instead relegated to the role of mere ‘best friend’, had been reading Diana Wynne Jones and instead of running through our usual playground favourites – She-Ra and Swift Wind battling across Etheria, Crysta and Zach saving Fern Gully, Peach and Mario doing something so unrelated to Super Mario Bros that I’m still uncertain why I dedicated so much of my free time to imagining myself as a paunchy, hairy faced plumber – she wanted to play out an adventure in a medieval fantasy world.…

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Bad UX in a puzzle game

M. J. Magee - Sunday, the 13th of September, 2015

When I’m working on something like the front-end design of the game – something that doesn’t require I sit hunched over my laptop with my head clutched in my hands, muttering, ‘Why? Why?’, or gently weeping – I like to put on some TV as background noise.…

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