Substance over style

A great movie with a very warm emotional core. Enjoyed it thoroughly. #guardiansofthegalaxy #marvelstudios #dayout #movie #fun #groot #starlord #fallingpianogames http://www.fallingpianogames.com

A post shared by Falling Piano Games (@fallingpianogames) on Apr 26, 2017 at 11:30pm PDT

It's been a bit since my last update - there's some stuff cooking that I can't post here yet until a later date. Rest assured there's interesting things on the horizon! In the meantime, have had the pleasure of catching two great movies recently, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2 and Fast 8:The Fate of the Furious. Both movies have great special effects and gripping action sequences, but where both really work for me is that they bother to go deep into the story and the characters. Even a short five sentence exchange between two characters can be enough to flesh out a backstory that changes the tone significantly and makes you more emotionally invested in a character. Not to give any spoilers away but in Fast 8, a very short scene between Hobbes and Shaw (Jason Statham) is enough to suddenly shift how you see the characters and explain a lot of their motivations. Similarly, a very short scene between Gamorra and Nebula in GOTG V2 changes dramatically the lens with which you view them, and makes the show so much better. I think when the effort is made to develop characters and plot properly, the end product is so much more rewarding than if the action and special effects (e.g. CGI monsters) are relied upon to do the heavy lifting for the movie. I enjoyed the two movies, and have had reinforced for me the conviction that substance remains far more important than style in many things, and when developing games, the same applies.