This blog started as a place to gather tabletop role-playing thoughts. Over time, it transformed into an outlet for professional musings. When my focus shifted professionally to systemic design, the blog shifted along.
I’m quite proud of this collection of tips, tricks, and practices. It’s come to the point where there’s a consistent monthly readership. But it’s also quite meandering and weird, not exactly accessible for a newcomer.
So here’s a brand spanking new Playtank Blog Guide to light your way, Monsieur Newcomer (or returning blog peruser)!
As always, you can contact me at annander@gmail.com or make a comment if you feel a sudden need to tell me something.
Overview
Key posts for understanding what this blog is about.
Systemic Building Blocks: examples showcasing what a system can be in a video game.
The Systemic Master Scale: investigates the design dichotomy between authorship and emergence.
Your Next Systemic Game: a practical process for making systemic games.
Designing a Systemic Game: an overview of what goes into designing a systemic game.
Simulated Immersion: a series in three parts that starts by talking about the immersive sim legacy, discusses their game design, and then immersive sims as products.
First-Person 3Cs: another series in three parts that deals with camera, controls, and character for when you are making first-person games.
Guest Posts
There’s just one of them yet, but here’s a spot specifically for posts written by someone other than yours truly.
Game Economy Design: the fantastic system designer Keelan Bowker-O’Brien teaches you how to design economies, providing some reference spreadsheets for your practical use.
Opinion Pieces
As with all things game design, much is just opinion. These are mine.
The Interaction Frontier: a treatment on why interaction matters more than you may think.
Definitions in Game Design: an argument against the never-ending attempts at trying to define things using words no one ever agreed on.
Challenges to Systemic Design: ten specific challenges facing systemic design and how you may approach them.
My Game Engine Journey: my own personal journey learning to work with different game engines.
A Love Letter to Cyberpunk 2077: written right after finishing the amazing Cyberpunk 2077, back in 2021.
Ways to Not Have Cooldowns: written because I was annoyed with over-reliance on cooldowns.
It’s (Not) an Iterative Process: an attempt to conceptualise how “it’s an iterative process” is actually a problematic adage often used to hide bad processes.
Speak to Me!: some musings on why game dialogue hasn’t really improved in the past four decades.
Boom, Headshot!: an attempt at a constructive treatment of violence in video games.
Game Design
These posts are practical and game design-related, with a broad segment of topics.
Books for Game Designers: by far the most referenced post on the blog. Some recommendations for good game design books.
Game Balancing Guide: a guide for anyone about to go knee-deep into game balancing.
Eras of Game Design: a very broad walkthrough of different “eras” of game design and the many lessons that risk being lost to time if we’re not curious enough.
Designing Good Rules: dedicated to the designing of rules. The glue that make systems work.
Combat Design Philosophy: a multi-part series that goes through Melee, Gunplay, Sport, and Drama in the context of combat.
Stages of a Game’s Design: one of the first posts where I started exploring how to be more specific with the work of a game designer.
Future Game Story: thoughts on the unique elements of video game storytelling and the modes of discourse they create. Originally written in 2014.
Tabletop Roleplaying as a Game Design Tool: one of my personal favorites, talking about tabletop roleplaying as a practical design tool.
Gamification: dips your toes into the Origin and Implementation of gamification systems, as well as the subject of Loot.
Game Design Philosophy: my first attempt at concretising what’s important to me in game design.
Getting Technical
Systemic design is nothing without its practical dimension. These posts are not nearly as technical as they should be, but keeps the code pseudo.
Building a Systemic Gun: the very first pseudocode post, and still probably the best one.
State-Space Prototyping: a general discussion on prototyping, but also my favorite method for prototyping systemic games.
An Object-Rich World: pivotal for my own personal understanding of object-object relationships, and still mostly holds up.
A State-Rich Simulation: an expansion of the object-rich world with the meaning and implementation of states and contexts.
What Systems Do: a slightly too general treatment of what systems may do when objects interact.
Maximum Iteration: the five broad things you must facilitate if you want to maximise your iteration.
Games Industry
Ideas that aren’t really design- or systemic design-related but more about the games industry or game development practices in general.
The Systemic Pitch: how to pitch, and how to pitch a systemic game specifically, based on lessons learned.
Custom Tools and Work Debt: the cost of pushing work forward onto “someone” before there’s a definition of the work or the tools it may require.
The Content Treadmill: one of the biggest problems facing game development today and how you can look at the content you create from a different perspective.
Making Money Making Games: a post on budgeting and some of the many unintuitive ways that game developers make money.
Role-Playing Stuff
Where it all began. A mix of musings and one-shots played during the Covid pandemic.
When in Doubt, Improvise: goes into my favorite way of playing tabletop role-playing games.
Player vs. Player in TTRPGs: my other favorite way of playing tabletop role-playing games: having the players in the room play against each other.
Courtroom Intrigue: a mini-campaign where players play the leftover nobles who are forced to step up to a challenge bigger than they are.
Investigate Your Own Murder: scenario where you play a ghastly supernatural murder both as the people being murdered and as the agents investigating the crime scene.
Tigers, Horses, and Weird Danish Rock Songs: over the top violence, full of angry man-eating horses and divas.
Cyberpunk + Heist = Grand Slam: a cyberpunk scenario that the game group asked for specifically and that turned into a mini-campaign.
Playtank 