Since my first days as a roleplayer, improvisation has always been what it’s all about. There was never a plan to make it that way, however. I just couldn’t afford the expensive campaigns and adventures that other groups played. So I took my core book or box and I used it in every way IContinue reading “When in Doubt, Improvise”
Category Archives: Game Design
Speak to Me!
A Rant on Dialogue in Games Video game storytelling is a nascent field. If we’re honest about it, we don’t really know how to do it. At least not well. Most of the time we just give up and copy film. Why? Because it’s comfortable to wrap ourselves in the cozy vernacular of the Hero’sContinue reading “Speak to Me!”
Books for Game Designers
Some cool news in Playtank-land (since I can’t talk about what happens in Tic Tek Toe-land): I’ve signed on with CRC Press to write a game design book! It’s a book I feel is currently missing and that will fill a critical gap in the knowledge sharing around game design. But to clearly state whereContinue reading “Books for Game Designers”
It’s (Not) an Iterative Process
“Game design, like most forms of design, is an iterative process. That means that the game is quickly prototyped, played, and refined again and again before it is finalized.” Brathwaite and Schreiber; “Challenges for Game Designers” Iteration is a word game developers use to describe the magic that makes games happen. But what we actuallyContinue reading “It’s (Not) an Iterative Process”
Stages of a Game’s Design
Projects I’ve worked on, large and small, have often demonstrated similar issues with game design in their later stages. Beyond having me in common – which is hard to do anything about when you’re me – one issue has been that the role of game designer changes throughout the project but not all game designersContinue reading “Stages of a Game’s Design”
Courtroom Intrigue
One of the best games ever designed, in my opinion, is Diplomacy. It originally saw the light of day in 1959, making it much older than myself. It’s also a game I rarely get to play because of its idiosyncracies – it takes a long time to play, it requires seven players, and it hasContinue reading “Courtroom Intrigue”
Subjectivity in Game Design
Is Candy Crush good? Is Dark Souls hard? Is ARMA 3 complicated? Is Battlefield V fast-paced? Is Hearts of Iron IV accessible? Unlike the academic theories of gravity or evolution, game design is entertainment. This means there’s no such thing as an objective truth. For every player who thinks Dark Souls is hard or HeartsContinue reading “Subjectivity in Game Design”
Investigate Your Own Murder
Experimentation in tabletop roleplaying is a ton of fun, and sometimes an idea comes up that’s nothing more than a “what if?” In the case of Death and Police Tape, which you can download on itch.io, the whole idea was to make a gritty (and gory) freeform horror scenario where you first died a gruesomeContinue reading “Investigate Your Own Murder”
Tigers, Horses, and Weird Danish Rock Songs
When you only have a week to write a whole scenario, you often have to stick with the first thing that comes to mind. After a couple of weekends of role-playing this way, there was also many of us. The pandemic made digital hobbies a good way to do social things from the quarantined safetyContinue reading “Tigers, Horses, and Weird Danish Rock Songs”
Cyberpunk + Heist = Grand Slam
In 2020, with the COVID pandemic in full swing, our regular role-playing group took to Roll20. Before then we used to meet once every week to play around a physical table. Something that sounds strangely exotic when you say it out loud today. Initially, no one knew how long the pandemic would last. There wereContinue reading “Cyberpunk + Heist = Grand Slam”
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