Category Archives: Game Design

This post is the last post in a series on combat design. There has been many attempts to classify storytelling. Georges Polti suggested The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations in 1895. Vladimir Propp used a selection of 31 functions to illustrate similar things in the 1920s. There’s also the widely misused monomyth of Joseph Campbell, originally publishedContinue reading “Combat as Drama”

This post is a continuation on a previous combat design post. Sport can be used as a layer on top of your gunplay or melee. Perhaps as added fairness (a sense of “good balancing”) or as a focus on competition. It can also be the whole purpose of your project. A competitive game needs toContinue reading “Combat as Sport”

The most consistent pushback I get when presenting my case for systemic design is against the idea that authorial games are not as interactive as more emergent games. “They surely are interactive,” says the typical critic, “because you are pressing buttons; there’s gameplay.” Which is true at face value, since you are certainly pressing buttonsContinue reading “The Interaction Frontier”

Something that has been missing from this blog is how players will experience playing your systemic games. What the inputs and outputs represent and what kind of game they help make. So that’s what this post is about. Also, please, if I’m wrong about something or you want to book a talk or just chatContinue reading “Systemic Building Blocks”

Note: this post has been revisited and expanded a few times, going from four scales to six to provide a more holistic set of scales. A big part of what makes systemic design work is your own design mindset. The relationship you imagine between yourself as the designer and the player who will be playingContinue reading “The Systemic Master Scale”

This post is a continuation on a previous combat design post. How to build a gun has already been discussed. We’ll now explore what happens after the trigger has been pulled and who you are shooting. We’ll be touching on projectile simulation and game physics, since those are systems that will solve (or cause) yourContinue reading “Combat Gunplay”

This post is a continuation on a previous combat design post. Shooting, stabbing, strangling nazis; or just quick-meleeing with knives to humiliate PvP opponents that didn’t see us coming. Melee combat is a big deal in video games and has been since forever. This post will try to break down how you turn a traditionallyContinue reading “Combat Melee”

The biggest difference between designing a systemic game and designing its opposite (a content-driven game) is that you can’t know the exact outcome of every system and you must consider this state of mutability a strength. You must be willing to let go of your authorial control. You can certainly define interesting interactions in advance,Continue reading “Designing a Systemic Game”

This is an unplanned Part 3 in my series on gamification and goes into loot. Itemised rewards. Maybe the most compelling of all reward systems that games have yet to use, so it’s possible that it was simply too obvious to be included the first time around. Designing a reward system is a ton ofContinue reading “Gamification, Part 3: Loot”