Category Archives: Game Design

The goal is to allow the player and their avatar to occupy the same emotional space. Harrison Pink, Snap to Character: Building Strong Player Attachment Through Narrative At Graewolv, while exploring the concept of the demon-powered first-person shooter, one question that kept nagging at my brain was who I was actually playing and why itContinue reading “Tabletop Roleplaying as a Game Design Tool”

Systemic design comes down to making objects and rules and inviting the player to interact with them. This sometimes clashes with game design at large or the expectations of external stakeholders. This post is dedicated to some challenges that are facing systemic game design right now. It won’t go into broader problems like financing orContinue reading “Challenges to Systemic Design”

There, but certainly not back again. It’s sometime around the late 1980s/early 1990s that some developers start talking about a “game engine” as a thing. Maybe not even using the term “engine” yet, but in the form of C/C++ libraries that can be linked or compiled into your project to provide you with ready-made solutionsContinue reading “My Game Engine Journey”

The object-rich world is crucial for making systemic games. Similarly, the state-space of your game can be used to describe the entirety of your design and to facilitate more holistic game development. But it’s about time that we talked about data, since it keeps coming up. How to describe the smallest pieces of your simulationContinue reading “A State-Rich Simulation”

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”