Game Design – Page 2

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”

Ways to Not Have Cooldowns

Cooldowns are not features. They were primarily invented to solve problems in the days of latency-riddled networking and limited bandwidth. By setting a server-side cooldown, the server can ignore specified input from a client and make sure that the clock behind the scenes isn’t choked. Cooldowns have since stayed with games, probably because many ofContinue reading “Ways to Not Have Cooldowns”

Player vs. Player in TTRPGs

In other kinds of games, PvP often means pure competition. Kill, invade, outbid, defeat. The opposition is defeated and you win, or you didn’t perform at your best today and you lose. It’s straightforward either way. But in the land of pens, papers, dungeons, and dragons, it’s not straightforward at all. Competing player against playerContinue reading “Player vs. Player in TTRPGs”

Game Design Philosophy

My design philosophy comes from thinking that games are fantastic tools for creating experiences rather than telling stories. There are many design philosophies you can have that will let you make fantastic games, but this one is mine. The Demonstrable Cool It was industry veteran Ian Stephens who phrased this in his sadly defunct blog.Continue reading “Game Design Philosophy”

Boom, Headshot!

It’s early 2005. My brother has just started working with an experienced mentor at the workplace he intends to make his career. They get along well, so they sometimes talk more casually. At the time, my brother plays a lot of Halo 2. He’s pretty good at headshots with the BR. He goes on toContinue reading “Boom, Headshot!”

A Love Letter to Cyberpunk 2077

In July 2010, the Nolan film Inception premiered. It has since been said that the film was “A multilayered, self-reflexive action film that fires on all cylinders, manipulating time through meticulous editing to deliver a hard-hitting cinematic experience.”(1) Others felt, “[T]he real cause of wonder […] is why Nolan should have embraced technocratic complexity inContinue reading “A Love Letter to Cyberpunk 2077”