“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”
Category Archives: Game Design
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”
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”
Playtank 