When you’re offered a handful of powers that are highly coupled, and there’s no restriction on picking one over the other, the choice is obvious. If the powers are loosely coupled the choice will be random/arbitrary. In either case, it’s not going to be an interesting decision in my opinion. If you missed it, over …
“Pick 1 of 3” is a missed game design opportunity Read More »
Hello all! I have a special episode for you today, wherein we have a great big discussion on MAGIC: THE GATHERING – something I haven’t really dived into too deeply before on the show. For most of my life I was very, very skeptical of these games – I still think, for good reason. But …
Let’s talk about Magic: The Gathering, with two experts Read More »
Hello everyone and welcome to the 91st episode of the CLOCKWORK GAME DESIGN PODCAST! Today’s guest is Dan Felder, a game designer who has worked at several studios, including EA, Blizzard, and Abrakam Games, where he worked on the popular CCG, Faeria. He also has written a bunch of game design articles on game balance, …
Free-to-play, Gacha games and game design discourse with Dan Felder Read More »
Here’s the complete list of all my games, ranked BEST to WORST – with helpful links if you wanna go check them out! UPDATE: people asked me to say a few words about each game and why it is where it is on the list. I’m going to skip 1-3 because I feel very positively …
Over the years, I’ve had some trouble expressing my point of view about pre-game asymmetric choices (characters, factions, etc) in games. Back in 2013 I wrote “Debunking Asymmetry“, which was my most clumsy attempt, and which awarded me over 100 comments, from notable game designers like Naomi Clark, Raph Koster, Greg Costikyan, Jon Schafer and …
Okay, I have two objectives here: 1). To talk about the effects of longer arcs, both in storytelling and in game design, and 2). To talk about what an amazing show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is. Actually, this was the main thing, really. But I did connect some stuff that I observed from this show into a …
Larger-arc contextualization, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Read More »
