I wanted to write a few words about difficulty in games. First, the word “difficulty” doesn’t really apply to the kinds of things I want to make: strategy games. Or at least, it shouldn’t. Any good multiplayer online strategy game will have a matchmaking system, which does the very best it can at providing a … Continue reading "Difficulty in Videogames"
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Hi! Welcome to episode 53 of the Clockwork Game Design Podcast! This is the second of “season 2” of the podcast – it’s another hour plus episode chock full of cool features. First we talk about the whole “a series of interesting decisions” concept, which Sid Meier is well known for(here‘s his GDC 2012 talk … Continue reading "“Decisions”, XCom’s “creeping problem”, and paper prototyping"
Read MoreIf you haven’t played Artifact, you should give it a try, I think. Not because it’s good necessarily, although I do think it’s probably the best CCG (collectible card game) I’ve ever played. I could talk about the bad kinds of randomness in the game (pro card player Reyand basically describes the difference between variable … Continue reading "Artifact and the Game-Complexity Overton Window"
Read MoreI’ve been playing a lot more videogames recently. Over the past ten years, I developed a very specific set of criteria and tastes that made up a paradigm of game design. All of this lead me to search within an extremely narrow (and increasingly narrow over time) space for new games to play—Eurogames in particular, … Continue reading "Four design lessons which were really obvious to everyone but me"
Read MoreYou can purchase the Early Access version of Escape the Omnochronom! now on itch.io! Tell your friends! Technically speaking, I started working on the project that eventually became Escape the Omnochronom! back in 2015, although it has had at least four different names since that time. Someday I’ll have to run you all through the … Continue reading "Escape the Omnochronom! now available on itch.io!"
Read MoreA few years ago, I wrote an article about randomness in games. It was far from my first time taking a stab at the subject, but it is the most recent big, singular effort at describing the relationship between randomness and game design, as I see it. In this article, I’m going to talk a … Continue reading "Three types of bad randomness, and one good one"
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