gamedesign

Single Player Competition: Strategy Games You Can Live In (my Indiecade ’17 Talk)

Hi everyone! As you may know, I did a talk at Indiecade ’17 last month. It went really well, so I thought I’d piece together a lot of that talk into a podcast episode to share with you guys. It’s about the special problem of avoiding toxicity, violence, and hostile feelings in strategy games, and …

Single Player Competition: Strategy Games You Can Live In (my Indiecade ’17 Talk) Read More »

Incremental Complexity

Announcement! In the future, I think I’ll do more articles in “video form”. Very lightly edited videos, mostly a voice over and some pictures/titles/video. I think that video seems to be where more of the conversation is happening these days. Here‘s the first video, on incremental complexity, a new way of thinking about strategy game …

Incremental Complexity Read More »

Brett Lowey’s Game Design Commandments

Today, in Episode 36* of the Clockwork Game Design Podcast, I had a great conversation with BrainGoodGames‘ Brett Lowey. If you don’t already know BrainGoodGames, they make some of the best single-player strategy games out there. All four of Brett’s games—Militia, Axes & Acres, Skyboats, as well as his latest, Minos Strategos—are available on Steam. …

Brett Lowey’s Game Design Commandments Read More »

Solvability In Games

What does it mean to say that one game is “more solvable” than another? Is there a relationship between solvability (of any sort) and the point at which players get bored of games? Solvability I should start out by making it clear that in game design, we are not usually concerned with true or mathematical …

Solvability In Games Read More »